Ancient Rome and Modern America; A Comparative Study of Morals and Manners

by Guglielmo Ferrero

The word “progress” is one of those which is much misused in Europe. I had no sooner landed in Argentina, however, than I recognised that the word had quite a different sound and significance on that side of the water from what it has in Europe. The standard by which my new transatlantic friends were unanimous in measuring progress was the rapidity of transformation and the magnitude of the results. New, modern, larger, were to them synonyms of progress and of improvement. Consequently, they had only to cast their eyes round their own country to find reasons for self-satisfaction. But this conception of progress at first somewhat amused and somewhat irritated me, just as the naïve touches of vanity in the young often amuse and irritate grown men. Many a time, when we were discussing the progress of Argentina and the comparisons, tacit or explicit, which were made with Europe, have I said to my Argentine friends:

“Undoubtedly the effort which you are making is a noble one, and a paying one. In thirty years, you have increased your wealth ten-, twenty-, even thirty-fold. You have been wonderfully quick in extending cultivation, railways, and population over the vast territory which Fortune has given you. You are now flooding the world with riches, and, profiting by the experience of others, you can transform, reshape, and make perfect your public services, your institutions, and your whole mode of living in the smallest number of years.

“You make a great mistake, however, if you think that the contrast between the rapidity of your growth and your changes and the slowness and immutability of Europe is any proof of your own nearer approach to perfection. That rapidity is a phenomenon of youth. A child’s weight and height double themselves every six months, year, two years, or three years in the first years of its life; while an adult stops growing or grows so slowly as to be hardly aware that he is doing so. Would you deduce from this that a boy of six years of age is superior to a man of forty? No. Childhood and manhood are two phases of life. Each has its own necessity, its own function, its own advantages and disadvantages. It is no more possible to compare them than it is to compare day and night, dawn and twilight, winter and summer; I can see no essential difference between the countries of Europe and your own. We are all children of the same civilisation; we have been nursed at the same breast. We are all like one to the other, though we may differ one from the other as brothers, or, if you prefer it, as cousins do. So an American progress, different from European progress, does not exist, though there are countries whose transformation, owing to external circumstances, may be retarded or accelerated. You have political institutions and social orders of less antiquity, and, therefore, of less rigidity and less strength than those of Europe. You also have a territory to exploit which is vaster, very much vaster, and much more easy to exploit, because civilisation supplies you, ready to hand, with almost perfect instruments for such exploitation. There you have the real difference between us.”

Though these arguments were listened to with courteous attention, they made but a slight impression on my hearers. I very soon realised that American progress, the rapid increase, that is to say, of the wealth of Argentina and the incessant modernisation of the customs and institutions of the country, were a sort of national religion, which was accepted by most people with a blind credence. So in the end, I was persuaded that this ardent faith in progress must be attributed to the preponderating influence of Buenos Aires, that immense city, almost half the population of which is composed of European immigrants in search of wealth. For it is the largest port, the principal emporium, and the financial centre of the Republic, through which passes most of the export and import trade, nearly all the great stream of wealth which flows out from the vast territory over the world, and from the world ebbs back to it again: a rich American city, after the European picture of such. It is only natural that a city whose wealth and size are being multiplied by the rapid development of the country should have adopted American progress as its religion, and should, through its influence, have imposed that religion on the whole country. The conclusion of the matter was, however, that the Argentine conception of progress was not and could not be anything but the passing exaltation of a fortunate country which, profiting by circumstances unusually favourable, could watch its wealth growing round it with bewildering rapidity. That, at any rate, was the conclusion I came to, and I thought it both reasonable and justifiable.

With this idea in my head, after a laborious, agreeable, and instructive stay of two months in Argentina, I sailed for Rio, making on my way thither a brief halt at Montevideo. I expected to find in Rio another American city like Buenos Aires. I was, however, mistaken. Brazil is not, like Argentina, a single body with one enormous head. Its economic activity is more diffuse and centres in different cities,—for coffee, in São Paulo; for rubber, in Manaos; for each one of the other great articles of production, in other cities scattered over the vast territory. Rio de Janeiro, though the chief political and intellectual centre of the Confederation, cannot, therefore, be called either the emporium or the port, or the economic capital par excellence. Consequently, it differs widely from Buenos Aires. It is less crowded, noisy, and busy. It lives, I might almost say, in the shade of its gardens and between the forest and the sea, quietly and reposedly. It is the only great American city I have visited in which people walk at a leisurely pace and not at headlong speed; and it not only lives reposedly, but it thinks, and even dreams a little.

While at Buenos Aires, we had lived surrounded by men of action; we found at Rio a coterie composed almost exclusively of intellectuals—literary men, journalists, historians, philosophers, and jurists. Most of them were state officials and members of the Brazilian Academy,—an academy founded about ten years ago and modelled exactly on the lines of the Académie Française,—composed, like it, of forty members, elected in the same way, and admitted with the same ceremonial. In a small inn situated on the slopes of Corcovado, on the outskirts of the town and the forest, whose roads were shaded by secular trees, we lived for six weeks, just as Plato and his friends lived in the gardens of the Academy; discussing art, literature, philosophy, right, and morality with the friends whom Graça Aranha, the diplomatist and man of letters chosen by Baron di Rio Branco to do us the honours of Brazil, gathered round us almost daily. At no moment of my life have I felt myself so much detached from, and so superior to, the accustomed preoccupations which form the groundwork of ordinary existence in the modern world. And when I found myself living amongst persons for whom the culture of Europe represented the supreme blessing of life, the greatest pride of civilisation, for a moment I believed myself freed from that demon of American progress which had dogged me in Argentina.

It was an illusion, however, which did not last long. Brazil is a country slightly older than Argentina. Owing to this reason, to its much greater size, to the variety of its climates and lands, which make it impossible to concentrate in a single city the direction of the whole of national life, and to other contingent reasons which it would take too long to enumerate here, Brazil has not developed in the last twenty years so rapidly as has Argentina. It has, however, developed much more quickly than any European country. I speedily saw that the rapidity of this progress was the great national pride of the Brazilians, even of those men of letters, philosophers, and writers, who professed to be such devoted disciples and admirers of Europe. In the same way the great national preoccupation was the acceleration, as far as possible, of the progress and increase of riches, and the exploiting and modernisation of the country, so that Brazil might not appear inferior in this particular to the other great states of America. An energetic administration had just finished the resanitation of Rio de Janeiro, destroying, at the cost of vast public works, all the breeding-places of yellow fever which up till then had infested it. The administration was then renovating it from top to bottom, opening streets and squares in the middle of the old quarters, constructing spacious promenades and gardens, and sumptuous public edifices, in a word, giving air and light and splendour and beauty to a city which was already beautiful in addition to being placed in a unique situation. I think there must be very few cities which in a few years have managed to destroy and rebuild, according to new plans, so large a part of themselves. Naturally the work has cost millions; but on the few occasions on which I timidly dared to make a remark to this effect, I received the laughing answer: “We are optimists; and we believe in progress!” This ædilitian transformation of Rio de Janeiro filled with pride all Brazilians, including my lettered and philosophical friends, on account of its rapidity and grandeur; and their pride was swelled by the thought that no European states, but perhaps the United States of North America alone, their great elder brother, could have done so much.

Everybody thought, moreover, that the whole of Brazil ought to be modernised just like Rio, from top to bottom. I visited São Paulo, the great coffee-producing state. I traversed from end to end Minas Gerães, the great agricultural and mineral state which, as a symbol, as it were, of its intention to modernise itself entirely, has recently constructed a smiling and graceful new capitol, Bello Horizonte, in a most picturesque position crowning the hoary Ouro Preto. Everywhere I found politicians, officials, professors, literary men, commercial men, bankers, Brazilian and European immigrants, united in the same thought: that railways must be built, machinery bought, able engineers engaged, mines explored, cultivation extended, and industries founded to increase the country’s rate of progress by modernising it entirely. It was useless for me to try to prove even to those of my Rio acquaintances who were endowed with the highest and finest intellectual culture, that this conception of progress was too simple and material; that real progress is not to make new or to make quickly, but to make better; that it is not enough to augment wealth, but that it is necessary also to put it to good use, a more difficult problem than the producing of it. I tried to convince my friends that if so simple and material a notion of progress acquired a strong hold on the popular mind, the public would infallibly be impelled to create, not a lofty and noble civilisation, but a sort of opulent barbarism. In Brazil, as much as in Argentina, my arguments beat harmlessly against a faith and a passion which demands no proofs. “American Progress” for the Brazilians too was the great historical force of the future, which is going to create the new world, and the new civilisation whose dim foreshadowing seems to be agitating the masses at the present time.

We returned to Italy in November. I recrossed the ocean from Rio de Janeiro to Genoa in fifteen days, during which I reread my books of philosophy. But the pages of Bergson, Kant, and Comte, which I read in mid-ocean, no longer riveted my attention as they had on the way out. For in the time for thought afforded me by the crossing, far from the world and its troubles, I plunged day by day in a more intense meditation on American progress, which, of all the things and phenomena I had witnessed, was that which had left on me the liveliest impressions. It was clear that it was not a theoretical idea, but a passion, a faith, a religion fervently embraced by nearly everybody. All the arguments which I had advanced to subject it to criticism had been fruitless; and not only ignorant men, and those eager to make money, but the most highly cultivated minds, the very intellectual élite of America, were blind to the contradictions and logical shortcomings of this conception. Nevertheless, was not this but an additional reason for studying this phenomenon thoroughly? It is not ideas which move and transform the world, but passions; and a passion, even if it be absurd, is a thousand times more powerful than a wise idea.

Now it was not difficult to see what would happen if this religion of American progress spread through the world. Europe would lose, so to speak, her rights of historical primogeniture, and all her ancient civilisation would lose a great part of its value. If the rapid increase of riches is the supreme measure of civilisation, and if, in consequence, the efforts of a people must be concentrated on everything which can accelerate this increase, it is clear that the most ancient, populous, and glorious countries of Europe will not be able to keep pace with the young countries and with the nations which are masters of vast territories; and that, bit by bit, the most glorious civilisations of Europe will come to be regarded by the eyes of the rising generations as relics and fossils of another age. This danger no longer appeared to me so distant and hypothetical as to many other Europeans. After what I had seen in America, many facts and thoughts and tendencies to which I had hitherto paid scarcely any attention in Europe, seemed to me to acquire a new significance. I saw everywhere, even in the ancient world, traces and proofs of the rapid spread of the American idea of progress, especially among the nations like Germany, which have developed industry to a great, perhaps a too great, extent; and in all the countries, classes, and professions which have identified their interests most completely with those of industry. So the enemy who threatened the destruction of the ancient civilisation of Europe had already invaded the Old World.