South America: Observations and Impressions / New edition corrected and revised

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

The aboriginal tribes with which the English and French came in contact when they settled the Atlantic coasts of North America were scattered over a vast wooded region, lived mainly by the chase, and had formed no habits of regular industry. They were mostly fierce fighters, proud and dogged, unwilling to bear any control, and it was found impracticable to make slaves of them, or use them for any kind of regular labour. They were unfitted for it, and it would have cost the settlers more effort to compel the Indians to cut down trees and till the ground than to do the same things themselves. There was, accordingly, never any question of Indian slavery or serfdom, either on the Atlantic coasts or when the march of colonization advanced further inland, nor was there more than a scanty intermarriage between the settlers and the natives.

Other reasons besides those connected with labour prevented any admixture in these regions of the white with the native races. There was little social intercourse, because the Indians, even the majority of the less warlike tribes of Virginia and the regions south of Virginia, were driven out, or retired, or died out. Their barbarous way of life drew a sharp line between them and the white intruders. The latter, moreover, brought their women with them, and had less temptation to seek wives among the Indians. Thus it was only among the French voyageurs and trappers of the region round and beyond the Great Lakes that any mixed race grew up, half white, half Indian, and this race has now almost disappeared.

In Spanish America, the case was quite different. Both in Mexico, in parts of Central America, and in Peru there was a large sedentary population of aborigines, cultivating the soil and trained to industry during many generations. The Conquerors immediately turned them into serfs, parcelling them out among the persons who received land grants, and who thereafter lived on the produce of this semiservile labour. The result was that whereas in Teutonic America there grew up, slowly at first, a white agricultural population and ultimately a white manufacturing population also, in Spanish America agriculture was left almost entirely to the aborigines, and the pure white population increased hardly at all, because few new settlers came. There appeared, however, and that within two or three generations, a considerable mestizo or half-breed population, which has come, after three centuries, to constitute most of the upper class and practically the whole of the middle class in all but two of the republics.

This was the beginning of the divergent careers of the two sets of European colonists, Spaniards and Englishmen, a divergence which ultimately gave to the social system of each set its own peculiar structure. Two other circumstances helped to deepen the divergence. One was the hot climate of most parts of Spanish America, which made field labour, or, indeed, any kind of manual labour, more distasteful to men of European stock than such labour was in the northern parts of Teutonic America. The same cause, it need hardly be said, had much to do with the importation of negroes on a vast scale into the southern parts of the British North American colonies. Such an expedient was less needed in Mexico and Peru, because they possessed (as already remarked) a native population that could be reduced to serfdom. In Spanish America, accordingly, all forms of labour connected with land were left by the European settlers to the natives, and no white peasantry grew up.

The other circumstance was that whereas in Teutonic America few or no mines were discovered or worked for a long time after the country had begun to be occupied, the Spaniards, having hit upon regions rich, some of them in gold, many of them in silver, began greedily to exploit this natural wealth and forced the natives to toil for them in this (to the native particularly odious) kind of work. The destruction of human life was terrible, but in those days life was little regarded. So was the slave-trade terrible in the deaths it caused and the suffering it inflicted, but the conscience of England was not stirred against it till the end of the eighteenth century. The development of mining in Spanish America, immense for the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, when comparatively little was going on elsewhere, had many effects for Spain and for the world. For Mexico and Peru the most direct effect was to enrich a good many persons without any industrial efforts put forth by themselves,[128] and to lead the settlers as a whole to rely less upon agriculture than men did in the English colonies. A luxurious style of living established itself in the city of Mexico and in Lima, most unlike the frugal simplicity of Boston or Providence, or even of Philadelphia or New York, in the eighteenth century.

It has often been observed that whereas the men who went to the northern English colonies were mostly small farmers or townsfolk of the trading or artisan classes, the Spanish emigrants were mainly adventurers, making gold and silver their first object, the acquisition of plantations or mines to be worked by natives the second. This stamped on Spanish colonial society what can hardly be called an aristocratic character, for many of the emigrant-adventurers, like the Pizarro brothers, sprang from a humble social stratum, but yet a character which lacked both the sentiment of equality and a respect for industry.

Not less marked than these social differences were those which belonged to the sphere of government and administration. The English colonies were for the most part left to govern themselves. Each had not only its colonial assembly, but also local assemblies for towns and counties, along with the English arrangements for securing justice in civil and criminal matters by juries. Even the governors sent out from England, where such there were, interfered but little with the power of the colonists to regulate their own affairs. The Crown did occasionally assert its prerogative, but these instances and the resistance which arbitrary intervention evoked bear witness to the general adherence to the principles of local self-government. In the Spanish colonies, on the other hand, all power remained in the Crown, and was exercised either directly from Spain by ordinances made or orders issued there, or else through the viceroy or captain-general of each colony. Lucrative posts were reserved for persons of Spanish birth, who obtained them by court favour at home, or perhaps from a viceroy, who had brought them out in his suite. In the field of religion the contrast was even greater. Ecclesiastical power had in Spanish America been almost equal to civil. Although the Crown of Spain yielded less authority to the Pope in its transatlantic than it did in its European dominions, the church as a whole, archbishops and bishops, the Orders and the Holy Office, were, in America, an immense and omnipresent force, with whom even viceroys had to reckon, for their influence was great in the Court at home as well as over the minds and conduct of the colonists. Society was saturated with clericalism, and a taint of heterodoxy was more dangerous than one of disloyalty.

Putting all these things together, it can be seen how little in common Teutonic America and Spanish America had when the colonial period ended for each of them by its severance from the mother country. They were, in fact, unlike in everything, except their position in the Western Hemisphere. Few, and far from friendly, had been their relations. There had been very little commercial intercourse but a great deal of fighting. English and American buccaneers and pirates—the two classes were practically the same—had been wont to prey upon Spanish colonial commerce and pillage Spanish colonial cities. There probably remained more aversion between the two races in America than in Europe, for in their hostility to France during the eighteenth century the people of Britain had almost forgotten their hostility to Spain. To the New Englander or Virginian the colonial Spaniard had been a Papist and a persecutor, to the colonial Spaniard his neighbours on the north were pirates and heretics.

What change was made by the two wars against the two mother countries and the independence which followed? It might have seemed likely that now, when both parts of the New World were disconnected from the Old and both had republican forms of government, they might begin to draw together. Independence, though it came nearly forty years later to Spanish America, made more difference there than it had done to the English colonies. Those who had been kept in leading strings by Spain were now left to their own devices. Ill-built and ill-steered had been the vessel that carried their fortunes, but now they began to drift and be tossed about with neither compass nor pilot. An era of civil wars and military revolutions set in, which lasted in Mexico nearly half a century, in Peru and Argentina still longer, and which seems to have become chronic in some of the more backward states. While Teutonic America was making enormous strides in population and prosperity, intestine strife checked all progress, educational and material, in the Spanish lands during two generations. It is to the last thirty years of the nineteenth century that the development of Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay belongs. After the Latin-American countries had become independent, there was no more commercial intercourse between them and the United States than there had been in colonial days and no more community of feeling. Warm sympathy had been expressed by the latter with the colonies in their struggle against Spain, and the declaration made by John Quincy Adams in concert with the English George Canning against any interference by the Holy Alliance to support the cause of monarchy in the New World, was gratefully welcomed by the insurgents. But no friendship between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking men grew up, and the war of the United States against Mexico in 1846, undertaken not so much because there were grievances against Mexico as from a desire to extend the area of slavery in the United States, and strengthen the Slave Power itself, exposed United States policy to suspicions that sank deep into the Spanish-American mind.

From this consideration of the past relations of the two American continents, let us return to the divergence of their fortunes. At the time of the Discovery, the regions which passed under the rule of Spain were richer, more advanced in the arts of life, and far more populous than those whose settlement began with the expeditions of Champlain and Raleigh. We have no data for guessing at the population of the New World either in 1500 or in 1600, but at both dates there evidently were in Mexico and Central America far more inhabitants than in all the rest of the Northern Continent taken together. As regards South America, the empire of the Incas alone probably contained from nine to eleven millions[129] of persons, a number many times greater than that of all the aborigines that at any one time dwelt between the Arctic circle and the Gulf of Mexico. Even in 1800 the population of Mexico alone, without counting South America, was far larger than that of the United States and Canada. But from 1810, when the revolt of the Spanish colonies began, down till 1860, the growth of those colonies was slow, and in some there was even retrogression. Meanwhile the United States, and latterly, Canada also, have been advancing with unexampled speed, so that now their population, about 108 millions, far exceeds that of all the Spanish republics in both continents. The hotter countries were at one time more populous than the temperate; now the reverse holds. If we regard wealth, there is, of course, no comparison at all between Teutonic America, as it stands to-day, and the southern regions. Yet Spain was long supposed to have got by far the best parts of the New World, not so much because they had tropical productiveness, as in respect of the quantity of the precious metals they contained. The economic change from the sixteenth century to the twentieth which the progress of natural science and mechanical invention has brought about can hardly be better illustrated than by the changed importance which coal, iron, and copper have for our time when compared with that which gold and silver had in the days of Charles the Fifth.