[CHAPTER XII]
THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS
In A.D. 1808, when Napoleon Bonaparte, the true Liberator of Spanish America, moved his armies into Spain, the dominions of the Spanish Crown stretched south eight thousand miles from the bay of San Francisco to the Straits of Magellan. The population that was scattered thinly over that vast region was mostly native Indian, but there may possibly have been a million of pure Spanish stock and many times that number of mixed Spanish and Indian blood. All except the Indians spoke Spanish; all except the wild heathen tribes were Roman Catholics, and the white men were orthodox Catholics, with universal and genuine horror of heresy. All who were of pure European or of mixed blood followed customs and held ideas generally similar; all had been ruled by governors sent from Spain under laws and an administrative system drawn up and carried out on similar lines. In every region the Roman Church was powerful and monasteries abounded. There were no sharp local distinctions among this Spanish and Indo-Spanish population. Intercolonial trade was indeed forbidden, and permission to travel from one colony to another had to be obtained. But as all were subjects of one king and members of one Church, there was no political separation beyond that which was involved in the existence of various local jurisdictions. A native of Mexico was not a stranger on the banks of the Orinoco or the Paraná any more than the Bostonian Benjamin Franklin had been a stranger when he came to settle in Philadelphia. They could hardly be said to form one nation, for they had no national organization, but they all alike belonged to the same Hispano-American nationality.
In A.D. 1908 there were in the same area, but now between the Rio Grande Del Norte and Cape Horn (the territories now known as California, Arizona, and New Mexico having by this time become annexed to the United States) sixteen independent republics,[101] all of which had freed themselves from the Spanish Crown between 1810, when the first risings took place in Mexico and Argentina, and 1826, when the flag of Spain was finally lowered on the fortress of Callao, the last stronghold on the American mainland of the successor of Charles the Fifth. That which had been one widely scattered and loosely connected people had become divided into many distinct communities, each with its own government, its separate historical traditions, its local prides and local antagonisms, its more or less definite and sharp-cut national consciousness. From the amorphous mass of protoplasm, so to speak, of 1808, each part of which was generally similar to every other part, there had emerged sixteen separate organisms, some markedly different and no two alike, although those distinctive features which make up national character had become much more fully developed in some than in others. That is to say, there are now instead of one people sixteen new nations.
But can we describe these sixteen republics as Nations?
What is a Nation?
It is dangerous to offer a definition which may not correspond to usage, for usage is the only true master and interpreter of words; and usage is in this case loose and varying. But it might be not far wide of the mark to say that while a nationality is a population held together by certain ties, as, for example, language and literature, ideas, customs, and traditions, in such wise as to feel itself a coherent unity, distinct from other populations similarly held together by like ties of their own, a Nation is a nationality, or a subdivision of a nationality, which has organized itself into a political body, either independent or desiring to be independent. This description would encounter some doubtful cases. The Athenians in antiquity and the Florentines in the Middle Ages were hardly nations, though they were independent states, for they were parts of a wider Greek and Italian people. The Swiss, Alemannian Germans to begin with, grew slowly into a nation, and were scarcely so to be described before A.D. 1648. Now, though they speak three languages and spring from at least three nationalities, they are as united a nation as there is in the world. The Magyars did not cease to be a nation because their constitutional freedom and rights of self-government were overthrown in 1849 and not regained till nearly twenty years later. Were the thirteen American colonies before 1776 a nation, or did they become so in that year, or not till the union of all of them was finally assured in 1791? Tuscany, though independent under its local rulers till 1859, was not a nation, and still less were the States of the Church. But is Bavaria to-day to be deemed a nation? Ireland and Scotland figure as nations in after-dinner speeches on the days of their respective saints: are they so at other times also? and if they are, is Wales a nation? Were the Transvaal and the Orange Free State nations before the South African war of 1899? They were certainly parts of a Dutch South African nationality. If Canada and Australia are nations, is the Union of South Africa one also? or does the whole British people all over the world constitute a nation?
Without multiplying doubtful cases, however, the description presented above, and any description which tries to represent current usage, would recognize the fact, that wherever a community has both political independence and a distinctive character recognizable in its members, as well as in the whole body, we call it a nation. Applying such a test to the Spanish-American republics, some of them, such as Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, are undeniably nations, while even some at least of the smaller, such as Cuba, Ecuador, and Paraguay, have attained sufficient individuality and consciousness of corporate unity to make them feel and act together and desire to preserve their independence.[102] If they maintain that consciousness and that independence for another fifty years, their nationhood will be indisputable. The bud is opening, even if the form and colours of the petals are not yet fully visible.
By what process, then, and through the working of what forces did this more or less uniform common substance, this raw material for the making of states, which a century ago was spread over the vast Spanish colonial empire, become differentiated into the sixteen nations that exist to-day?
There is nothing in history more interesting than the study of the process by which nations are evolved from races or tribes. The widest range of phenomena are those supplied by the formation of the kingdoms of modern Europe through the admixture or contact of the peoples comprised in the Roman Empire with the barbarian tribes which entered it or received civilization from it. The growth of France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, England, Scotland, and (by contact with little mixture) of Poland, Russia, and the Scandinavian states, and in more recent times the creation of Greece and Belgium and Rumania and the re-creation as nations of Servia and Bulgaria, are all instances of the process. But in the case of the greater and older nations this process occupied many centuries, and its earlier stages are obscure. Here in Spanish America it has been going on under the eyes of the civilized world in an age when everything is or can be known, and it has taken only a hundred years. In all probability, nothing like this, no creation of new national entities coming about over so large an area in so short a time, can ever occur again. The causes which have produced these divergences from one type into many, turning the colonial Spaniard, who was in essentials much the same kind of man wherever he lived, into a Mexican or Uruguayan, a Peruvian, Chilean, or Argentine (to take a few of the more marked new national forms), are as interesting a subject for enquiry and reflection as could engage the thoughts of a philosophic historian.
All I can do here is to suggest some of these causes which occur to the mind of one who travels in Spanish America. To work the subject out in detail would need years of reading as well as many a journey. Hitherto few of those who have read have travelled, and few of those who have travelled have read. I have done so much less of either than the magnitude of the subject demands, that I must ask indulgence for even throwing out suggestions which are meant to urge others, better equipped than myself, to prosecute the enquiry.