The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

North American evolution has in the nineteenth century been especially rapid because of several great economic factors: (1) the tobacco and cotton culture of the period before the civil war; (2) the very large immigration from Europe; (3) the rush for gold to California, hastening the development of the West; (4) the abundant yield of coal and iron, quickening every species of manufacture, especially after (5) a large influx of cheap European labour in the last decades of the nineteenth century. No one of these special factors has been potent in Brazil, save for the latterly rapid increase of immigration; there is no great staple of produce that thus far outgoes competition, unless it be caoutchouc; the precious metals are not now abundant; and there is practically no coal, though there is infinite iron. But these are conditions merely of a relatively slow development, not of unprogressiveness; and the presumption is that they will prove beneficent. The rapid commercial development of the United States is excessively capitalistic, in virtue largely of the factor of coal, and the consequent disproportionate stress of manufactures. The outstanding result is a hard-driven competitive life for the mass of the population, with the prospect ahead of industrial convulsions, in addition to the nightmare of the race-hatred between black and white—a desperate problem, from which Brazil seems to have been saved. There the problem of slavery was later faced than in the United States, partly, perhaps, because there the slave was less cruelly treated; but the result of the delay was altogether good. There was no civil war; the process of emancipation was gradual, beginning in 1871 and finishing with a leap in 1885-88; and no race-hatred has been left behind.[978] Those whose political philosophy begins and ends with a belief in the capacities of the "Anglo-Saxon race" would do well to note these facts.

In Brazil the process of emancipation, long favoured as elsewhere by the liberal minds,[979] was peacefully forced on by economic pressure. It was seen that slave labour was a constant check to the immigration of free labour, and therefore to the development of the country.[980] When this had become clear, emancipation was only a question of time. The same development would inevitably have come about in North America; and it is not a proof of any special "Anglo-Saxon" faculty for government that the process there was precipitated by one of the bloodiest wars of the modern world, and has left behind it one of the blackest problems by which any civilisation is faced. The frequent European comments on the revolutions of South America are apt to set up an illusion. All told, those crises represent perhaps less evil than was involved in the North American Civil War; and they are hardly greater moral evils than the peaceful growth of financial corruption in the North. In any case, the only revolution in Brazil since the outbreak of 1848 has been the no less peaceful than remarkable episode of 1889, which dethroned the Emperor Pedro II and made Brazil a republic. There was as much of pathos as of promise in the event, for Pedro had been one of the very best monarchs of the century; but at least the bloodless change was in keeping with his reign and his benign example,[981] and may indeed be reckoned a due result of them.

In fine, Brazil—in common with other parts of South America—has a fair chance of being one day the scene of a civilisation morally and socially higher than that now evolving in North America. What may be termed the coal-civilisations, with their factitious rapidity of exploitation, are in the nature of the case relatively ugly and impermanent. That cannot well be the highest civilisation which multiplies by the myriad its serfs of the mine, and by the million its slaves of the machine. In South America the lack of coal promises escape from the worst developments of capitalism,[982] inasmuch as labour there must be mainly spent on and served by the living processes and forces of nature, there so immeasurable and so inexhaustible of beauty. Fuel enough for sane industry is supplied by the richest woods on the planet; and the Brazilian climate, even now singularly wholesome over immense areas,[983] may become still more generally so by control of vegetation. It is a suggestive fact that there the common bent, though still far short of mastery, is in an exceptional degree towards the high arts of form and sound.[984] It may take centuries to evoke from a population which quietly embraces the coloured types of South America and Africa the æsthetic progress of which it is capable;[985] but the very fact that these types play their physical and artistic part in the growth is a promise special to the case. And if thus the "Latin" races—for it is Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, and French-speaking Belgians who chiefly make up the immigrants, though there is a German element also—build up a humanly catholic and soundly democratic life in that part of the planet most prodigally served by nature, subduing to their need the vast living forces which overpowered the primitive man, and at the same time escaping the sinister gift of subterranean fuel—if thus they build up life rather than dead wealth, they will have furthered incomparably the general deed of man. But it is part of the hope set up by the slower rate of a progress which overtakes and keeps pace with nature, instead of forestalling the yearly service of the sun, that when it reaches greatness it will have outlived the instincts of racial pride and hate which have been the shame and the stumbling-block of the preceding ages. Should "little" Portugal be the root of such a growth, her part will surely have been sufficient. But in the meantime Portugal and Brazil alike suffer from illiteracy, the bane of the Catholic countries;[986] and that priest-wrought evil must be remedied if their higher life is to be maintained.

Until this vital drawback is removed the possible social gain to Portugal from the revolution of 1910 cannot be realised. A republic is more favourable to progress than a monarchy only in so far as it gives freer play and fuller furtherance to all forms of energy; and in the still priest-ridden Peninsula the resistance of sacerdotalism to democratic rule is a great stumbling-block. The Republic of Portugal needs time to establish itself aright. Citizens of more "advanced" countries are wont to criticise with asperity shortcomings of administration in the "new" States of our time which were fully paralleled in their own in the past. Englishmen who make comparisons between their own political system and that of countries whose constitutions have been reshaped within the present century would do well to consider the state of English government in the latter part of the eighteenth century, after a hundred years of constitutional freedom. Nay, in a country where the great parties in our own time perpetually accuse each other of gross and unscrupulous misgovernment, disparagements of the politics of countries which only recently attained self-government are obviously open to discount. Suffice it that Portugal, albeit by a via dolorosa of violence trodden by other peoples before her, has reaffirmed her part in the movement of civilisation towards a larger and a better life, thus giving the hundredth disproof to the formulas which deny the potentiality of advance to States which have known decadence.

FOOTNOTES:

[942] The Story of Portugal, by Mr. H. Morse Stephens, 1891, is the most trustworthy history of Portugal in English, giving as it does the main results of the work of the modern scientific school of Portuguese historians.

[943] Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik, 1881, p. 283.

[944] H. Morse Stephens, Portugal, 1891, pp. 53, 87, 102, 236.

[945] Stephens, Portugal, pp. 148, 149, 182.

[946] Many of the dates are to some extent in dispute. Cp. Stephens, Portugal, pp. 144-56; and Mr. Major's Life of Prince Henry of Portugal, 1868, passim.