The Spanish navigators, as brave as they were audacious, launched themselves into the unknown, guided only by their own genius, in order to discover a world, to conquer new lands, new subjects, for their country and their king; and in the pursuit of that heroic dream they performed exploits which to this day amaze us by their audacity.
These were the famous conquistadores, whom one of their descendants, José Maria Hérédia, has celebrated in the admirable lines:—
“As from the natal charnel-heap a flight
Of falcons: sick of purseless pride at home
By Murcian Palos pilots and captains come
With brutal and heroic dreams alight:
They seek the fabulous ore that comes to birth
And ripens in Cipango’s distant mines,
And the trade-wind their long lateens inclines
Toward the dim limits of the Western earth.”
These first colonisers of Spanish America—soldiers, missionaries, officials, adventurers, men without family—seized upon a whole continent, which they discovered and conquered at the price of unheard-of exertions. They parcelled out the land, subjugated the native tribes, reducing them to servitude in their famous encomiendas, or putting into experimental practice, as in the Jesuit missions, theories of collectivism, which is to-day regarded as a modern invention. It was a true feudal system that arose in the new world.[12]
[12] It must be remembered, in comparing North with South America, that the former also had its period of extensive slavery, its plantations worked by convict labour, and for a period an almost feudal system.—[Trans.]
If, on the one hand, the native races were initiated into the doctrines of Catholicism in exchange for their liberty and independence, they did not, on the other hand, receive from their masters any political instruction, but preserved their habits of submission and passive obedience to their chief, which constituted their sole political tradition.
When, therefore, the day of emancipation arrived, and this enormous colony, in arms against its oppressors, declared itself independent, and divided itself into several Republics, the great mass of the population consisted of Indians converted to Christianity, and half-breeds, who preserved their habits unchanged and had no ideas, no traditions, other than that of government by individual might.
Only in the urban centres did the white race, with its conception of political institutions, predominate. And when the new Government wished to organise itself in an independent manner, the two tendencies and traditions, which correspond to two distinct mentalities, violently clashed, and began that long struggle, not wholly terminated even to-day, of which the history is the history of anarchism in America.
Another factor that also procured this conflict was the colonial political economy of Spain, which was not only