The Blancos have been out of power in Uruguay since 1864, but they hold well together and compose an opposition which acts by constitutional methods in the legislature (when any of its partisans can find an entrance) and by military methods outside the constitution, in the open country, whenever peaceful methods are deemed useless. The parties have become largely hereditary; a child is born a little Blanco or a little Colorado, and rarely deserts his colour. Feeling runs so high that in Blanco districts it is dangerous for a man to wear a red necktie, just as in driving through certain Irish towns a harmless botanist from Britain may, when his car approaches a particular quarter, be warned by the driver to throw away or cover over the ferns which he has gathered in a mountain glen, because the sight of the obnoxious colour will expose him to be stoned by those who regard its display as an affront.
These revolutions, however, have in the course of years been tending to become rather less frequent, and certainly less sanguinary, just as in parts of South America there are volcanoes once terrible by their tremendous eruptions which now content themselves with throwing out a few showers of ashes or discharging a stream of lava from a little crater near the base. This rising ended with a surrender, accompanied by an amnesty which included the absence of any decree of confiscation of property, so no blood was shed except in the field.
When I asked what were the grievances alleged to justify the revolt of November, 1910, the answer was that an election of the legislature was impending, that the new legislature would, when elected, proceed forthwith to the choice of a President of the republic for the next four years, that the Blancos fully expected that the elections would be so handled by the government in power as to secure a majority certain to choose a particular candidate whom the Blancos feared and disliked, and that therefore the only course open to the latter was to avert by an appeal to arms the wrong which would be done to the nation by tampering with the rights of the electors. How much truth there may have been in these allegations the passing traveller could not know, nor was it for him to judge whether, if true, they would warrant an appeal to force.
The conditions in some Latin-American republics are peculiar, and can be paralleled only in one or two other parts of the modern world. In the years between 1848 and 1859 when despotic governments held sway in most parts of Europe, the ingenuous youth of Britain used to assume, as Thomas Jefferson had done fifty years before, that every insurrection was presumably justifiable and entitled to the sympathy of all lovers of freedom. Of recent years, since constitutional governments have been established in nearly all countries, the presumption is deemed to be the other way, and revolts are prima facie disapproved. In some American republics, however,—and here I am speaking not of Uruguay, but of more backward communities,—there is no presumption at all either way. A government in Nicaragua or Honduras, for instance, has usually obtained power either by force of arms or by a mock election carried through under military pressure. To eject it by similar means is, therefore, in the eye of a constitutional lawyer, not a breach of law and order, because the government which it is sought to eject has no legal title, being itself the child of wrongdoing. On the other hand the insurgents are probably no better friends of law and order than is the government. If they succeed by arms, they will not hold an honest election, but will rule by force, just as did their predecessors. There is, accordingly, no ground for the award of sympathy or moral approval to either faction, while for foreign powers the problem of when to recognize a government that has come in by the sword, and will presently, like the Priest of the Grove at Nemi, perish by the sword, is no easy one, and must usually be solved by waiting till such a government has made itself so clearly master of the situation as to possess a de facto title likely to hold good for some time to come, and perhaps ultimately pass into a title de iure.[88]
Reverting to Uruguay, the most curious and historically instructive feature of her case is that these recurrent civil wars and attempts at revolution do not seem to have retarded her prosperity. She saw more incessant fighting from 1810 till 1876 than any other part of the world has seen for the last hundred years. Even since then risings and conflicts have been frequent, and though there has been no foreign war since 1870, when that with Paraguay ended, the presence on either side of two great powers, not always friendly to her or to each other, has often caused anxiety. Nevertheless, the country has continued to grow in wealth and population. Capital has flowed in freely to build railways, and the good opinion which European investors entertain is shewn by the fact that the Uruguayan five per cent bonds average just about par in the London stock market. Foreign trade has increased fivefold since 1862. Without forsaking their love of fighting, the people have turned to work, and the land or cattle owner depends less on foreign labour than he does in Argentina. Thus it would seem that as there have been countries ruined by war—as Central Asia Minor was by the long strife between the Seljukian Turks and the East Roman Emperors, and as Germany suffered from the Thirty Years' War injuries it cost her nearly two centuries to repair, so there are countries which have thriven in the midst of war. In the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. the Greek cities of Sicily were seldom at peace. They fought with the Carthaginians, they fought with one another, they fought for or against a Tyrant within their own walls; and all this fighting was done by citizen soldiers. Yet they throve and erected those majestic temples whose ruins we admire at Girgenti and Selinunte, while the iron peace of Rome in those later days, when the island had been made a province, brought to the country folk misery interrupted only by servile insurrections.
The occasional recurrence of such incidents as that of November, 1910, had not for some years prior to my visit prevented the government of Uruguay from emulating that of Argentina in efforts to keep abreast of Europe in all sorts of administrative schemes for the advancement of education, and for the development of the country. In two respects it has entered on a policy different from that of other South American states. It is the only one in which schemes or ideas tending towards state socialism have been countenanced by the Executive, and it is also the only one in which there is a distinctly antireligious party. In Peru the church has still some political influence. In Chile she has less, in Argentina practically none, but in neither is she the object of hostility. Here, however, a section of the dominant party is professedly antagonistic to the church, and this would seem to be due not to any provocation given recently by the clergy, whose Blanco friends have been long out of power, but rather to a spirit which seeks to strike at and eliminate religion itself.
Such a movement does not seem, any more than do socialistic ideas, to be a natural growth of the Uruguayan soil. Just as the anarchistic propaganda in Argentina has been recently brought thither from Europe by immigrants, so this less fierce expression of the revolutionary spirit bears marks of having been transplanted from those parts of southern Europe where the more violent advocates of change regard not only the Roman Church, but religion itself, as hostile to progress and to the reconstruction of society on a new basis. The rural population of Uruguay are not the sort of people among whom such ideas would spontaneously arise, for they belong, so far as their beliefs and views of life are concerned, rather to the eighteenth than to the twentieth century. Elsewhere in South America, enmity to the church has been due to the power she has exercised in the secular world, or to the memory of her old habits of repression. One does not hear, however, that she has for a long time past been politically obnoxious here; nor can there have been any memories of serious persecution to provoke hatred, for the era of persecution was passing away when these regions began to be thickly settled.
With her temperate climate and her fertile soil, Uruguay is an attractive country. In no part of South America, except perhaps southern Chile, would a European feel more disposed to settle down for life. The people are of pure European stock and have many of the qualities—frankness and energy, courage, and a high sense of honour—which make for political progress. The country is no doubt comparatively small, and it is the fashion nowadays to worship bigness and disparage small nations. Yet the independent city communities, or the small nations—such as were England and Holland in the seventeenth century—have produced not only most of the best literature and art, but most of the great men and great achievements which history records. National life is apt to be more intense and more interesting where it is concentrated in an area not so wide as to forbid the people to know one another and their leaders. Thus one cannot but hope that the Uruguayans, with some favouring conditions, and without the disadvantage of excessive wealth suddenly acquired, will seriously endeavour to smooth the road, now rough and dangerous, over which the chariot of their republican government has to travel. It is not the Constitution that is at fault, but the way in which the Constitution is worked. The backward state of education and consequent incompetence of the ordinary citizen is usually assigned as the source of political troubles. There is certainly an inadequate provision both here and generally in South America of elementary and secondary schools. But the experience of many countries has shewn that the education of the masses is not enough to secure a reform in political methods. There is surely force in the view I heard expressed, that if the whole population, or even the whole of the educated class in the population, were to exert themselves to take more active part in politics, they could set things right by checking the abuses or grievances out of which revolutions grow and by moderating the party spirit which rushes to arms when grievances remain unredressed.