There are, in Spanish America, some communities still so far from being capable of genuine popular self-government that the best thing for them is the strong rule of an able ruler which will give them prosperity through peace, shew them how to develop their resources, make them, by education and by better communications, a more homogeneous people. Those things done, such communities will, like Argentina, find themselves fitter to work free institutions. At present, under the rule of selfish adventurers and corrupt legislatures who are the tools of the adventurer, the conditions of progress are absent. Two or three of the South American republics—they are not among those which I saw—are still in this condition. The rule of a man like Porfirio Diaz would seem to give them the best chance of emerging from it. At present they advance neither morally nor materially.
Nevertheless, taking the eleven South American states as a whole, their condition is better than it was sixty years ago. In most of them the civil element has tended to grow and the military element to decline. The lawyer-politician is not always a law-abiding politician, yet on the whole preferable to the soldier-politician. His methods are less brutal. May not even a perversion of the law be a trifle better than a disregard of all law? Revolutions and civil wars have become less sanguinary; the execution of political opponents less frequent. Political assassinations, which in Europe have unhappily been growing more frequent,[148] are now more rare here. The sort of savagery that existed in the days when Artigas, fighting for the independence of his country, used (according to the story) to sew up prisoners in oxhides by batches and roll them downhill into the river has long since passed away. Nor is it to be forgotten that there is extremely little brigandage or insecurity in most of these states, far less than there was a few years ago in Sicily. The ordinary citizen is little affected even by the revolutions which, where they occur, are carried on by a small part of the population. Perhaps if the ordinary citizen suffered more, revolutions would be fewer.
Ecclesiastical questions have been almost wholly eliminated from politics in all the larger and some of the smaller states, and religious liberty has been established on a basis not likely to be shaken. A long-standing and bitter cause of strife has thus been removed.
All the Spanish-American countries, even Paraguay, are now more open to the world than they used to be; and the currents of its opinion reach them in ever increasing volume. As few of them have peaceful political traditions of their own to guide or inspire them—when they invoke the past, it is the exploits of revolutionary heroes that are recalled—they must needs look to the thought and practice of the older nations for principles and precedents in the art of government; so whatever brings them into intellectual touch with Europe and North America is helpful. Already one discovers an increasing number of men who perceive that for their nations the only path upward and forward is through the creation of a spirit of self-control and a higher sense of civic duty.
To understand these countries, one must think of them as having, under the rule of the Spanish Crown and of the Church, dropped two centuries behind the general march of civilized mankind. When they were finally liberated in 1825, they were practically still in the seventeenth, while Europe and the United States were in the nineteenth, century, with the additional disadvantages of a large aboriginal population, a thinly peopled land, fifteen years of bloodshed and disorder, such as Europe had not seen for nigh three hundred years, and no preëxisting constitutional forms or usages. A few of them, favoured by physical or by racial conditions, have already overcome these difficulties. Their example will tell upon and encourage the rest.
In the middle of last century, when European Liberals, disappointed at the failure of their earlier hopes, had begun to pass a severe judgment on the peoples of these republics because freedom had not made them at once virtuous, happy, and prosperous, were not those Liberals themselves misled by their own too sanguine temper? Had they not too implicit a faith in the power of liberty? They ascribed all the faults of existing governments to the monarchies or oligarchies of the past and did not understand, having little experience of popular rule, how many faults in governments have been, and will continue to be, due not to their form, but to human nature itself. Since 1859, power has in many countries passed from the hands of the few into the hands of the many, but no millennium of virtue and peace has yet followed. There is still bitterness and discontent, there are still complaints that the law is not fair between classes, still a distrust of legislative bodies, still demands for an extension of direct popular control over the whole machinery of administration and, in North America, even over the judiciary. No sensible man proposes to go back to the absolutism and repression of the older time; but every sensible man feels that the problems of government are far more difficult than our grandfathers had perceived, and that men have still much to learn from a fuller experience. These things being so, ought not the judgment passed on the Spanish Americans to be more lenient? Their difficulties were greater than any European people had to face, and there is no need to be despondent for their future.
[CHAPTER XVI]
SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS
Whether it is well to rejoice that the population of our planet has grown so fast during the last century, even as the inhabitants of a city rejoice when a decennial census reveals a rapid growth in their city, is a question which may be deemed a branch of the larger one whether life is worth living. The fact, however, being unquestionable, raises a practical question. If the present rate of growth should continue for a few centuries, there presently will be little room left on the planet. What will then happen? During the nineteenth century the surface of the earth has been explored sufficiently to enable us to know how much of it is available for the production of food. Of that part which was available and unused in 1800 a great deal had been settled by 1900. In Europe there is no more land to be occupied, because the waste spaces of southern Russia have now been almost filled by settlers from the rest of that country. In the temperate parts of Asia, though there has been considerable Russian immigration into western Siberia and considerable Chinese immigration into Manchuria, there still remain in those countries large tracts unoccupied and not too dry for cultivation. In Australia it is still doubtful how much of the land whose aridity has discouraged settlement can be turned to account either for tillage or for pasture. In North America the immense rush to the West, which began after 1830 with the building of railways, has now filled nearly the whole of the United States, and a very large part of Canada, so that another forty or fifty years may see the country filled up as far as the frozen north. In Africa there are parts of Tunisia and Algeria which irrigation might reclaim, there are parts of Morocco which could support a larger population than now dwells in them, and there is also a limited highland area on the eastern side of the continent fit to be inhabited by men of European stock. The rest, including not only the Sahara, but most of the country south of the Tropic of Capricorn, is either arid desert, or else so hot and humid that it must be given up to the black races, who have so far shewn no capacity for settled industry when left to themselves. Thus, if we omit the tropical countries inhabited by savage peoples (central Africa and the islands of southeastern Asia), it will appear that, should the present increase of the civilized peoples be maintained, the rest of the world will not suffice for their agricultural expansion for more than a short period, that is to say, a period shorter than the four centuries which have elapsed since the outward movement of the European peoples began with the discovery of the New World.