We also dislike intensely the South American habit of staring at strangers and of making audible comments on ladies who happen to be passing. Unfortunately, this is a Latin habit which will be hard to change. The South American has a racial right to look at such customs differently. But if some of his personal habits are unpleasant, and even disgusting from our point of view, there is no question that we irritate him just as much as he does us. Our curt forms of address; our impatient disregard of the amenities of social intercourse; our unwillingness to pass the time of day at considerable length and inquire, each time we see a friend, after his health and that of his family; our habit of elevating our feet and often sitting in a slouchy attitude when conversing with strangers, are to him extremely distasteful and annoying. Our unwillingness to take the trouble to speak his language grammatically, and our general point of view in regard to the “innate superiority” of our race, our language, and our manufactures, are all evidences, to his mind, of our barbarity. We care far too little for appearances. This seems to him boorish. We criticise him because he does not bathe as frequently as we do. He criticises us because we do not show him proper respect by removing our hats when we meet him on the street.
Furthermore, he regards us as lacking in business integrity. We are too shrewd. Our standard of honor seems low to him. In fact, a practical obstacle with which one accustomed to American business methods has to contend in South America, is the extreme difficulty of securing accurate information as to a man’s credit. Inquiries into the financial standing of an individual, which are regarded as a matter of course with us, are resented by the sensitive Latin temperament as a personal reflection on his honesty. It seems to be true that the South American regards the payment of his debts as a matter more closely touching his honor than we do. He is accustomed to receiving long credits; he always really intends to pay sometime, and he generally manages to raise installments without much difficulty. Yet when pressed hard in the courts, he is likely to turn and resent as an intentional insult the judgment which has been secured against him. I have known personally of a case where a debtor informed his creditor that it would be necessary for him to come well armed if he accompanied the sheriff in an effort to satisfy the judgment of the court, for the first man, and as many more as possible, that crossed the door of his shop on such an errand would be shot. This we criticise as defiance of the law. To the South American, the law has committed an unpardonable fault in venturing to convict him of neglecting his honorable debts.
It is unfortunate that the South Americans themselves are generally quite unaware of their failings—a species of blindness that has frequently been laid at our own doors. It is due to a similar cause.
South American writers who have travelled abroad and seen enough to enable them to point out the defects of their countrymen rarely venture to do so. The South American loves praise but cannot endure criticism. It makes him fairly froth at the mouth, as it did the Americans in the days of Charles Dickens’ first visit. So the pleasant-faced gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Bevan, told young Martin Chuzzlewit. “If you have any knowledge of our literature, and can give me the name of any man, American born and bred, who has anatomized our follies as a people, and not as this or that party; and has escaped the foulest and most brutal slander, the most inveterate hatred and intolerant pursuit, it will be a strange name in my ears, believe me. In some cases, I could name to you, where a native writer has ventured on the most harmless and good-humoured illustrations of our vices or defects, it has been found necessary to announce, that in a second edition the passage has been expunged, or altered, or explained away, or patched into praise.”
There is a story in Santiago de Chile of a young American scholar who spent some time there studying localisms. When he returned to New York he ventured to publish honest but rather severe criticisms of society, as he saw it, in that most aristocratic of South American republics. As a result, the university from which he came received a bad name in Chile and his visit is held in such unpleasant memory that his welcome, were he to return there, would be far from friendly. This seems narrow-minded and perverse but is exactly the way we felt not long ago towards foreigners who spent a few months in the States and wrote, for the benefit of the European public, sincere but caustic criticisms. American sensitiveness became a byword in Europe. Possibly it is growing less with us. However that may be, South American sensitiveness is no keener to-day than ours was fifty years since.
I am willing to admit that it ill becomes an American to offer serious adverse criticisms of the people of any country. Our own defects have been so repeatedly pointed out by foreigners, many of them with distressing unanimity, that we cannot afford to set ourselves up as judges of what South Americans should or should not do. It is true that the South Americans have certain graces of manner which we lack. They are more formal in their social intercourse, and use more of the oil of polite speech in the mechanism of their daily life than we do.
Climatic conditions and difficulties of rapid transportation have had much to do with the backwardness of the South American republics. With the progress of science, the great increase in transportation facilities and the war that is being successfully waged against tropical diseases, a change is coming about which we must be ready to meet.
It is particularly important that we should realize that the political conditions of the larger republics are very much more stable than our newspaper and novel-reading public are aware of. Lynchings are unheard of. Serious riots, such as some of our largest American cities have seen within the past generation, are no more common with them than with us. It is true that the Latin temperament finds it much more difficult to bow to the majesty of the law and to yield gracefully to governmental decrees than the more phlegmatic Teuton or Anglo-Saxon. But the revolutions and riots that Paris has witnessed during the past century have not kept us from a serious effort to increase our business with France. The occasional political riot that takes place, of no more significance than the riots caused by strikers with which we are all too familiar at home, is no reason why we should be afraid to endeavor to capture the South American market.
There is not the slightest question that there is a great opportunity awaiting the American manufacturer and exporter when he is willing to grasp it with intelligent persistence and determination. South America is ready to take American goods in very large quantities as soon as we are ready to take time to give attention to her needs. As Mr. Lincoln Hutchinson aptly says: “There is no quick and easy remedy; money must be spent, thoroughly equipped export managers must be employed, export houses specializing on South American trade must be established, efficient travellers must be sent out, technical experts employed, agencies established, credits be given, minutiæ of orders attended to, and, above all, trade connections adhered to in spite of allurements of the home market, if we would succeed in the face of our competitors. Half-way measures can accomplish but little, and that only temporary.”
Germany teaches her young business men Spanish or Portuguese and sends them out to learn conditions in the field. American Universities long ago learned the advantage of adopting Germany’s thorough-going methods of scientific research. American business men have hitherto failed to realize the importance of adopting Germany’s thorough-going methods of developing foreign commerce. It is high time that they took a leaf out of the experience of the “unpractical” universities.