Latin America: Its Rise and Progress

by Francisco García Calderón

Will a generous élite succeed in withstanding this racial tendency? Perhaps, but nothing can check the onward march of the United States. Their imperialism is an unavoidable phenomenon.

The nation which was peopled by nine millions of men in 1820 now numbers eighty millions—an immense demographic power; in the space of ten years, from 1890 to 1900, this population increased by one-fifth. By virtue of its iron, wheat, oil, and cotton, and its victorious industrialism, the democracy aspires to a world-wide significance of destiny; the consciousness of its powers is creating fresh international duties. Yankee pride increases with the endless multiplication of wealth and population, and the patriotic sentiment has reached such an intensity that it has become transformed into imperialism.

The United States buy the products they themselves lack from the tropical nations. To rule in these fertile zones would to them appear the geographical ideal of a northern people. Do not their industries demand new outlets in America and Asia? So to the old mystic ambition are added the necessities of utilitarian progress. An industrial nation, the States preach a practical Christianity to the older continents, to Europe, and to lands yet barbarous, as to South America; they profess a doctrine of aggressive idealism, a strange fusion of economic tendencies and Puritan fervour. The Christian Republic imposes its tutelage upon inferior races, and so prepares them for self-government.

This utilitarian and mystical expansion is opposed to the primitive simplicity of the Monroe doctrine. In 1823, to counter the political methods of the Holy Alliance, President Monroe upheld the republican integrity of the ancient Spanish colonies. The celebrated message declared that there were no free territories in America, thus condemning in advance any projected establishment of European colonies upon the unoccupied continent of America, and that the United States limited their political action to the New World, and renounced all intervention in the disputes of Europe.

At the close of the last century the political absolutism of the Holy Alliance was only a memory; democracy is progressing, even in the heart of the most despotic of monarchies, and France is republican. Europe, after the tragic adventure of the Mexican Empire, abandoned her expeditions of conquest. The United States, forgetting their initial isolation, intervened in the politics of the world; they defended the integrity of China, took part in the conference of Algeciras, and maintained peace in the East. Like the character in Terence, nothing in the world leaves them unconcerned. The two bases of the Monroe doctrine, the absolutism of Europe and the isolation of the United States, exist no longer, but the Monroe doctrine persists indefinitely. "If," says Mr. Coolidge, professor of political law at the University of Harvard, "if, by his principles, the American finds himself drawn to conclusions which do not please him, he ordinarily revolts, forsakes his promises, and jumps to conclusions that suit him better." To the logic of the Latins Americans and Englishmen oppose utility, common sense, instinct.

The Monroe doctrine has undergone an essential transformation; it has passed successively from the defensive to intervention and thence to the offensive. From a theory which condemned any change of political régime among the new democracies under European pressure, and which forbade all acquisitions of territory, or the transfer of power from a weak to a strong nation, there arose the Polk doctrine, which, in 1845, decreed the annexation of Texas for fear of foreign intervention. In 1870 President Grant demanded the seizure of San Domingo as a measure of national protection, a new corollary of the Monroe doctrine. President Johnson was anxious to see his country in possession of Cuba in the name of the "laws of political gravitation which throw small States into the gullets of the great powers." In 1895 Secretary of State Olney, at the time of the trouble between England and Venezuela, declared that the United States were in fact sovereign in America. From Monroe to Olney the defensive doctrine has gradually changed to a moral tutelage.

If theories change, frontiers change no less. The northern Republic has been the beneficiary of an incessant territorial expansion: in 1813 it acquired Louisiana; in 1819, Florida; in 1845 and 1850, Texas; the Mexican provinces in 1848 and 1852; and Alaska in 1858. The annexation of Hawaii took place in 1898. In the same year Porto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and one of the Marianne Islands, passed, by the Treaty of Paris, into the hands of the United States. They obtained the Samoan Islands in 1890, wished to buy the Danish West Indies in 1902, and planted their imperialistic standard at Panama in 1903.

Interventions have become more frequent with the expansion of frontiers. The United States have recently intervened in the territory of Acre, there to found a republic of rubber gatherers; at Panama, there to develop a province and construct a canal; in Cuba, under cover of the Platt amendment, to maintain order in the interior; in San Domingo, to support the civilising revolution and overthrow the tyrants; in Venezuela, and in Central America, to enforce upon these nations, torn by intestine disorders, the political and financial tutelage of the imperial democracy. In Guatemala and Honduras the loans concluded with the monarchs of North American finance have reduced the people to a new slavery. Supervision of the customs and the dispatch of pacificatory squadrons to defend the interests of the Anglo-Saxon have enforced peace and tranquillity: such are the means employed. The New York American announces that Mr. Pierpont Morgan proposes to encompass the finances of Latin America by a vast network of Yankee banks. Chicago merchants and Wall Street financiers created the Meat Trust in the Argentine. The United States offer millions for the purpose of converting into Yankee loans the moneys raised in London during the last century by the Latin American States; they wish to obtain a monopoly of credit. It has even been announced, although the news hardly appears probable, that a North American syndicate wished to buy enormous belts of land in Guatemala, where the English tongue is the obligatory language. The fortification of the Panama Canal, and the possible acquisition of the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific, are fresh manifestations of imperialistic progress.

The Monroe doctrine takes an aggressive form with Mr. Roosevelt, the politician of the "big stick," and intervention à outrance. Roosevelt is conscious of his sacred mission; he wants a powerful army, and a navy majestically sailing the two oceans. His ambitions find an unlooked-for commentary in a book by Mr. Archibald Coolidge, the Harvard professor, upon the United States as a world-power. He therein shows the origin of the disquietude of the South Americans before the Northern peril: "When two contiguous States," he writes, "are separated by a long line of frontiers and one of the two rapidly increases, full of youth and vigour, while the other possesses, together with a small population, rich and desirable territories, and is troubled by continual revolutions which exhaust and weaken it, the first will inevitably encroach upon the second, just as water will always seek to regain its own level."

He recognises the fact that the progress accomplished by the United States is not of a nature to tranquillise the South American; "that the Yankee believes that his southern neighbours are trivial and childish peoples, and above all incapable of maintaining a proper self-government." He thinks the example of Cuba, liberated "from the rule of Spain, but not from internal troubles, will render the American of the States sceptical as to the aptitude of the Latin-American populations of mixed blood to govern themselves without disorder," and recognises that the "pacific penetration" of Mexico by American capital constitutes a possible menace to the independence of that Republic, were the death of Diaz to lead to its original state of anarchy and disturb the peace which the millionaires of the North desire to see untroubled.