As regards Spanish America, its different States are, in general, better in being separated. Both geographical conditions and those of temperament support this. These States, or their capitals and centres of population, are generally divided by Nature from each other, often by tremendous barriers of mountain chains, rivers or impenetrable forests. How could a single or centralized government be set up to control either their home or foreign policy? Where would it be, and how would it operate?
It might be said that similar topographical conditions obtain in the case of the United States, Canada, or Australia, which prefer to live as federations. But the natural geographical barriers of Spanish America are, in reality, much more formidable. Again, the present multiplicity of states, each with its complement of president and state officers, gives opportunity for more intensive political training, more pleasing social life and a greater general opportunity for partaking in government by the people than does a centralized government.
Let us thus refrain from judging too hastily or too harshly the Spanish American people. Their temperament, their environment is different from ours. They have not chosen or been able to follow the more prosaic, more useful life of England or North America in the commercial age. They had not our inventive, our mechanical gifts. Under their warmer skies idealism played a stronger part. They could not agree to live together unless idealistic conditions were to dominate them—conditions which were impossible of course, and they never were able to oil the wheels of life with that spirit of compromise which providence—if it be a providential gift—gave to us. Moreover, they have a dreadful history of oppression behind them, and the dead-weight of a great Indian bulk of folk who were ruined by the arrogant Spaniards, who despised them without a cause.
Rather let us see that they are endowed with many gifts, and that a different phase of world-development and civilization may give these people an opportunity to display their best qualities, of overcoming their serious errors.
The thoughtful traveller will find matter of interest in Spanish America wherever he journeys, in the delightful place-names he encounters, which a little trouble will enable him to pronounce, and often whose pleasing origin some study will permit him to understand. Here are no duplications of "Paris," "Berlin," "London"; no monstrosities of "Copperville," "Petroleumville," "Irontown," and so forth, such as in Anglo America, the United States and Canada, the developers of that part of America in some cases hastily assigned to their places of settlement or industry, either through lack of or laziness of search for original topographical nomenclature. Here in Spanish America its old and rightful folk had given poetical baptism to their localities. Such were often the abiding places of deities or spirits. Yonder mountain, for example, was "the home of the wind god" of the Quechuas; yonder point the "place of the meeting of the waters" of the Aztecs, or the "field of the fruitful," or the "forest of the dark spirits"; and thus is imprinted upon them for all time the poetic fancy of their founders. There rises the "snow-forehead" of the Andes, there is the "cañyon of a thousand ripples," there is the "pompa of the Holy Saints." The names flow liquidly from the lips of the Indian, perhaps our harsher tongues can ill articulate them in comparison.
Moreover, let us remark the wealth of topographical nomenclature, both in the native languages of Mexico and Peru, and all the sisterhood of states, and in the later Spanish tongue. Every hill, hill-slope, stream, wood, plain, valley, desert, every kind of hill, feature and topographical change of form is designated.
The present chapter, it is seen, is, in some small degree, designed to prime the intending traveller to Spanish America—or, if not the traveller, the person athirst for information concerning the region—with such geographical detail as he or she may assimilate without mental indigestion. In accordance with this purpose we may consider a few figures, which are indispensable if we are to gather any intelligent idea of extent and distance.
There are twenty independent republics of Spanish, or rather Latin America, ranging from the enormous Brazil, with an area of three and a quarter million square miles, down to little Salvador, with only seven thousand two hundred and twenty-five square miles. Among these twenty States we include Hayti and Santo Domingo, places which, although often mentioned with a smile when independent republics are spoken of, are nevertheless worthy of geographical respect.
