What ultimate effect the intermixture of blood will have on the European element in Brazil I will not venture to predict. If one may judge from a few remarkable cases, it will not necessarily reduce the intellectual standard. One of the ablest and most refined Brazilians I have known had some colour; and other such cases have been mentioned to me. Assumptions and preconceptions must be eschewed, however plausible they may seem.
The chief conclusions which the history of the relations of races in the South American continent suggests are the three following. The first may be thought doubtful. It is negative rather than positive, and though it seems worth stating, I state it with diffidence.
The fusion of two parent stocks, one more advanced, the other more backward, does not necessarily result in producing a race inferior to the stronger parent or superior to the weaker. The mestizo in Peru is not palpably inferior in intellect to the Spanish colonial of unmixed blood, but seems to be substantially his equal. The mestizo in Mexico is not palpably superior—some doubt if he is at all superior either physically, morally, or intellectually—to the pure Tarascan or Zapotec Indian, who is, no doubt, a stronger human being than the South American Quichua or Aymará.
The second conclusion is this: Conquest and control by a race of greater strength have upon some races a depressing and almost ruinous effect. The Peruvian subjects of the Incas had reached a state of advancement which, though much below that of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, was remarkable when one considers that their isolation deprived them of the enormous benefit of contact with other progressive peoples, and when one considers also the disadvantage of living at a great altitude, the absence of milk-yielding animals, and the paucity both of animals capable of domestication and of cereal plants. The impact of Spanish invasion not only shattered their own rudimentary civilization to pieces, but so took all the heart and spirit out of them that they have made practically no advances during four centuries, and have profited hardly at all by the western civilization of their masters. The aborigines of Mexico, having more stamina of intellect and will, have suffered less by the shock, but have done almost as little to assimilate the arts and ideas of Europe.
Thirdly, the ease with which the Spaniards have intermingled by marriage with the Indian tribes—and the Portuguese have done the like, not only with the Indians, but with the more physically dissimilar negroes—shews that race repugnance is no such constant and permanent factor in human affairs as members of the Teutonic peoples are apt to assume. Instead of being, as we Teutons suppose, the rule in this matter, we are rather the exception, for in the ancient world there seems to have been little race repulsion; there is very little to-day among Mohammedans; there is none among Chinese. This seems to suggest that since the phenomenon is not of the essence of human nature, it may not be always as strong among the Teutonic peoples as it is to-day. Religion has been in the past almost as powerful a dissevering force as has racial antagonism. In the case of Spaniards and Portuguese, religion, so soon as the Indians had been baptized, made race differences seem insignificant. Islam has always done this in the East and in Africa.
As touching the future, it seems as certain as anything in human affairs can be that the races now inhabiting South America, aboriginal, European, and African, will be all ultimately fused. The Spanish republics (except the purely white Argentina and Uruguay) will be Ibero-American, Brazil will be Ibero-American-African. All present facts point that way, and that any hitherto unfelt repulsion will arise seems most improbable. When, however, will the process be complete? In the Spanish republics, hardly before two centuries, probably not even then. It seems not much nearer now than it was in 1810, when the revolutionary struggles began, though anything which stirred up the Andean population, such as the discovery of a large number of new and rich mines, bringing in foreign labour and increasing the demand for domestic labour, or anything that roused a spirit of economic and political change, might accelerate the consummation.
Still less predictable is the quality of the mixed race that will emerge. One cannot but fear that the Portuguese of tropical Brazil may suffer from the further infusion of an element the moral fibre of which is conspicuously weak, though there are those who argue that the blood of the superior race must ultimately transmute the whole. But we need not assume that the peoples of the Spanish republics will necessarily decline, for the present degradation of the Indians may be due as much to their melancholy history as to inherent defects. It is still too soon to be despondent. There may be in the Indian stock a reserve of strength, dormant, but not extinct, ready to respond to a new stimulus and to shoot upwards under more inspiriting conditions.