Essential points of difference separate the two Americas. Differences of language and therefore of spirit; the difference between Spanish Catholicism and the multiform Protestantism of the Anglo-Saxons; between the Yankee individualism and the omnipotence of the State natural to the nations of the South. In their origin, as in their race, we find fundamental antagonisms; the evolution of the North is slow and obedient to the lessons of time, to the influences of custom; the history of the southern peoples is full of revolutions, rich with dreams of an unattainable perfection.
The people of the United States hate the half-breed, and the impure marriages of whites and blacks which take place in Southern homes; no manifestation of Pan-Americanism could suffice to destroy the racial prejudice as it exists north of Mexico. The half-breeds and their descendants govern the Ibero-American democracies, and the Republic of English and German origin entertains for the men of the tropics the same contempt which they feel for the slaves of Virginia whom Lincoln liberated.
In its friendship for them there will always be disdain; in their progress, a conquest; in their policy, a desire of hegemony. It is the fatality of blood, stronger than political affinities or geographical alliances.
Instead of dreaming of an impossible fusion the Neo-Latin peoples should conserve the traditions which are proper to them. The development of the European influences which enrich and improve them, the purging of the nation from the stain of miscegenation, and immigration of a kind calculated to form centres of resistance against any possibilities of conquest, are the various aspects of this Latin Americanism.[[3]]
[[1]] The United States as World-Power.
[[2]] Race Improvement in the United States. Academy of Political and Social Science, Philadelphia, 1909, pp. 70-1 et seq.
[[3]] The Mexican sociologist, F. Bulnes, writes in his book, L'Avenir des nations Hispano-Americaines: "It is more than probable that by 1980 the United States will hold a population of 250,000,000 inhabitants. They will then scarcely be sufficient for the needs of this population, and will no longer be able to supply the world with the vast quantity of cereals which they supply to-day. They will therefore have to choose between a recourse to the methods of intensive culture and the conquest of the extra-tropical lands of Latin America, which are fitted, by their conditions, to the easy and inexpensive production of excellent cereals."