BOOK VI
THE LATIN SPIRIT AND THE GERMAN, NORTH
AMERICAN, AND JAPANESE PERILS
From a racial point of view, it is true, one cannot call the South American republics Latin nations. They are rather Indo-African or Africo-Iberian. Latin culture—the ideas and the art of France, the laws and the Catholicism of Rome—have created in South America a mental attitude analogous to that of the great Mediterranean peoples, which is hostile or alien to the civilisation of the Germanic or Anglo-Saxon peoples.
New influences, whether they come from Germany or Anglo-Saxon America, and even more those that come from Japan, are dangerous to the Latin-American nations, if they tend to destroy their traditions.
CHAPTER I
ARE THE IBERO-AMERICANS OF LATIN RACE
Spanish and Portuguese heredity—Latin culture—The influence of the Roman laws, of Catholicism, and of French thought—The Latin spirit in America: its qualities and defects.
Contrasting the Imperial Republic of North America with the twenty democracies of South America, we seek the reason of the antagonism which exists between them in the essential element of race. The contrast between Anglo-Saxons and Latins is the contrast between two cultures.
The South American peoples consider themselves Latin by race, just as their brothers of the North are the remote descendants of the Anglo-Saxon Pilgrim Fathers; but although the United States were created largely by the aggregation of austere English emigrants, there has been no intervention of pure Latin elements in the colonisation of the South. Navigators of Latin blood discovered an unknown continent, and Spaniards and Portuguese conquered and colonised it; but there was little Latin blood to be found in the homes formed by the sensuality of the first conquerors of a desolated America.