A series of partial commercial treaties, navigation treaties, railway systems, customs unions, and international congresses (like those recently held at Montevideo and Santiago) may all be indicated as means of realising unity. The railways above all will create a new continent; for isolation and lack of population are the enemies of American federation.
To-day these peoples do not know one another. Paris is their intellectual capital, where their poets, thinkers, and statesmen meet. In America everything makes for separation: forests, plains, and mountains. What does Venezuela know of Chili, Peru of Mexico, Colombia of the Argentine? Even in the case of neighbouring nations the political leaders do not know one another. The psychology of neighbouring peoples is a mystery; whence traditional errors and disastrous wars. American journalism is ignorant of nothing in European life—the sessions of the Duma, the ministerial crises of Roumania, the nobility of the Gotha Almanac, the scandals of Berlin; but of the public life of the American nations it publishes only the vaguest and most erroneous news. By stimulating the love of travel and building railroads these peoples would escape from an isolation so perilous. "Every line of railroad which crosses a frontier," said Gladstone, "prepares the way for universal confederation." The Yankees have understood this, which is why they are preparing to build a great Pan-American railway to unite the two Americas under their financial sceptre.
The line which has recently united the two capitals of the South—Santiago and Buenos-Ayres—has contributed to the formation of a solid understanding between Chili and the Argentine. That which will unite Lima and Buenos-Ayres in the near future will bring the culture of the Argentine to the Bolivian table-lands, as far as Cuzco, the centre of Inca tradition; it will draw together the seaboard populations of the two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, and will prove a powerful agent of civilisation and unity. The great rivers of the Amazonian basin from the Putumayo to the Beni, the affluents of the Rio de la Plata, the Magdalena and the Orinoco, united by new railroads, will also contribute to the continental unity by multiplying international relations. One may well repeat the celebrated phrase, that to govern is to lay rails. Railways vanquish barbarism; they attract the stranger, people the desert, civilise the native. Political organisation and internal peace correspond with the development of the means of communication. With the appearance of the rails the caudillos lose their influence, and a double transformation is effected; in the interior by the civilising action of commingled interests, and at the exterior by the new relations which the multiplication of railways involves.
Customs unions in Germany created the Imperial unity; Mr. Chamberlain thinks that a Zollverein would increase the power of the British Empire. The economic grouping of nations prepares the way for future confederations. The frequent congresses which unify law and jurisprudence, and bring together politicians, men of letters and scientists, all tend to the same result. To increase the number of these assemblies, to hold them in different capitals of the continent, and to replace the Pan-American Congresses, whose plans are somewhat indefinite, by racial Latin-American Congresses, would be equally to the profit of the economic and intellectual unity of the continent, and the harmony of its politics and its laws. An undivided, uniform American law,[[2]] a single monetary system, a similar policy in respect of protectionism and free trade, the unification of methods of teaching, and the equivalence of academic diplomas and university degrees, are questions that might be discussed at these general assemblies. Each nation would have ministers in the other republics, who would be at once intellectual emissaries and propagandists, while to-day American peoples who send ministers to Austria or to Switzerland have no accredited representatives in the capitals of adjacent states. The national ambitions which satisfy our politicians to-day would be replaced by a more ample and original design, embracing the future of an entire continent, as was the case a century ago.
In short, we should neglect no form of co-operation—conventions, travel, diplomatic labours, periodical congresses, commercial treaties, and partial groups of nations. Nothing but a disastrous weakness can perpetuate the present division of the Latin peoples in the face of the unity of the United States.
The nations of the South are not unaware of this necessity, and after a century of independence they are seeking to reconstitute the ancient unions. Central America, disturbed by periodic wars, is endeavouring to create a Confederation. In 1895 a treaty between Honduras, Nicaragua, and Salvador formed the Republic of Central America; only Costa Rica and Guatemala held aloof from this union. In 1902 all these nations, with the exception of Guatemala, accepted a convention of arbitration. In 1905 the presidents of the five republics met at Corinth in order to honour the work of Morazan and Rufino Barrios; spontaneously, or at the instance of the United States and Mexico, they signed various treaties intended to realise the unity of the sister nations. A Central American Pedagogic Institute was created, and a "Bureau of the Five Republics," with the same object of unification. In 1907, after nine different conflicts in the interval, a conference of these same nations was assembled at Washington. On this occasion a tribunal of arbitration for Central America was installed, and the neutrality of Honduras was recognised. This tribunal, which sits at Cartago, in Costa-Rica, is to judge the conflicts between states and the diplomatic claims of the governments and of individuals. Moreover, the Republics of Central America have agreed to a declaration which provides that they will recognise no government which has been enforced by a revolution or a coup d'État, and that they will not intervene in the political movements of neighbouring countries.
The Court of Arbitration thus established had already, in 1909, settled differences between Salvador and Honduras, and between Guatemala and Nicaragua, by rejecting the pretentions of Honduras in the one case and of Nicaragua in the other.[[3]] In short, the United States and Mexico are leading these peoples, who used to be in a condition of perpetual discord, towards the unity necessary to their progress.
A Congress met recently (1911) at Caracas, which was attended by the representatives of the states liberated by Bolivar—Venezuela, New Granada, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru. This was a truly Bolivian assembly in honour of the national hero. The object of this Congress was to reconstitute Greater Colombia with the three Republics which formerly made part of it—Venezuela, New Granada, and Ecuador; this would be a return, after the lapse of a century, to the harmonious union of the sister peoples, which would truly give them a common future.
The formation of a great Bolivian State, after a period of isolation lasting more than a century, is certainly the dream of generous statesmen. It is not easy to conceive of the political union of peoples as far removed as those of Venezuela and Bolivia, but this assembly might well result in a natural union of the peoples of the North; a new Greater Colombia, whose provinces would stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
In the south the A.B.C., the alliance of the Argentine, Brazil, and Chili, is the question incessantly discussed in the sensational press, and in the chancelleries, which love to surround themselves with an atmosphere of mystery. These three nations, wealthy, military powers, situated in distinct zones, are seeking confederation; their ambition is to exercise in America a tutelage which they consider indispensable. Already the understanding of May, 1902, had limited the armaments of Chili and the Argentine, and had put an end to a long conflict. The rivality between the Argentine and Brazil; the old friendship between that country and Chili, which afterwards changed to a jealous alienation; the rivalry between the Argentine and Chili in the matter of wealth and power; discord, threats of war, uneasy friendships; all this is insufficient to restrain the military ambition of the three great nations. The statesmen of Buenos-Ayres, Rio de Janeiro, and Santiago are labouring to effect the realisation of an alliance between the three most highly civilised and organised and most advanced nations of the continent. Once this union is accomplished, to the indisputable influence of the United States will be added the moderative influence of the three great States of the South, and the equilibrium between Latins and Anglo-Saxons would be its immediate result.