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

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

In speaking of the future South American type as likely to be in the main "Spanish-colonial," I do not suggest that it will be uniform. Already there are variations in character between the peoples of the several republics; and these are more likely to be accentuated than to disappear. The different extent to which aboriginal elements become absorbed, and the differences in those aboriginal elements themselves, will be among the factors which will produce what may be called national "sub-types" of character. But apart from such causes it seems to be a general—I will not say universal—law of social growth that an independent political community, even if originally the same in race, religion, and habits as its neighbours, tends to draw apart from them, and to form an individuality of its own, creating a national type and impressing that type upon its members.

Were there any forces compelling these various republics to close political alliances, such as the fear of attacks by a Power outside their continent, they might suppress their jealousies and ally themselves close with one another and realize better than they do now all that they have in common. But they are not, and are not likely to be, so threatened. Holland, France, and England all at one time meddled in South America, but all three, while each retaining a foothold in Guiana, have long ago drawn apart and left Latin America to itself. Politically its republics live in a little world of their own; they have their own alliances, their own wars and bitternesses, with which strangers do not intermeddle. Of wars they have had, since 1825, their full share; nor is the danger of war yet extinct. No states seem likely to unite with one another of their own free will, but it is possible that smaller states may be annexed by or partitioned among some of the larger ones, their weakness and internal disorders furnishing to powerful neighbours, as in the famous case of the partition of Poland, at once the temptation and the pretext.

As the Old World no longer interferes with the South American states, so they are unlikely to interfere with the Old World. They have never proclaimed any such self-denying ordinance, and have not hitherto been strong enough to make it seem needed. But even if any among them becomes a first-class power, small is the chance that it can acquire interests in other parts of the globe that would collide with those of other nations. Were Colombia and Venezuela strong states owning strong navies, there might be Caribbean questions to embroil them with neighbouring maritime states. But the three leading powers of South America belong to its southern half, and there are now no unoccupied countries left to be acquired as colonies.

To what has been said in a preceding chapter regarding the internal political conditions and political prospects of the South American republics little need here be added. He who studies their history since Independence, with a knowledge of what they were when it was assured in A.D. 1825, will find nothing surprising in the storms that have buffeted them, nor anything to discourage a hope that they may eventually reach a smoother sea. The moral of that history is that nations have to be trained to self-government, just as individual men have to be trained to every work requiring patience and skill. The error into which the victorious colonists fell when they expected freedom and prosperity to follow at once on their deliverance from Spain was not their error only. It was shared by their friends in Europe and even more fully by their friends in North America. The latter had succeeded in establishing efficient state governments and thereafter an efficient federal government. They attributed this partly to liberty, i.e. to their having broken their tie with a European monarchy, partly to the benign influences of a new Continent, free from the evil traditions of the Old World. Many among them made the mistake, which no intelligent North American makes now, of thinking that their history began in 1776, the mistake of ignoring the centuries during which their ancestors had been learning the principles of self-government in England and the century and a half during which they had been putting those principles into practice in the older colonies. In this state of mind and attaching a magic significance to the name of a republic, the people of the United States did not see why Spanish America, which had imitated them in rejecting a European king and was placed, like them, in a new land, should not repeat their happy experiences. Liberal enthusiasts in England and France and Italy were scarcely less sanguine. None of them realized that Spanish America belonged, in 1825, to an age which England and North America had long left behind. Most of the land was wilder than England or Germany had been in the twelfth century, a thin population, no roads, settlements scattered here and there in forests or deserts. The peasantry were further back than those of western Europe in the fifteenth century, not merely rude and ignorant, but speaking native languages and soaked in primeval superstitions. The upper class were further back than those of Europe in the seventeenth century, for few of them had received any sort of higher education and none of them had any personal knowledge of free institutions, or any experience in civil administration. Thus both classes wanted the foundation on which free governments must be erected. The humbler class did not know and could not know how to elect representatives or supervise those whom they elected. The upper class did not know how to legislate or govern. They tried to erect a superstructure of complicated political institutions when there was no solid foundation to build on, when only a few of the choicest minds knew what order meant and what liberty meant and what was the relation between the two. Such experiments were foredoomed to failure.

The troubles of these ninety years have, accordingly, nothing in them that need dishearten either any friend of Spanish America or any friend of constitutional freedom. The person who ought to reconsider his position is the man who holds that any group of human beings called "the people" are always right, that the best and sufficient way to fit men for political power is to give it to them, and that the name of Republic has the talismanic gift of imparting virtue and wisdom to the community which adopts it. The mistaking of names for things is an old error, and has sometimes proved a fatal one.

Yet there was something noble in the over-sanguine confidence of the North American and European liberals, as well as of some of the finest minds among the South Americans themselves when they expected freedom to work miracles. The ideal of liberty that these men set up, though rarely realized, has never been lost. Servility and obscurantism have never resumed their old sway in South America. And as it is true that men need to be trained to self-government, so it is also true that men never become fit for the work till they try it. The ninety years of turmoil have not been altogether wasted. Two real constitutional republics have already emerged from it and their example cannot but tell on those others who, oppressed by less favourable conditions, still lag behind. That sort of progress which consists in getting rid of the old ideas and old habits of thinking and acting and replacing them by better ones must needs be a slow process. Something has already been done, and the closer and more frequent contact with Europe and North America into which these Spanish-American states are being brought ought to accelerate the process. So ought the additional motives for desiring order which the growth of material prosperity brings with it. Already the presence of foreigners imposes a certain check, and their property is generally respected in revolutions. The more the citizens acquire capital and themselves enter on commercial undertakings, and form business habits, and get to look at things with a practical eye, the stronger and more general will grow the public sentiment that insists on replacing the reign of force by the reign of law. When force has been eliminated, the task of making governments pure and rooting out fraudulent methods will become less difficult. It is a fair conclusion from European history that violence is, of all the evils that afflict a state, the evil which must be first extinguished. In England, a period of corruption set in after the great Civil War had ended, and the forms of constitutional government were often grossly perverted, but corruption and perversions ultimately disappeared with the growth of a higher sentiment.

Those South American states which have a large aboriginal population, even if they cannot become—and is it desirable that with such a population they should become?—democracies of the modern type, may at least try to secure order and such material prosperity as will bring them into closer touch with the outer world, and enable their peoples to learn, and be influenced by, the ideas and the methods of government that prevail among the great nations.

Intellectual and social progress were both in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages largely due to the reciprocal influences of nations on one another. As the want of these influences retarded the movement towards civilization of the Peruvians and Mexicans before the Conquest, so the isolation of the Spanish Americans has retarded their development ever since. They stood almost entirely outside the current of European thought and had little personal contact with Europeans till English and German merchants and English railway men, and North American mining engineers began to come among them from about 1860 onwards, and till somewhat later, the wealthy Argentines and Brazilians found their way to Paris. Although this contact has brought capital in its train, and given a start to material development, it has been a force rather among the people than of the people. It comes from without and is pumped into them like oxygen from a tube. It touches only one section of the inhabitants, and one side of their life. It is teaching them business methods and all that is therein implied, but it affects them only slightly on the literary, or scientific, or artistic side. This is of course less true of countries like Argentina and Chile than of the smaller northern republics, yet even in the former it is material interests that are dominant. This is, no doubt, in our day true of all European countries as well as of North America. In Europe, however, and also in the United States and Canada, the number of men who occupy themselves with science and letters is far larger in proportion to the population than it is in the South American countries, and the provision made for higher education incomparably more ample. Argentina has, indeed, not only the University of Buenos Aires, already staffed by able and energetic teachers, but the older and more ecclesiastically coloured University of Cordova and the new University of La Plata and its excellent military school, as Chile has its university in Santiago, and as Uruguay has the University of Montevideo. But these stand almost alone. Isolation, as well as poverty, has been a cause of the weakness of these organs of national life, a deficiency which order and prosperity ought presently to remove in other states as they have in Argentina.

One cause of the isolation I have referred to is found in the fact that there has been comparatively little literary production during the last two centuries in the language which these nations speak. Spanish is no doubt what the Germans call a "World Speech." It is now used by sixty millions of people in the New World as well as by twenty millions in Old Spain. But Old Spain never supplied to her colonies through books anything approaching the volume of that perennial stream of instruction and stimulation which English-speaking writers have for nearly four centuries supplied to those who can read English all over the world, and which France has likewise supplied to all who can read her language. In South America, men now learn French in increasing numbers, but they are still a small percentage of the educated population of Spanish America.

Of the eight or nine millions of people in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay probably one-half are not only illiterate, but cannot speak even Spanish. These facts constitute no reproach on the peoples of these states. They are a result of the circumstances attending the Conquest in the sixteenth century and of the way in which Spain thereafter administered her colonial empire.