Most informed observers agree that the mixed-bloods of Latin America are distinctly inferior to the whites. This applies to both mestizos and mulattoes, albeit the mestizo (the cross between white and Indian) seems less inferior than the mulatto—the cross between white and black. As for the zambo, the Indian-negro cross, everybody is agreed that it is a very bad one. Analyses of these hybrid stocks show remarkable similarities to the mongrel chaos of the declining Roman Empire. Here is the judgment of Garcia-Calderon, a Peruvian scholar and generally considered the most authoritative writer on Latin America. “The racial question,” he writes, “is a very serious problem in American history. It explains the progress of certain peoples and the decadence of others, and it is the key to the incurable disorder which divides America. Upon it depend a great number of secondary phenomena; the public wealth, the industrial system, the stability of governments, the solidity of patriotism.... This complication of castes, this admixture of diverse bloods, has created many problems. For example, is the formation of a national consciousness possible with such disparate elements? Would such heterogeneous democracies be able to resist the invasion of superior races? Finally, is the South American half-caste absolutely incapable of organization and culture?”[64] While qualifying his answers to these queries, Garcia-Calderon yet deplores the half-caste’s “decadence.”[65] “In the Iberian democracies,” he says, “an inferior Latinity, a Latinity of the decadence, prevails; verbal abundance, inflated rhetoric, oratorical exaggeration, just as in Roman Spain.... The half-caste loves grace, verbal elegance, quibbles even, and artistic form; great passions and desires do not move him. In religion he is sceptical, indifferent, and in politics he disputes in the Byzantine manner. No one could discover in him a trace of his Spanish forefather, stoical and adventurous.”[66] Garcia-Calderon therefore concludes: “The mixture of rival castes, Iberians, Indians, and negroes, has generally had disastrous consequences.... None of the conditions established by the French psychologists are realized by the Latin American democracies, and their populations are therefore degenerate. The lower castes struggle successfully against the traditional rules: the order which formerly existed is followed by moral anarchy; solid conviction by a superficial scepticism; and the Castilian tenacity by indecision. The black race is doing its work, and the continent is returning to its primitive barbarism.”[67] This melancholy fate can, according to Garcia-Calderon, be averted only by wholesale white immigration: “In South America civilization is dependent upon the numerical predominance of the victorious Spaniard, on the triumph of the white man over the mulatto, the negro, and the Indian. Only a plentiful European immigration can re-establish the shattered equilibrium of the American races.”[68]
Garcia-Calderon’s pronouncements are echoed by foreign observers. During his South American travels Professor Ross noted the same melancholy symptoms and pointed out the same unique remedy. Speaking of Ecuador, he says: “I found no foreigners who have faith in the future of this people. They point out that while this was a Spanish colony there was a continual flow of immigrants from Spain, many of whom, no doubt, were men of force. Political separation interrupted this current, and since then the country has really gone back. Spain had provided a ruling, organizing element, and, with the cessation of the flow of Spaniards, the mixed-bloods took charge of things, for the pure-white element is so small as to be negligible. No one suggests that the mestizos equal the white stock either in intellect or in character.... Among the rougher foreigners and Peruvians the pet name for these people is ‘monkeys.’ The thoughtful often liken them to Eurasians, clever enough, but lacking in solidity of character. Natives and foreigners alike declare that a large white immigration is the only hope for Ecuador.”[69]
Concerning Bolivia, Professor Ross writes: “The wisest sociologist in Bolivia told me that the zambo, resulting from the union of Indian with negro, is inferior to both the parent races, and that likewise the mestizo is inferior to both white and Indian in physical strength, resistance to disease, longevity, and brains. The failure of the South American republics has been due, he declares, to mestizo domination. Through the colonial period there was a flow of Spaniards to the colonies, and all the offices down to corregidor and cura were filled by white men. With independence, the whites ceased coming, and the lower offices of state and church were filled with mestizos. Then, too, the first crossing of white with Indian gave a better result than the union between mestizos, so that the stock has undergone progressive degeneration. The only thing, then, that can make these countries progress is a large white immigration, something much talked about by statesmen in all these countries, but which has never materialized.”[70]
These judgments refer particularly to Spanish America. Regarding Portuguese Brazil, however, the verdict seems to be the same. Many years ago Professor Agassiz wrote: “Let any one who doubts the evil of this mixture of races, and is inclined from mistaken philanthropy to break down all barriers between them, come to Brazil. He cannot deny the deterioration consequent upon the amalgamation of races, more wide-spread here than in any country in the world, and which is rapidly effacing the best qualities of the white man, the negro, and the Indian, leaving a mongrel, nondescript type, deficient in physical and mental energy.”[71]
The mongrel’s political ascendancy produces precisely the results which might have been expected. These unhappy beings, every cell of whose bodies is a battle-ground of jarring heredities, express their souls in acts of hectic violence and aimless instability. The normal state of tropical America is anarchy, restrained only by domestic tyrants or foreign masters. Garcia-Calderon exactly describes its psychology when he writes: “Precocious, sensual, impressionable, the Americans of these vast territories devote their energies to local politics. Industry, commerce, and agriculture are in a state of decay, and the unruly imagination of the Creole expends itself in constitutions, programmes, and lyrical discourses; in these regions anarchy is sovereign mistress.”[72] The tropical republics display, indeed, a tendency toward “atomic disintegration.... Given to dreaming, they are led by presidents suffering from neurosis.”[73]
The stock feature of the mongrel tropics is, of course, the “revolution.” These senseless and perennial outbursts are often ridiculed in the United States as comic opera, but the grim truth of the matter is that few Latin American revolutions are laughing matters. The numbers of men engaged may not be very large according to our standards, but measured by the scanty populations of the countries concerned, they lay a heavy blood-tax on the suffering peoples. The tatterdemalion “armies” may excite our mirth, but the battles are real enough, often fought out to the death with razor-edged machetes and rusty bayonets, and there is no more ghastly sight than a Latin American battle-field. The commandeerings, burnings, rapings, and assassinations inflicted upon the hapless civilian population cry to heaven. There is always wholesale destruction of property, frequently appalling loss of life, and a general paralysis of economic and social activity. These wretched lands have now been scourged by the revolutionary plague for a hundred years, and W. B. Hale does not overstate the consequences when he says: “Most of the countries clustering about the Caribbean have sunk into deeper and deeper mires of misrule, unmatched for profligacy and violence anywhere on earth. Revolution follows revolution; one band of brigands succeeds another; atrocities revenge atrocities; the plundered people grow more and more abject in poverty and slavishness; vast natural resources lie neglected, while populations decrease, civilization recedes, and the jungle advances.”[74] Of course, under these frightful circumstances, the national character, weak enough at best, degenerates at an ever-quickening pace. Peaceful effort of any sort appears vain and ridiculous, and men are taught that wealth is procurable only by violence and extortion.
Another important point should be noted. I have said that Latin American anarchy was restrained by dictatorship. But the reader must not infer that dictatorships are halcyon times—for the dictated. On the contrary, they are usually only a trifle less wretched and demoralizing than times of revolution. The “caudillos” are nearly always very sinister figures. Often they are ignorant brutes; oftener they are blood-thirsty, lecherous monsters; oftenest they are human spiders who suck the land dry of all fluid wealth, banking it abroad against the day when they shall fly before the revolutionary blast to the safe haven of Paris and the congenial debaucheries of Montmartre. The millions amassed by tyrants like Castro of Venezuela and Zelaya of Nicaragua are almost beyond belief, considering the backward, bankrupt lands they have “administered.”
Yet how can it be otherwise? Consider Critchfield’s incisive account of a caudillo’s accession to power: “When an ignorant and brutal man, whose entire knowledge of the world is confined to a few Indian villages, and whose total experience has been gained in the raising of cattle, doffs his alpagartes, and, machete in hand, cuts his way to power in a few weeks, with a savage horde at his back who know nothing of the amenities of civilization and care less than they know—when such a man comes to power, evil and evil only can result. Even if the new dictator were well-intentioned, his entire ignorance of law and constitutional forms, of commercial processes and manufacturing arts, and of the fundamental and necessary principles underlying all stable and free governments, would render a successful administration by him extremely difficult, if not impossible. But he is surrounded by all the elements of vice and flattery, and he is imbued with that vain and absurd egotism which makes men of small caliber imagine themselves to be Napoleons or Cæsars. Thus do petty despotisms, unrestrained by constitutional provisions or by anything like a virile public opinion, lead from absurdity to outrage and crime.”[75]
Such is the situation in mongrel-ruled America: revolution breeding revolution, tyranny breeding tyranny, and the twain combining to ruin their victims and force them ever deeper into the slough of degenerate barbarism. The whites have lost their grip and are rapidly disappearing. The mixed-breeds have had their chance and have grotesquely failed. The oft-quoted panacea—white immigration—is under present conditions a vain dream, for white immigrants will not expose themselves (and still less their women) to the horrors of mongrel rule. So far, their, as internal factors are concerned, anarchy seems destined to continue unchecked.
In fact, new conflicts loom on the horizon. The Indian masses, so docile to the genuine white man, begin to stir. The aureole of white prestige has been besmirched by the near-whites and half-castes who have traded so recklessly upon its sanctions. Strong in the poise of normal heredity, the Indian full-blood commences to despise these chaotic masters who turn his homelands into bear-gardens and witches’ sabbaths. An “Indianista” movement is to-day on foot throughout mongrel-ruled America. It is most pronounced in Mexico, whose interminable agony becomes more and more a war of Indian resurgence, but it is also starting along the west coast of South America. Long ago, wise old Professor Pearson saw how the wind was blowing. Noting how whites and near-whites were “everywhere fighting and intriguing for the spoils of office,” he also noted that the Indian masses, though relatively passive and “seemingly unobservant,” were yet “conquering a place for themselves in other ways than by increasing and multiplying,” and he concluded: “the general level of the autochthonous race is being raised; it is acquiring riches and self-respect, and must sooner or later get the country back into its hands.”[76] Recent visitors to the South American west coast note the signs of Indian unrest. Some years ago Lord Bryce remarked of Bolivia: “There have been Indian risings, and firearms are more largely in their hands than formerly. They so preponderate in numbers that any movement which united them against the upper class might, could they find a leader, have serious consequences.”[77] Still more recently Professor Ross wrote concerning Peru: “In Cuzco I met a gentleman of education and travel who is said to be the only living lineal descendant of the Incas. He has great influence with the native element and voices their bitterness and their aspirations. He declares that the politics of Peru is a struggle between the Spanish mestizos of Lima and the coast and the natives of Cuzco and the interior, and predicts an uprising unless Cuzco is made the capital of the nation. He even dreams of a Kechua republic, with Cuzco as its capital and the United States its guarantor, as she is guarantor of the Cuban republic.”[78] And of Bolivia, Professor Ross writes: “Lately there has been a general movement of the Bolivian Indians for the recovery of the lands of which they have been robbed piecemeal. Conflicts have broken out and, although the government has punished the ringleaders, there is a feeling that, so long as the exploiting of the Indian goes on, Bolivians are living ‘in the crater of a slumbering volcano.’”[79]