Spanish America, Its Romance, Reality and Future, Vol. 1 (of 2)

by C. Reginald Enock

But we need not despair. The malady is but part of one that afflicts the whole world, whose cure awaits the turning of the next page of human evolution—a page which can be turned whenever slothful humanity desires to do it.

Spanish America is really one of the most interesting fields of travel in the world, even if it does not make great pretension of its attractions. From the point of view of the holiday-maker it has remained undeveloped. The traveller who requires luxuriance of travel, of hotel and pleasure-resort, such as the playgrounds of Europe afford, will not find such here, except perhaps in a few of the more advanced cities. It is a continent which, despite its four centuries of discovery, has so far done little more than present its edge to the forces—and pleasures—of modern life. Nature is in her wildest moods: it is an unfinished world; mankind is still plastic. The mountain trail and the horse are more in evidence than the railway and the motor-car; the fonda rather than the hotel. Here, moreover, Don Quixote de la Mancha has taken up his abode, and we may find him often, to our pleasure if we like his company, as some of us do.

But let us dismount. Here are beautiful cities too. A sensitive and developing people, the Spanish American folk would resent any aspersion of their civilization. They have all the machinery of culture to their hand. Here the Parisian toilette rubs shoulders in their streets and plazas with the blanketed and sandalled Indian; the man of fashion and the man of the Stone Age walk the same pavement. Here in these pleasing towns—some of them marvels of beauty, some of them in an atmosphere of perpetual spring, some miles above the sea—are palaces of justice, art and science. Here are republican kings and plutocrats, rich with the product of the field and mine, here are palms and music, homes of highly cultured folk, speaking their soft Castilian: shops stored with all the luxury of Europe or the United States. Here are streets of quaint colonial architecture, and courteous hosts and hostesses, and damsels of startling beauty in all the elegance of the mode.

Here, too, are smooth-tongued lawyer statesmen, dominating (as they always do) the Senatorial Councils. It is true that from time to time there are disturbing elements when rude soldier-politicians break in upon the doctor-politicians with the clatter of a mule-battery, on the pavement, and the sword takes the place of the bauble; it is true that the walls of the streets are pitted here and there with bullet marks, from some whiff of grapeshot, and that there are stains of blood upon the pavements; and it is true that against the white walls of justice, science, art and oratory stands silhouetted the figure of the poor Indian, or peon, who slinks humilde amid the palms and music—doffing his hat as he passes the Cathedral precincts—and that the veneer of civilization, torn aside, reveals at times both the cultured and the uncultured savage.

Here, too, congregate the merchants and traffickers of all the world, Old and New, from all the four corners of the earth to buy and sell. Here is the Frenchman with his emporium of finery, the Spaniard with his groceries, or the Italian with his wares, the Arab with his little shop, the Chinaman with his laundry (and his peculiar affinity with the Indian, perhaps of the same mother-race), the German with his hardware, drugs and cheap jewellery and much besides; the English or American with every commodity, and in addition his mining schemes and railways and steamers, or his municipal stocks and bonds. For Spanish America is now a peculiarly attractive Mecca of the international merchant and pedlar, who does it services both good and ill.

Here, in this financial and business field, the Englishman has been predominant (though that predominance may not always be, for he is closely pressed now and must not muddle on).

England, indeed, soon conquered a world commercially which she bungled in overcoming in conquest. She early scorned Columbus, or would not help him; at Cartagena, Callao, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Buenos Ayres, and elsewhere, her admirals and generals seem to have failed, and she secured but a couple of small footholds on the continent and some rich islands off its coast. Perhaps it was destiny; perhaps we would not now have it otherwise, and the Spanish American civilization develops more interestingly alone. But interesting too would have been a British Indian Empire in America, perhaps with possibilities and results of value to the world.

But, despite all this, the British name here stands high, and heaven grant it always may.

Not for all her past misdeeds, nor the present defects arising from them, shall we forget the gifts that Spain has made to the New World. To-day it might indeed be said that some of the main problems of colonial empires are but beginning (as witness Egypt and India under British rule). Spain made nations, even it they afterwards fell from her by misgovernment or from natural causes. She implanted her religion, literature, culture, language, architecture over hundreds of thousands of miles of forbidding desert and Cordillera, as we shall see in these pages. Over a zone of the earth's territory seven thousand miles long, from the Mexican border with the United States, throughout the twenty Republics of Central and South America, to the tapering end of Chile, the Spanish language is the medium of communication, a language-area vaster than any in the world.

And Portugal, the patron of great voyagers and explorers, has left her mark and language upon her half of the New World, the old empire of Brazil, with a population greater than that of all her neighbours combined. Less dominating than the Spaniard in the long run—for Portugal has always said of herself that she could conquer but not colonize—Portugal has left her own Iberian culture in Latin America.