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

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

Four questions may be asked regarding the racial future:—

1. Which of the races is or are increasing?

2. Is the intermingling of races likely to continue?

3. Which type predominates in persons of mixed race?

4. What is likely to be the ultimate outcome of the mixture of races?

1. There are no official figures supplying an answer to this question as regards the northern and the Andean republics; but the traveller receives the impression that the Indians are more prolific than the whites, though their neglect of sanitary conditions gives a high death-rate, especially among children. It is rare to see an old man among them. If either they or the mestizos are now increasing, it is at no rapid rate. The pure whites in Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil are certainly increasing, and thus the proportion of white to other blood in the continent as a whole is growing.

2. Everything points to a continuance of the process of race mixture. It is the rule in all parts of the world, except where religion or a strong feeling of race antagonism (such as exists in the United States) prevents it. Neither of these hindrances exists in South America. In Peru and Bolivia, however, the process is so slow that it may be centuries before the white and aboriginal elements have been so completely commingled as to form one race, and leave no pure Indians remaining.

3. In the mixed race (mestizo or mulatto) the white element seems usually to predominate. I do not state this as a physiological fact. It may or may not be so; nobody seems to have investigated the matter. But it is true as a social fact; that is to say, the mestizo deems himself a white, wishes to be a white, tries to live and think as a white, and is practically recognized by others as a white. This is not equally true of the negro, because he is, physically regarded, further off the white than is the Indian. But in Brazil, when the negro is able to take his stand, so far as education and property go, beside the white, he too thinks and acts like a white man and is so treated.

4. The facts just stated make it probable that the nations likely to emerge when the process of fusion is complete, perhaps at a very distant date, will be white much more than Indian nations. Blood is only one factor, and not the most important factor, in the making of men. Environment and the influence of the reigning intellectual type count for more. In the United States the child of the Polish or Rouman or Italian immigrant grows up as an American. He may be a more emotional and impulsive, a more violent or more criminal, a more artistic and sensitive American; but the stamp of the new country is on him. So apparently will it be, so at any rate it has been, with the Indian. Tinged however slightly by the blood of the higher race, he will become a Spanish-speaking man of the colonial kind, which differs from the European kind at least as much as an English-speaking North American differs from an Englishman. These mixed nations will, however, stand nearer, intellectually and socially, to the South European group of nations than to any other white peoples.

It may seem natural to assume that such mixed nations will, in respect of their aboriginal blood, be inferior to their European relatives. But this is a mere assumption. No one has yet investigated scientifically the results of race fusion. History throws little light on the subject, because wherever there has been a mixture of races there have been also concomitant circumstances influencing the people who are the product of the mixture which have made it hard to determine whether their deterioration (or improvement) is due to this or to some other cause. So in these countries there may be reservoirs of dormant strength in the ancient native races waiting to be opened by conditions better than fortune has given them since the days of the Conquest. Who knows whether when the fusion is complete the Bolivian of two or three centuries hence, who will be nine-tenths, or the Paraguayan, who will be nineteen-twentieths, of Indian blood, will be inferior to his neighbours with a smaller aboriginal infusion? The Chilean peasant to-day, who is at least half Indian, is not inferior to the Argentine peasant, who is almost pure white.