There are also those who carry race disparagement still further and hold that the Spanish or "Iberian" races are unfitted for constitutional government, in company, it would appear, with the Celtic and Slavonic and all others except the favoured Teutons. This doctrine is not worth discussing, because it cannot be brought to any test of history, and it is history alone that enables us to test such theories. The collapse in the sixteenth century of that free constitutional government for which there seemed at one time to be almost as good a chance in Spain as there was in contemporary England, can be explained by causes altogether irrespective of race. It is not in the hypothetical inferiority of any pure or any mixed race that the importance of race questions for South America lies, but in the fact that the existence in the same state of different races, speaking different languages, prevents that homogeneity and solidarity of the community which are almost indispensable conditions to the success of democratic government.[145]
III. Economic and Social Conditions.—Economic phenomena and social phenomena may be considered together, because the latter depend largely on the former. All the republics except Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, of which I shall speak presently, are poor countries, not that natural resources are wanting, but that these have been so imperfectly developed as to bring little wealth to the native population. Almost the only fortunes made in them are made by foreigners or foreign companies who have got concessions for mines, or have bought plantations, because there is very little native capital and not much talent or experience to work mines or develop estates.[146] The land, it is true, belongs to large proprietors, but they do not form a class of men who, having a common and solid interest in the country, constitute a sort of natural aristocracy, concerned to preserve order, and make the government stable. Similarly, there is only a small native class of substantial business men, with a like interest in public tranquillity and good administration. The want of local capital has left the larger industrial and financial enterprises to foreigners. It is better that the country should be developed by foreign capital than that it should not be developed at all, yet we may regret that what is gained in the way of experience as well as of money is not gained for the people of the country. That which Europeans call a "lower middle class," composed of shopkeepers and skilled artisans, is small, and the towns in which it exists are so few and far apart from one another, that it has been hitherto a feeble political factor. Lastly, the agricultural population consists in some states largely, in others almost entirely, of those ignorant aborigines who have no sense of their interest in progress or good government. The absence of that class of intelligent small landowners, which is the soundest and most stable element in the United States and in Switzerland, and is equally stable, if less politically trained, in France and parts of Germany, is a grave misfortune for South and Central America. What is wanting in these countries is a sufficient number of citizens who have no personal ends to secure, and nothing to get out of government, except good administration, but whose interest in such administration is intelligent enough and strong enough to rouse them to their civic duty. Public spirit and an active participation in public life without the prospect of such private gains as professional politicians make out of politics,—that and nothing else is what provides in every country the public opinion needed to guide and control the ruling authorities of a state.
It may be said that nowhere in the world can we expect ideal conditions for popular governments. Such governments have existed and have attained creditable results in countries where both physical conditions and racial conditions might have seemed unfavourable, because the people possessed the gifts and the training that enable the rule of the people to succeed.
Admitting this to be true, it raises the question whether those who were summoned to govern the new republics that emerged from the War of Independence did possess, and could have been expected to possess, the requisite gifts and the training. Such gifts are not natural. They are the result of a people's previous career and of experience gained therein. What, then, had been the history of the colonial dominion of Spain and what sort of practice in government had the Crown allowed to its Spanish-American subjects?
This brings us to a fourth branch of the enquiry,—viz.:—
IV. Historical Conditions during the Colonial Period.—The Spanish Conquerors of the New World were men of extraordinary audacity and energy. No such forcible individualities had been seen in the world since the Norsemen of the tenth century and their children, the Normans, of the eleventh. They were, however, loyally submissive to the Spanish Crown and never thought of asking for, or of setting up for themselves, any self-governing institutions. Neither did the Spanish Crown ever think of granting such institutions. Those which existed in Castile had just disappeared; but even had they continued, it is improbable that any idea of reproducing them in the colonies would have been entertained. The English Crown granted charters to the companies which undertook colonization in North America, and the settlers themselves were soon organized by counties in Virginia, by townships and counties in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Forms of local self-government more effective than those which then existed in England were in full working order in those colonies, all through the eighteenth century, until they separated from the mother country. But everywhere in Spanish America the authority of the viceroy, or captain-general, or Audiencia and their subordinate officers, was paramount, and covered the whole field. There were no elected assemblies or elected officials. All power came from above; the people had nothing to do with administration, and were not enough permitted to subject it to public criticism. The only exception was furnished by the sort of municipal council in the towns which was called a Cabildo or Ayuntamiento, and the members of which, while in a few towns freely elected by the householders, or perhaps by the more substantial householders, were in others nominated, and often nominated because they had bought the nomination. The despotic power of a viceroy or other governor was, of course, restrained by the instructions he received and by the laws which the Crown enacted for the colonies, and to some extent also both by the ecclesiastical magnates and by local sentiment. But there were no responsibilities devolved on the people, and no machinery in and by which they could acquire any training in public affairs. In the English North American colonies the management of church affairs belonged to the laity as well as to the clergy; and the New England Congregational churches in particular, founded on the principles of liberty, became direct exponents of popular feeling. In the Spanish colonies the Roman Church represented the principle of authority, and impressed it on the minds of the laity by all the sanctions she possessed. All books and publications of every kind were subjected to a searching ecclesiastical censorship; and the right of freely expressing opinion either by speech or in writing was steadily denied.
V. Historical Conditions at the Close of the War of Independence.—Thus, when the revolt from Spain threw all power into the hands of the people, the people were unfit to exercise it. It was easy to frame constitutions modelled on that of the United States. But who were the people and what did they know about the working of free governments? What was the capacity of the citizens whose votes were to choose legislatures, and of what sort of persons were the legislatures to be composed?
Ten or twelve years of fighting against Spanish troops, years in which there had been many severities and cruelties perpetrated on each side, had accustomed everybody to violence and had made soldiers the only leaders. Everyone's mind was full of dreams of liberty, but no one knew how to secure it by coupling liberty with law. Even in the United States the first years after the acknowledgment of the independence of the thirteen colonies had been marked by so many errors and so much legislative weakness that the constitutional convention of 1787 was regarded by the wisest men of the time as a last chance for saving the nation. Yet the North American states were carrying on governments which had existed for several generations and following principles which their forefathers had established in England five centuries before. Small wonder that among the Spanish Americans, who had no experience at all in the most complicated of all human undertakings,—the conducting of government by the will of the majority, but according to settled law and with due respect to the rights of the minority,—small wonder that legislatures were not honestly elected, that, when elected, they wasted time in vain debates and neglected business, that each party in turn drove out its opponents or cowed them by violence, that debts were recklessly contracted and left unpaid, that the government remained one not of laws, but of men, and those men mostly military adventurers at the head of armed bands.
The inhabitants, accustomed to be ruled by others in State and in Church, had never been given a chance of learning to think of government as their own business nor of themselves as responsible for public order. When a long and sanguinary war had destroyed the habit of obedience to constituted authority, they were remitted—constitution or no constitution—to that primitive state of things in which force prevails. There being often either no authority de iure, or one too feeble to protect those who appealed to it, authority de facto had to be recognized, and the notion of legal right and legal duty vanished. It must be remembered that these were small and scattered communities, in each of which there were but few men who were at once law-abiding and intelligent, able to impose some check on the partisans of one or the other of the adventurers who were fighting for power. The parties were usually factions following the banner of a particular chief. Only one set of controversies raising questions of principle emerged from time to time in one republic or another, those that turned on the property and claims of the Church. Other issues were usually either local or personal, seldom economic, hardly ever racial.
Several thoughtful South Americans in the days of the Revolution perceived that their countries were not fit for democracy. The illustrious San Martin favoured a republican government based on a limited suffrage; and Bolivar himself desired to be life president of a confederation of states. Apart, however, from the difficulty of proposing constitutions which would have excluded a large part of those whose arms had secured independence, the enthusiasm for liberty that prevailed and the rapturous belief that liberty was enough to secure peace and prosperity, prescribed democratic arrangements, and it was only in later struggles between rival parties that some leader would enact qualifications calculated to exclude his opponents. Everywhere the system of vesting executive power in a president holding office for a term of years was adopted. It seemed the simplest plan, and was recommended by the example of the United States, but it set up a tempting prize for ambition and generally led straight to dictatorship. Bad men abused it to enrich themselves or their friends, good men found that the quickest and possibly the only way to carry out the reforms which the country needed was to stretch their constitutional authority. High-minded and public-spirited rulers were not wanting, but they could not, with the best will in the world, create the materials for a true democracy.