FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
It is impossible to grow liberty of life, apart from its natural soil and necessary nourishment. If we are to have free institutions, we must first have free men. We cannot have a stream of water without a flowing fountain, nor ripe fruit without a living tree. Political liberty is impossible without moral freedom, and it is idle to expect independence of political action without the established right to think for oneself. When consciences are forced into fixed and prescribed molds it is useless to ask that men turn about and practice the principles of a free democracy. Majority rule is meaningless where the confessional dominates the consciences of men. If we apply these factors in the social history and life of the Latin-American to the traits of his development most subject to criticism, we find much illumination. Out of all the discussion three items emerge, each significant and each closely related to the factors just mentioned.
The Latin mind is given to an idealism that reaches out for large things but often stops short of large actual realization. Out of this tendency grow weak initiative and superficial standards. As evidence of this characteristic may be cited the tendency in education to stress the superficial and showy features of the curriculum, leaving in the background the foundations and essentials of the intellectual life. Anything that makes a good appearance is given place over the less spectacular realities. In architecture, a florid ornamentation is achieved, even at the expense of good plaster and proper surface stone, later with the resultant unsightliness.
SEAWALL CHURCH AND SCHOOL, PANAMA
Deductive processes of thought are much in evidence. In outlining a plan of provincial government, or a system of national education, the paper plans will include every needed feature of a complete and theoretical system, without much regard for the local needs and actual conditions under which the full scheme is to be realized, which in all probability it will never be. To have projected and announced a grand undertaking in any department of human life is as important as to have accomplished something. It is the grand-piano constitution and the one-finger administration. It is not hard to find automobile undertakings and wheelbarrow accomplishments.
Now, all this is not cause for railing accusation but for thoughtful analysis. And the dominant cause is not far to seek. Where effort to translate ideals into realities is met by a barrier of official indifference, it is not strange if men give their time to dreaming rather than actualizing their visions. Where belief and conduct are prescribed and commercialism dominates the moral lives of men, it is easy to see that initiative is crippled at its source. Where a people is divested of responsibility for the final outcome and taught to pay the price and "believe or be damned," it is a rash spirit that will try to do more than dream dreams and write books and project utopias. Without the incentive of encouragement to produce practical results, no real efficiency has ever appeared among any people. There are accusations of moral duplicity among Latin-American peoples. More serious and fundamental than impotent idealism, this defect registers itself in perversion of public trust, in the degradation of public office to the uses of private gain, in deception, graft, and greed. Promises are easy, but performances are delayed until the would-be enterprising citizen gives up in despair.
In regard to this two things are to be said. In the first place, our own records as a people will not bear any too close inspection. Aside from race riots and labor disturbances, our Civil War furnishes our only revolution, except the one that produced the original United States. But when it comes to political prostitution of public office and the invention of grafting schemes, large and small, our own history does not give us much ground for boasting. And many a "revolution" has caused less bloodshed than a North American labor row.