Latin America: Its Rise and Progress

by Francisco García Calderón

To this first very important factor of unity we must add the powerful and permanent influence of the Spanish language, whose future is bound up with the future of the Latin Transatlantic peoples. Sonorous and arrogant, this language expresses, better than any other, the vices and the grandeur of the American mind; its rhetoric and its heroism, its continuity of spirit from the feats of the Cid to the Republican revolutions. The Spanish tongue is an intimate bond of union between the destinies of the metropolis and those of its ancient colonies, and it separates the two Americas, one being the expression of the Latin and the other of the Anglo-Saxon genius.

The language is always to a certain extent transformed in these democracies; provincialisms and Americanisms abound; the popular tongue differs from the autocratic Castilian. Don Rufino Cuervo predicts that Spanish will undergo essential alterations in America, as was the case with Latin at the time of the Roman decadence. An Argentine writer, Señor Ernesto Quesada, believes that a national language is in process of formation on the banks of the Plata, and that the barbarisms of the popular speech are forecasts of a new tongue. In Chili an exalted patriot has upheld the originality of the Chilian race and language in an anonymous book, claiming that they derive from the Gothic. Thus is the effect of the national spirit exaggerated. Among the Ibero-American republics there is a profound and general resemblance in the pronunciation and the syntax of the language; the same linguistic defects even are to be found in all. The Spanish of the Peninsula loses its majesty overseas; it is no longer the language, lordly in its beauty, solemn in its ornaments, of Granada, of Mariana, of Perez de Guzman. Familiar, declamatory, pronounced with a caressing accent, the Castilian of America is uniform from North to South.

More effectual than religion and language the identity of race explains the similarity of the American peoples, and constitutes a promise of lasting unity. The native race, the Spanish race, and the negro race are everywhere mingled, in similar proportions, from the frontier of the United States to the southern limits of the continent. On the Atlantic seaboard European immigration, an influx of Russians, Italians, and Germans, has given the supremacy to the white race, but this influence is limited to small belts of land, when we consider the vast area of the continent.

A single half-caste race, with here the negro and there the Indian predominant over the conquering Spaniard, obtains from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There is a greater resemblance between Peruvians and Argentines, Colombians and Chilians, than between the inhabitants of two distant provinces of France, such as Provence and Flanders, Brittany and Burgundy, or between the Italian of the north, positive and virile, and the lazy and sensual Neapolitan, or between the North American of the Far West and the native of New England. The slight provincial differences enable us the better to understand the unity of the continent.

This identity explains the monotonous history of America. A succession of military periods and industrial periods, of revolts and dictatorships; perpetual promises of political restoration; the tyranny of ignorant adventurers, and complicated and delusive legislation.

It is in the great crises of its history that the essential unity of the race is revealed. The Wars of Independence were a unanimous movement, an expression of profound solidarity. In 1865, after half a century of isolation, the democracies of the Pacific once more united to oppose Spain's attempt at reconquest. Soldiers of different nations, who had already fought in bygone battles, but against each other, now fought side by side for the common liberty. The same unity of inspiration has brought the nations together in opposition to many projects of conquest: the expedition of Flores against Ecuador, of France against Mexico, and the Anglo-French alliance against Rosas. At the second Hague Congress in 1907 Latin America revealed to the Western world the importance of her wealth and the valour of her men, and supported her ideal of arbitration; to the Monroe doctrine she opposed the doctrine of Drago, and, without preliminary understanding, asserted her unity.

No other continent offers so many reasons for union, and herein lies the chief originality of Latin America.

In Europe states and races are in conflict, and the unstable equilibrium is maintained only by means of alliances. Religions, political systems, traditions, and languages differ. History is merely a succession of turbulent hegemonies: of Spain, England, France, and Germany. We find artificial nations, like Austria; unions of democratic and theocratic peoples, like the Franco-Russian Alliance; rival empires of the same race, like England and Germany; political alliances of alien races, like Germany and Italy; and the dispersion of peoples painfully seeking to recover their lost unity, like the Poles, the Irish, and the Slavs. The federation of Europe is a Utopian dream.

Africa is not yet autonomous; it is a vast group of enslaved peoples of primitive races, colonised by the great European powers. There the Anglo-Saxon genius is seeking to establish a political union between English and Dutch, and one day, perhaps, the empire dreamed of by Cecil Rhodes will stretch from Cairo to the Cape. But the unity of Africa is impossible; for the colonists come to the Dark Continent as conquerors, as the representatives of hostile interests; they can but quarrel over Morocco, Tripoli, and the Congo. Oceania possesses only a partial unity in the Australian commonwealth, the work of England. In Asia it is still more impossible to guess whence a future unity might arise. Mussulmans and Buddhists share India; Japan has won only an ephemeral superiority; China retains all her irreducible independence; in Manchuria and Korea Russian and Asiatic interests are opposed; in Turkestan, Persia, and Tibet the conflicts of race and religion are enough to destroy any hope of union.