The observer who has realized that many of these states are not natural political entities, but the creation of a series of accidents, naturally wonders whether they are likely to remain as at present. May not the two or three greatest swallow up the weaker, or may not some of the smaller seek strength in a voluntary union, federal at first, and perhaps ultimately leading to a unitary state? This is not impossible. The three republics of Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador might renew the federal tie they dissolved in 1831. Some, or all, of the Central American republics might similarly form a confederation. Mr. Root, when Secretary of State of the United States, tactfully acting in conjunction with Mexico, succeeded in persuading all those republics to set up and promise to obey a sort of Federal Court of Justice for the determination of disputes between them, and the Court still exists, though the promise to use it has been generally forgotten when the time came. There are those who think that Bolivia, one of the least homogeneous among South American countries, may possibly be partitioned, like Poland, by her more powerful neighbours, but of this there seems no present risk. It is chiefly in Central America that the existing situation may be deemed to lack stability, for while Costa Rica and Salvador are comparatively peaceful and well-governed states, and Guatemala has latterly kept quiet, Nicaragua and Honduras have been in a state of constant disturbance, and any ambitious president attaining power in either might be tempted to attack his neighbours.
It is of more importance to enquire what are the prospects of a continued and durable peace in the continent of South America. Here three states stand out as far stronger than any of the others. Chile, Argentina, and Brazil have all of them considerable armies, and have now provided themselves with fleets, including powerful ironclads, not in any direct or immediate contemplation of war, nor because any one of them is threatened by any other naval power, but apparently in imitation of the United States and of the largest nations of the Old World. It seems to be thought nowadays that the dignity and status of great nations require a big navy, just as in the sixteenth century a nobleman of high degree was expected to travel about with and maintain a crowd of useless retainers. Each of these three nations is as strong as any two of the other republics. Next to them come Peru and Uruguay, while the northern states, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, find their chief defensive strength in the difficult nature of their territories.
There has been no war (other than a civil war) in South America since 1883, when peace was made between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. The tension over disputed boundaries between Argentina and Chile ended with the acceptance of the Delimitation Award made by the king of England in 1902. The friction between Argentina and Brazil which arose once or twice at a later date seems to have passed away, and the friendly relations now subsisting between these three, which one may call the Great Powers of the Continent, are of good augury for the averting of hostilities, more than once threatened, between Ecuador and Peru and between Colombia and Ecuador. The influence of the United States also has been usefully exerted towards the same end. Most of the causes to which European wars have been due are absent from this Continent. There are no religious differences. There are, as between states, no race questions, no nationalities held in bondage against their will and struggling to be free. There are no rival claims to lay hold of unoccupied or semicivilized territories in other parts of the world.
Fish, and the element in which fish live, have often been quarrelled over elsewhere, but in South America there are no fishing rights worth a quarrel (except perhaps the pearl fisheries of Panama), and the only water questions that have ever given trouble are those relating to the respective jurisdictions of Argentina and Uruguay in the river Plate estuary and regarding the navigation rights of Colombia and Venezuela in the river Orinoco. Boundary disputes remain. Some of them, like that of Chile and Argentina, that of Bolivia and Argentina, and that of Brazil and Peru, have been recently settled, but there are still outstanding not only the controversy between Peru and Chile regarding Tacna and Arica,[106] but also the three-cornered quarrel of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru about their respective claims to the half-explored Amazonian region in which their territories meet on the eastern side of the Andes.
There remains an unclassifiable margin of other possible incidents which might precipitate into war the inhabitants of the more backward republics, men of an over-sensitive and explosive temper, a temper which holds every question to be one of honour, and even if it has been induced to accept a reference to arbitration, refuses to accept the award when rendered. Thus the danger of wars in this Continent cannot be deemed to have vanished, though it has so greatly diminished that its extinction seems to approach. Let us, nevertheless, remember one possible contingency. Now and then there has arisen in some republic a man of ruthless force whose unslaked ambition, after it has made him master of his own country, turns its arms against its neighbours. Though there are signs that the era of revolutions and tyrannies is passing away, such a man might again appear, rising by the favour of the populace and ruling by military force, and he might try to strengthen his domestic control by foreign conquest.
Of wars with European Powers there has for a long time past been no question, and as those Powers do not try to annex South American territories, and have no causes of quarrel except when their subjects complain of debts unpaid and injuries inflicted, so the South Americans have not taken a hand in the game of Old World politics. They need not now be tempted to do so, for there is at present plenty in the changeful relations of their own republics to engage the capacity of the ablest statesman. As to what may happen when one or two of the South American countries have reached the population and wealth of France or Italy, it is vain to speculate. Those who live to see that day will see a world wholly unlike our own.
[CHAPTER XIII]
THE RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA
Although races, unlike in character and differing in the scale of upward progress, must have come into contact from the earliest times, it is only in recent years that the phenomena attending that contact have been carefully observed and studied. From the end of the fifteenth century European nations have been conquering the backward races. In some countries they enslaved, in others they extirpated, these races. They have now portioned out the whole world of savagery, barbarism, and semicivilization among themselves, so that, as the result of discoveries, wars, and treaties, six great and three smaller powers[107] have now appropriated all the extra-European world, except three or four ancient Asiatic states. In our own day the questions connected with race contact have obtained both a new moral interest, because the old methods of killing off the so-called lower branches of mankind by the sword or by slavery have fallen into discredit, and also a new scientific interest, because we have become curious to know what are the effects of a mixture of markedly dissimilar racial stocks. Such mixture raises some of the most obscure problems in the doctrine of heredity. Does the blending of one race with another tend to weaken or to improve the breed, and how far are any marked qualities of one parent stock transmissible by blood to a mixed progeny which is placed in and powerfully affected by a different environment? Spanish America offers a large and varied field for the study of these and other similar questions, and a field which has been, so far, little examined. My own knowledge does not go far enough to enable me to do more than state a few broad facts and suggest to those who have better opportunities for enquiry some of the problems which the subject presents.