There are sixteen thousand Government servants in Cuba—nearly all Spaniards; all underpaid; all permitted to make livings or fortunes by such means as present themselves. They maintain themselves, and many of them grow rich, by corruption, which there is no public opinion to rebuke. The ignorance of the people is unsurpassed—not more than one-tenth of their number having received any education at all. A few poor newspapers, living under a strict censorship, supply the literary wants of Havana, a city of two hundred and thirty thousand souls. No religious teaching, excepting that which the Church of Rome supplies, is permitted within the island. Justice is administered according to the irresponsible pleasure of ignorant Spanish officials, incessantly eager to be bribed. Slavery lingers in Cuba after its rejection by all American and European States, and is here characterized by special brutalities. Recent English travellers have witnessed the flogging of young slave-women, from whose arms lately-born children were removed in order that the torture might be inflicted.
The States of the Spanish mainland suffered deeply in their struggle against the power of the mother country, but they gained the ample compensation of independence. Unhappy Cuba endured miseries no less extreme, but she found no deliverance. The solace of freedom has been withheld; the abhorred and withering despotism survives to blight the years that are to come as it has blighted those that are past.
CHAPTER V.
INDEPENDENCE.
When the thirteen English colonies of the Northern Continent gained their independence, they entered upon a political condition for which their qualities of mind and their experience amply fitted them. They were reasonably well educated; indeed there was scarcely any other population which, in this respect, enjoyed advantages so great. They were men of a race which had for centuries been accustomed to exercise authority in the direction of its own public affairs. Since they became colonists they and their fathers had enjoyed in an eminent degree the privilege of self-government. The transition by which they passed into sovereign States demanded no fitness beyond that which they inherited from many generations of ancestors and developed in the ordinary conduct of their municipal and national interests.
With the Spanish settlements on the Southern Continent it was altogether different. The people were entirely without education; the printing-press was not to be found anywhere on the continent excepting in two or three large cities. They were of many and hostile races. There were Spaniards—European and native. There were Indians, classed as civilized, half-civilized, and wild. There were Negroes; there were races formed by the union of the others. The European Spaniards alone had any experience in the art of government, and they were driven from the continent with all possible speed. The others were wholly unpractised in the management of their own national concerns. Spanish officials supplied, according to their own despotic pleasure, the regulation which they deemed needful; and the colonists had not even the opportunity of watching and discussing the measures which were adopted.
No people ever took up the work of self-government under a heavier burden of disadvantage and disqualification. It is not surprising that their success thus far has been so imperfect. Nor is their future to be despaired of because their past is so full of wasted effort, of incessant revolution, of blood lavishly shed in civil strife which seemed to have no rational object and no solid result. Mankind must be satisfied if, beneath these confusions and miseries, there can be traced some evidences of progress towards that better political and industrial condition which self-government has never ultimately failed to gain.
The early legislation of the South American States expressed genuine sympathy with the cause of liberty, and an unselfish desire that its blessings should be enjoyed by all. Slavery was abolished, and for many years the absence of that evil institution from the emancipated Spanish settlements was a standing rebuke to the unscrupulous greed which still maintained it among the more enlightened inhabitants of the Northern Continent. Constitutions were adopted which evinced a just regard to the rights of all, combined, unhappily, with an utter disregard to the fitness of the population for the exercise of these rights.[42] Universal suffrage and equal electoral districts were established, and votes were taken by the ballot. Orders of nobility were abolished, and some unjust laws which still retain their place in the statute-book of England, as the laws of entail and primogeniture. Entire religious liberty was decreed, and it was not long till the interference of the Pope in such ecclesiastical concerns as the appointment of bishops was resented and repelled. The punishment of death for political offences was abolished. In course of time an educational system, free and compulsory, was set up in some of the States. The people of South America had been animated in their pursuit of independence by the example of the United States and of France, and they sought to frame their political institutions according to the models which these countries supplied.