The primary factor which determined the territorial limits of each republic is to be found in the existence in colonial days of certain administrative divisions. The Viceroyalties and Captaincies General constituted so many governmental areas, the inhabitants of each of which felt a sort of community among themselves, although they had no share in the government. In a few of these areas there existed what might be called the rudiments of a distinctive character belonging to the inhabitants of that area and marking them off from those who dwell in other divisions. In the larger number of areas there was not yet anything of the sort. When the insurrections broke out and as the War of Independence proceeded, the dwellers in each Viceroyalty or Captaincy General fought for themselves (with more or less help from insurgent bands elsewhere), and when they set up a revolutionary government, they tried to make the old provincial capital the seat of that government, so that in this way the boundaries of the old areas tended to remain, and that which had been an administrative division passed into a Republic. Yet it was still only a body of inhabitants in an area, not a nation. What we have to ask is—How did these groups of inhabitants occupying each its own territory, in only some few of whom did there exist the rudiments of a distinctive national character—how did they grow into Nations in the proper sense of the word?
The aim of this chapter will accordingly be:—
I. To indicate the main influences which have differentiated the inhabitants of Spanish America into distinct Nations. These influences are partly physical, partly racial, partly historical.
II. To enquire how far the process of differentiation has gone in making the people of any, and which, of the republics into true Nations, i.e. in giving them both distinctive traits of character and a strong national self-consciousness.
III. To ascertain to what extent there remains among the peoples of these republics any common Hispano-American sentiment, any sense of kinship linking them together in spite of political separation, possibly even underlying political hostility.
I. Among the causes or influences which have tended to differentiation, the first place may be assigned to geographical position. Where one part of a nationality is cut off from the other parts by the sea, or by deserts, or by dense forests, any peculiarities that already belonged to it tend to develop further and become intensified, because they are not affected by contact from without; and such a part, moreover, being isolated, attains a stronger consciousness of itself as a separate social and political entity. Two island republics, Cuba and Santo Domingo, were thus destined by nature to stand apart from those of the mainland as soon as their connection with the European sovereign had been broken. The people of Chile, severed from Peru by a wide and waterless desert, drew farther and farther apart from those of that country. The Chileans and the Argentines are divided from one another by a lofty mountain range, passable at a few points only, and at those points with difficulty, so the differences between them, which more frequent intercourse might have lessened, grew more pronounced. Paraguay stands almost alone in her forests, and till steamships began to ply on the great Paraná, could be reached from the coast only by a tedious upstream voyage or an even more toilsome land journey.
Not less important is the influence of physical environment in modifying both the race itself and the economic conditions of its life. In Mexico, for instance, the existence of a compact area of fertile soil around the lakes on whose shores the semi-civilization of the men of Tezcuco and Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) arose, created in that area a comparatively large population of pure Spanish blood and a still larger one of mixed blood which ultimately became the core of the Mexican republic and enabled it not only to hold together the outlying territories, but, also, when it got a strong ruler, to set up a strong centralized administration. Peru is cut up by the lofty and barren Andean ranges into a number of valleys, each more or less isolated. Some of its cities, like Arequipa, stand in solitary oases surrounded by deserts, while the eastern towns are severed from the capital by so many ridges and gorges that the formation of an active and homogeneous public opinion has been retarded. Chile, on the other hand, had till recently nearly all her inhabitants gathered in a comparatively small cultivable area, favourable to the growth of a united people, and similar conditions have accelerated the material progress and intensified the patriotism of Uruguay. In the vast territories of Colombia and Venezuela where, besides three or four cities lying far apart, there are only small settlements scattered through a region of mountain and forest, political cohesion and the sense of national life must needs advance far more slowly than in a level and cultivated land like Argentina, covered with a network of railways.
Climate has told for much in compelling the inhabitants of the colder regions to work hard and enabling those of the hotter to take life easily. The tropical states have on the whole lagged behind the temperate ones, and there is between them a perceptible difference in character and habits. In Bolivia the combined effect of the low temperature, thin air, extreme dryness, and poor food has not only made a large part of the plateau a sterile desert, but has also checked the advance of the aboriginal race, and has confined the population of Spanish origin to a small number of towns lying so far away from one another that common political action becomes difficult and social antagonisms remain acute.
While these physical differences have told upon all the divisions of Spanish America, they have been in some all the more efficient because they have been followed by economic consequences, and have induced certain forms of industrial life. Cattle and the horse have determined the habits of the Argentine and Uruguayan. Mining has had more to do with the Peruvian and the Mexican. No one of the nations has taken to a sea-faring life except the Chileans.
Whoever will compare Spanish America with Anglo-America (i.e. the United States and Canada) will be struck by the far greater differences of physical environment between the various parts of the former and those of the latter, where no section of the country, except Florida, Louisiana, and Texas is oppressively hot, even in summer, and where no section, till one reaches Labrador, suffers from severities of cold and wet such as check settlement in the far south of Chile and of Argentina. Nature does less to differentiate Anglo-American man into varieties than she does in the case of Spanish-American man.
Even more important than the influence of natural conditions has been the presence in Spanish America of the aboriginal tribes. These differed greatly in intelligence, courage, and a disposition to industry. In some regions they were both numerous and warlike, as in Mexico and Chile. In others they were numerous but easily conquered, as in the Peruvian highlands and Central America and Paraguay. In some they were too few to hold their ground, as in central Argentina and Uruguay, or so feeble as neither to offer serious resistance nor furnish servile labour. This was the case in Cuba and on some of the coasts of the Caribbean Sea. The differences in intellectual capacity were expressed in the degree of progress they had made towards civilization; the Mexicans and the subjects of the Peruvian Incas standing at the top, and the Amazonian savages in the east of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru at the bottom of the scale. As another chapter treats of their present relations to the European part of the population, it is enough to call attention here to the effect of the infusion of native blood in differentiating various parts of the old colonial population from one another. The volume of that infusion has been greater in some regions than in others, and the native blood has been unequal in quality. A half-Indian people tends to differ—whether for worse or for better is another question—from a white people; and a people mixed with Indians of a strong race, like the native Mexican, differs from one which has received a blend of weaker native blood. In persons of mixed race, the white element predominates, but less evidently in physical appearance than in mental attributes. The mestizos are all Christians and more generally educated; they draw their ideas and habits from their European rather than their native parentage, which, indeed, they prefer to ignore.
Besides this influence, which we may call physiological, we must further note, as a factor producing diversity, the social effect which the presence of a native semiservile class has upon the character of the ruling element in the population. Where such a class supplies labour, the ruling element generally despises and refuses manual work. Where the former is both numerous and ignorant, it usually lowers the moral and probably also the intellectual standard of the European inhabitants. In some republics the presence of this class has encouraged civil wars and revolutions by furnishing Indian soldiers who can be forced to fight and will fight well for causes in which they take no interest. It has moreover made the provisions of constitutions which confer universal suffrage seem hollow shams.