Although it is true that the historical and geographical background of the South Americans is radically different from ours, it is also true that they have many social and superficial characteristics very like those which European travellers found in the United States fifty years ago. The period of time is not accidental. The South American Republics secured their independence nearly fifty years later than we did. Moreover, they have been hampered in their advancement by natural difficulties and racial antipathies much more than we have. Although the conditions of life in the United States, as depicted by foreign critics seventy-five years after the battle of Yorktown, were decidedly worse than the conditions of life in South America seventy-five years after the battle of Ayacucho, the resemblances between the faults that were found with us fifty years ago and those that are noticeable among the South Americans of to-day, are too striking to be merely coincidences. It is surely not for us to say that there is anything inherently wrong with our Southern neighbors if their shortcomings are such as we ourselves had not long ago, and possibly have to-day.
The first criticism that one hears, and the first one is likely to make after getting beyond the pale of official good breeding in South America, is that the manners of the ordinary South American are very bad. Lest the traveller be inclined to take such a state of affairs too seriously, let him read what Dickens wrote about us and our ways in 1855. It was a faithful picture of a certain phase of American life. It should be confessed that it paints a condition of affairs worse than anything I have seen in South America.
Travellers who are prone to find fault with the service at South American hotels and restaurants will enjoy Dickens’ description of the dining-room of a New York boarding-house. “In the further region of this banqueting-hall was a stove, garnished on either side with a great brass spittoon.... Before it, swinging himself in a rocking-chair, lounged a large gentleman with his hat on, who amused himself by spitting alternately into the spittoon on the right hand of the stove, and the spittoon on the left, and then working his way back again in the same order. A negro lad in a soiled white jacket was busily engaged in placing on the table two long rows of knives and forks, relieved at intervals by jugs of water; and as he travelled down one side of this festive board, he straightened with his dirty hands, the dirtier cloth, which was all askew, and had not been removed since breakfast.”
It is indeed hard for us to overlook the table manners of the average South American. But how many years is it since North Americans were all reading and conning “Don’t! A Guide to Good Manners”? It is less than a quarter of a century since our self-conscious use of the fork on all possible (and impossible) viands showed that we felt the need of improvement.
To one inclined to criticise the speed with which a company of South Americans will dispose of their food, let me recommend Dickens’ American boarding-house table where a “very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost in self-defence, as if a famine were expected to set in before breakfast-time to-morrow morning, and it had become high time to assert the first law of nature. The oysters, stewed and pickled, leaped from their capacious reservoirs, and slid by scores into the mouths of the assembly. The sharpest pickles vanished; whole cucumbers at once, like sugar-plums; and no man winked his eye. Great heaps of indigestible matter melted away as ice before the sun. It was a solemn and awful thing to see. Dyspeptic individuals bolted their food in wedges; feeding, not themselves, but broods of nightmares, who were continually standing at livery within them. Spare men, with lank and rigid cheeks, came out unsatisfied from the destruction of heavy dishes, and glared with watchful eyes upon the pastry.”
The conversation of a group of young South Americans is not such as appeals to our taste. There is usually too much running criticism on the personal qualities and attractions of their women acquaintances. To them it seems doubtless most gallant. At all events, it is not sordid, as was that conversation which Dickens describes as “summed up in one word—dollars.”
When Dickens visited America, he remarked the frequency of the expression “Yes, sir” and made a great deal of fun of us for our use of it. Singularly enough, the Spanish “Yes sir”—si señor—is so extremely common throughout South America as to attract one’s attention continually.
Another thing that Dickens noticed was our tendency to postpone and put off from day to day things that did not have to be done. Yet there is no more common criticism of Spanish-Americans than that known as the “Mañana” habit. You will hear almost any one who pretends to know anything at all about Spanish-America say that the great difficulty is the ease with which the Spanish-American says “Mañana.” Personally, I do not agree with this criticism for I have heard the expression very seldom in South America. It is true that it is hard to get things done as quickly as one would wish, but I believe that the criticism has been much overworked. Undoubtedly Dickens was honest in reporting that the habit of postponing one’s work was characteristic of the middle west as he saw it, but it would be greatly resented to-day and would not be true.
In many South American cities one is annoyed by the continual handshaking. No matter how many times a day you meet a man, he expects you solemnly to shake hands with him just as did those western Americans who annoyed “Martin Chuzzlewit.”
So also with “spitting.” I have been repeatedly annoyed, not only in the provinces, but also in the very highest circles of the most advanced Republics, by the carelessness of South Americans in this particular, even at dinner parties. But how many years is it since “The Last American” was prophetically depicted by J. A. Mitchell as sitting amid the ruins of the national Capitol with his feet on the marble rail, spitting tobacco juice? One can hardly ride in our street cars to-day without being reminded that only recently have the majority of Americans put the ban on spitting. The fact that there are already printed notices in some of the principal South American cathedrals begging people, in the name of the local “Anti-Tuberculosis Association,” not to spit on the floor, shows that this unpleasant habit will undoubtedly be eradicated in considerably less than fifty years after we have ceased to offend.