Prowling about Panama

by George A. Miller

Certain influences from this stream have affected Latin-American life. The nomenclature of South American politics is that of the United States, and many constitutions contain provision for every modern practice. But these model constitutions are like a beautiful and costly piano imported into a home where no one knows how to use it. It takes a democratic spirit to get democracy out of a democratic constitution. The best piano yields only discord, and the most advanced constitution does not prevent revolution if there be no musicians or statesmen to play and administer. People living beside the stream of democratic progress have caught the names and forms drifting on the current, but only those people have advanced with the current who have not been tied to the shore by moral and intellectual despotism.

The influence of geographical nearness is slight beside that of historical background and social relations. Mexico is much closer to Spain than to the United States. After twenty years of successful administration of the Philippines on the most colossal scale of national benevolence that the world has ever seen, nearly all the Filipinos who had reached maturity in 1898 are still Spanish at heart and out of sympathy with American ideals and administration. If the United States can hold the islands until every person who was ten years old or over in 1898 is thoroughly dead and safely buried, there will be a chance for some form of democracy, but the old-time leaders will retain so long as they live the ideals derived from three hundred years of Spanish administration.

If there are in the mountains of the South isolated neighborhoods that have been passed by in the current of modern American progress, and are to-day practically ignorant of all that makes up American life, even though surrounded on all sides by the march of a virile and restless race, what must be the results of the isolation from this stream of North American development, of the whole Latin-American race, while maintaining close and vital connections with European standards and ideals?

But Latin Americanism can never be explained merely by its European background and its isolation from the progress of North America. The keynote to the present product in Latin lands is to be found in that system of religious despotism that has checked the free growth of every people whose life it has dominated.

BEGGARS AND CATHEDRALS

Jesuitism is what is the matter with the civilization southward. We have had Romanism and Jesuitism in the United States, but people who have never seen any form of these forces except that which has developed in the free air of North America have much to learn. Romanism checked and balanced by a virile Protestantism and a democratic political life is an altogether different institution from Romanism dominant, degenerate, and intolerant. The latter becomes the religion of the bound Bible, the chained spirit, and the crippled conscience. It is the center of spiritual infection and the microbe of moral weakness. No land has ever advanced under its leadership. Like a blight on the human spirit, it has cast its spell of ignorance and superstition over the millions of men and women who have had no other ethical code or spiritual leadership.

It has been claimed that the rigors of New England winters had something to do with the sturdy New England conscience. But the Pilgrims brought their consciences with them, and the climate came near exterminating the colony. If the Pilgrims had landed in Cuba and the Spanish in Boston, civilization might be very different to-day. If rigorous climates produce vigorous men, how is it that some of the most terrible of men sailed the Caribbean sea and devastated the whole mid-American world, while the northern coasts of the Atlantic never saw a pirate's sail? The tropical zephyrs of the Bay of Panama never softened the tempers or dispositions of the bloodthirsty men who came near exterminating whole populations and left a trail of blood and terror behind them. And these same unconscionable scoundrels used to attend mass and plant wooden crosses wherever they went.

The effort to account for South American civilization by climate falls to pieces before the splendid and bracing altitudes of the Andes, the ideal conditions of Argentine, Uruguay, and Chile, and the delightful regions of the higher elevations of Central America. There is nothing inherently demoralizing in the climate of lands inhabited by the Latin peoples in America, but there is something distinctly vitiating in the moral miasma breathed by these peoples for three hundred years. If cold climates produced inflexible consciences, the Eskimos ought to be the most conscientious people on earth. But the moral climate of Jesuitism has produced a uniform effect everywhere that it has supplied the soil for soul-growth.