If the Inca monarchy recalls the great empires of Asia, China, and Assyria, Mexico, on the other hand, appears to have been a feudal kingdom in which caciques, governors of vast provinces, ruled beside the absolute monarch. "There is no general overlord," observed Cortez. There was a central authority, as in Peru, but the Mexican despotism was more rude and barbarous than that of the Incas; the blood of human victims dripped from its smoking altars. The social organism had not reached the degree of perfection attained by the Inca monarchy.
The Spanish and Portuguese conquerors, with their mediæval ideas, their African fanaticism, their marvellous ships, and their powerful weapons, terrified these peoples who were still dwelling in the age of bronze and polished stone. Historians report the surprise of these hungry adventurers before the treasures of Mexico and Peru. Atahualpa offered to fill with gold the chamber in which Pizarro held him prisoner. The court of Montezuma displayed an Asiatic luxury: surrounded with women, buffoons, idols, and strange birds, under a resplendent canopy loaded with gold and jewels, the Aztec monarch advances like a king in an Oriental tale. His escort is of haughty princes. The imperial city abounds in temples, lakes, and causeways; it is melancholy and sumptuous, the capital of Mexico. The chroniclers of the time tell us how the cupidity of the conquistadors was awakened: men who had left a ruined Spain to find these immense treasures in America; they are writing for impoverished hidalgos, and fear that they will not be believed when they speak of this fabulous abundance of gold. Since the days of Ophir and the Queen of Sheba, says one of these historians, "no ancient writing had ever stated that gold, silver, and jewels" had ever been discovered in such vast quantities as those which Castile was about to receive from her new colonies.
The soldiers of the conquest pillaged these treasures, sacked temples and palaces, and quarrelled over their wealth in a series of tragic struggles. Around the mines cities sprang up and parties were formed; at Potosi Vicuñas and Biscayans, excited by the sight of the metal which delighted their cupidity, prolonged the savagery of the first conflict. Where minerals existed the colonial life was unstable, harsh, and brutal; in poor countries, such as Chili and the Argentine, societies were slowly formed which cultivated the soil: tenacious oligarchies bound to the new country by solid interests.
The vanquished races and the victors differed greatly from one another; hence amidst the political and moral unity of the new societies arose different characteristics and incipient antagonisms. Spaniards and Portuguese took Indian wives or women; the leaders married princesses of Mexico and Peru; the soldiers founded provisional homes in the colonies. The Andalusians settled in the tropics; the Basques in the temperate regions; and the Castilians swarmed in the towns. A curious affinity of race, as between the Basques and the Araucanians, and analogies of climate and landscape, and, apart from these factors, the erratic wanderings of the conquerors, explain this original diversity of the American provinces. Why should they be similar: the offspring of the gentle Indian Quechuas and the fiery Andalusians; the children of the virile Araucanians and the calm, reasonable Basques? Wherever the native population was more abundant, and the political organisation more complicated, as in Mexico and Peru, its influence on miscegenation was more potent than in colonies from which the Indian was disappearing (as the Charruas of Uruguay or the nomadic tribes of Brazil) before the onset of civilisation. The climate, severe on the plateaux, and favourable to an energetic existence, warm and enervating on the coast, contributed to the variety of human types. The first families sprung of the sensuality of the conquerors already revealed the elements of future developments.
It was an age of creation: races and cities, new rites and customs; all were sprung of the crossing of Iberian and Indian. The diversity of the elements whose fusion was paving the way for a new caste gave mankind an interesting variety. The negro, imported by the Spaniard for the cultivation of the tropical soil, added yet another complication to the first admixture of castes. Grotesque generations with every shade of complexion and every conformation of skull were born in America from the unions stimulated by the kings of Spain. In the Anglo-Saxon provinces of North America the climate only changed the invaders; in the Iberian colonies the conquered race, the land itself, the air they breathed, all modified the conquerors. Creation, the synthesis of human elements, action and reaction between the country and the men who ruled it, a crucible continually agitated by unheard-of fusions of races; all this gave the process of evolution the intensity and the aspect of a continual conflict. From the negro bozal recently imported from Africa to the quinteron, the offspring of slaves purified by successive unions with the whites; from the Indian who mourned his monotonous servitude in the solitude of the mountains, to the coloured student of the universities, we find, in the seventeenth century as in the twentieth, in the colonies as in the republics, every variety of this admixture of Iberians, Indians, and Africans. From a social point of view the rank of the individual corresponded generally with the shade of his epidermis. "In America," wrote Humboldt at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "the more or less white skin determines the position which a man holds in society."
The Spaniard degenerated in the colonies. The passage from a period of violence to one of conventual quietude betrayed this slow decadence of the invader, under the pressure of the climate and in contact with the conquered races. The Creole, the Spaniard born in America, has lost the prickly characteristics of the hidalgo: the proud individualism, the love of bloody adventure, the stoicism, the tenacity in resistance and conflict, and the rigidity of faith.
In flexibility, brilliance, and grace he has surpassed the rude Iberian; but his effort is transitory, his will weak; his hatred is as ephemeral as his love. The new race produces neither mystics nor men of action, but poets, orators, admirable intriguers, superficial scholars, brilliant commentators of exotic ideas; from the seventeenth century onwards they succeed to the first generation of audacious colonists, heroic monks, and warlike captains.
To extend the domains of the monarch, to "cause the Indians to live in the knowledge of our Catholic faith," they conquered America, and they brought to the New World a religion, a political régime, universities, an economic system—all the elements, in short, of a traditional civilisation. Absolutism in government, monopoly in matters of commerce and finance, intolerance in questions of dogma and morality, tutelage and rigorous isolation; these were the foundations of Spanish colonisation. The methods practised by the Dutch and the English in their colonies were not essentially different. Toqueville and Boutmy have studied the effects, in the United States, of Calvinistic intolerance and commercial monopoly. They have remarked upon the slavery of negroes in the agricultural districts of Virginia, and the cupidity of the emigrants who pursued the Indians with a truly Puritan ardour.
The viceroy, the representative of the monarch, exercised full powers of government in the colonies. He presided over the Real Audiencia, the king's tribunal, was superintendent of finances, protector of the Church, and chief of the army. To him all power was subordinate, whether ecclesiastical, military, or civil. A luxurious court surrounded him, the flattery of courtiers intoxicated him, and subornation had its way with him. Sometimes the viceroys represented the real aspirations of the colonists, and were serious legislators, such as Francisco de Toledo, in Peru; or they defended the colonists from the expeditions of filibusters with such energy that their fiercely contested battles evoked the sentiment of nationality. At other times they enriched themselves by the sale of posts, and drained the treasury, or passed in progress through the cities of their state, haughty overlords surrounded with luxury and gold.
To her political despotism corresponds the commercial monopoly which Spain established in her dominions. Humboldt defined the ancient ideal of the colonising races in his "Essay on the Government of New Spain": "For centuries a colony was regarded as useful to the metropolis only inasmuch as it furnished a great number of raw materials and consumed plenty of goods and merchandise, which were borne by the vessels of the mother-country."[[1]] England, Holland, Spain, and Portugal acted upon the same exclusivist principles; the ordinances of Cromwell were as inflexible on this point as the schedules of Philip II. Commercial liberty and industrial competition were condemned on the same grounds as rebellion and heresy.