That political conditions will improve during the next century seems altogether probable, and although social advance must be slow, especially where the native population is very large, political progress is sometimes unexpectedly rapid. To anyone observing England during the Wars of the Roses civil strife might have seemed so ingrained a habit as to be likely to last for generations. Yet after the accession of the first Tudor there were only a few slight troubles down till 1641, when a really great issue appeared which had to be fought out and was fought out within four years. So in our own days we have seen a new country, Bulgaria, as soon as it was delivered from a foreign despotism, step forward towards settled government with a firm tread which surprised all Europe. Democracy in the North American sense may be still far distant, but a settled government, maintaining order, giving opportunities for educational and social as well as material improvement, and responsible to the opinion of the more educated classes, may be much nearer than the never-ending, still beginning, troubles of the last ninety years have led most Europeans to expect.
To forecast what one may call the intellectually creative future of the Spanish-Americans is far more difficult. Considering themselves not Spaniards, but a new people, or peoples, they hold that views or predictions about them based on the history and tendencies of Spaniards are beside the mark. Nevertheless, as the other race factors—the quality of the aboriginal element and the results of an intermingling of the aboriginal with the Spanish colonial stock—are obscure, it is only in the Spanish element that any sort of basis for speculation can be found. Now the Spanish, or so-called Iberian, race, more or less Latinized during the ages of Roman dominion, and slightly Teutonized by the Germanic invasions of the fifth century, has been always a strong race. It was strong when it fought against Rome, and strong when it resisted the Moors in its mountain fastnesses and drove them step by step backwards, and ultimately out of the peninsula. It produced in the Middle Ages and afterwards many warriors and statesmen of the first rank. But the genius of the race seems to have at all times run more to practical life than towards intellectual creation. Two or three writers are of world fame, and so are two or three artists, without reckoning the mostly unnamed or unknown mediæval architects who reared ecclesiastical buildings of unsurpassed beauty. Metaphysical talent, turned into theological channels, gave birth to some dogmatic and casuistical writings of unquestionable power. Still the total quantity of literary or artistic product of high excellence is small when compared with that of Italy or France. That this is more markedly true of the later seventeenth and the eighteenth than of earlier centuries may be explained by the extinction in the sixteenth of intellectual freedom. French literature still flourished while Spanish was sinking under ecclesiastical censure.
In Spanish America, where remoteness from European influences darkened the firmament still further, scarcely any literary or scientific work of permanent merit was accomplished, though the fountain of pleasing verse did not cease to flow.[158] The stormy times of the War of Independence and the domestic turmoil that everywhere followed gave no opportunities for acquiring knowledge nor any leisure to use it. It is only recently, and chiefly in Mexico and in the southern South American states, that the day of more benignant conditions has seemed to be dawning. It is true that in them, as political conflicts subside, material interests come first to the front, and, like a rank growth, so cover the ground that not much room is left for the play of intellect upon matters promising no direct pecuniary gain to the nation or to individuals. This was to be expected at a time when the development of natural resources attracts foreign capital and fills the minds of enterprising men. It is the salient feature of the life to-day of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, and to a slighter extent of Chile also. But it need not be permanent. Just as in North America there came, not long after the Civil War, a passionate eagerness to found universities and extend the range and improve the efficiency of the higher scientific and literary teaching, so the leading men in these more advanced states may realize the need for basing their civilization on the enlightenment of the people. The task before them is harder than that which the North Americans had, because their system of elementary and secondary education is far less complete. With this extension of higher instruction and the closer communion of the best minds with those of the northern hemisphere, there may at any time come an outburst of purely intellectual activity. Prediction is so much more difficult in this field than in the field of politics that one must abstain from venturing to enter it. Shrewd observers living in the middle of the eighteenth century were able to foretell some sort of political upheaval as approaching in France; but nobody foretold the flowering in Germany of the great literature which began with Kant and Lessing and continued in Goethe and Schiller, Fichte and Hegel.
The traveller in South America who confines himself, as many do, to the larger cities, finds them so like those of Europe and North America in their possession of the appliances of modern civilization, in their electric street cars and handsome parks, in their ably written press, in the volume of business they transact—I might add in the aspect of the legislatures and in the administrative machinery of their government—that he is apt to fancy a like resemblance in the countries as a whole. But the small towns and rural districts are very far behind, though least so in Chile and Argentina. If one regards these various nations as a whole, one is struck by the want of such an "atmosphere of ideas," if the phrase be permissible, as that which men breathe in Europe and in North America. Educated men are few, books are few, there is little stir of thought, little play of cultivated intelligence upon the problems of modern society. Most of these countries seem to lie far away from the stream of intellectual life, hearing only its distant murmur. The presence of a great inert mass of ignorance in the native population partly accounts for this; and one must remember the difficulty of providing schools and the thinness of a population scattered through mountainous or desert or forest-covered regions. These disadvantages may in years to come be lessened, but in the meantime those who are born with superior talents are born into an ungenial environment, ill-fitted to develop and polish such talents to their own and to the public benefit. The traveller finds, now and then in some of these states, gifted men who would be remarkable in any country. One whom I knew in Mexico years ago was as brilliant and as accomplished in many lines of knowledge as any person I have ever known. But it takes a large number of such men to influence a nation and guide the course of its opinion. Men of marked ability abound, but their talent, like the system of instruction of the country, is directed almost exclusively to practical ends, and does less than it ought either for political progress or for the expansion of the national mind. Their interest in science is almost entirely an interest in its applications, and their hero is the great inventor. Science and learning, pursued for their own sake, have not yet won the place they ought to hold. Those in whom a taste for philosophical speculation or abstract thought of any kind appears, seldom devote themselves to patient investigation. They are apt to be captured by phrases and formulas, perhaps of little meaning, which seem to give short cuts to knowledge and truth.[159]
Another fact strikes the traveller with surprise. Both the intellectual life and the ethical standards of conduct of these countries seem to be entirely divorced from religion. The women are almost universally "practising" Catholics, and so are the peasantry, though the Christianity of the Indians bears only a distant resemblance to that of Europe. But men of the upper or educated class appear wholly indifferent to theology and to Christian worship. It has no interest for them. They are seldom actively hostile to Christianity, much less are they offensive when they speak of it, but they think it does not concern them, and may be left to women and peasants. The Catholic revival or reaction of the first half of the nineteenth century did not touch Spanish America, which is still under the influence of the anti-Catholic current of the later eighteenth. The Roman Church in Spain and Portugal was then, and indeed is now, far below the level at which it stands in France, Germany, and Italy. Its worship was more formal, its pressure on the laity far heavier, its clergy less exemplary in their lives. In Spanish America the obscurantism was at least as great and the other faults probably greater. There was not much persecution, partly, no doubt, because there was hardly any heterodoxy, and the victims of the Inquisition were comparatively few. But the ministers of religion had ceased not only to rouse the soul, but to supply a pattern for conduct. There were always some admirable men to be found among them, some prelates models of piety and virtue, some friars devoted missionaries and humanely zealous in their efforts to protect the Indians. Still the church as a whole had lost its hold on the conscience and thought of the best spirits, and that hold it has never regained. In saying this I am comparing Catholic South America not with the Protestant countries of Europe, but with such Roman Catholic countries as France, Rhenish Prussia, and Bavaria, in all of which the Roman Church is a power in the world of thought and morals. In eastern Europe the Orthodox Church has similarly shrivelled up and ceased to be an intellectual force, but there it has at least retained the affection of the upper class, and is honoured for its fidelity during centuries of Musulman oppression. In the more advanced parts of South America it seems to be regarded merely as a harmless Old World affair which belongs to a past order of things just as much as does the rule of Spain, but which may, so long as it does not interfere with politics, be treated with the respect which its antiquity commands. In both cases the undue stress laid upon the dogmatic side of theology and the formal or external side of worship has resulted in the loss of spiritual influence. In all the Spanish countries, the church had trodden down the laity and taken freedom and responsibility from them more than befell anywhere else in Christendom, making devotion consist in absolute submission. Thus when at last her sway vanished, her moral influence vanished with it. This absence of a religious foundation for thought and conduct is a grave misfortune for Latin America.
The view which I am here presenting is based chiefly on what I saw in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, the three countries in which there is a larger educated class than in the less populous republics. It applies in a less degree to Chile; and there are, of course, exceptions in the three first-named republics also, though not numerous enough to affect the general truth of what I am trying to state. The phenomenon is all the more remarkable because in the days when America began to be settled there was no part of Europe where religion had so strong a hold on the people as it had in Spain and Portugal. The Conquistadores, whatever may be thought of the influence of their faith upon their conduct, were ardently pious in their own way. Even in the desire they professed for the propagation of the faith among the Indians, they were not consciously hypocritical, though they never allowed their piety to stand in the way of their avarice.
The fiery vigour of that extraordinary group of men has often blazed out in their descendants. It is the appearance in almost every state of men of tireless energy and strenuous will that gives their chief interest to the wars and revolutions of the last hundred years. Few of these men, besides the heroes of Independence, such as San Martin, Belgrano, Miranda, Bolivar, and Sucre, are known to Europe, and of those who are known, some like Francia and Artigas and Rosas and Lopez, have won fame by ruthlessness more than by genius. Of late years the leading figures have been more frequently statesmen and less frequently soldiers. Both types are honourably represented to-day in many of the republics. There is plenty of strength in the race, and Juarez of Mexico is only one of many examples to show that Indian blood does not necessarily reduce its quality. Into what channels its force will be hereafter directed, and whether it will develop a gift for thought and for artistic creation commensurate with the activity which it has shewn in other fields, is a question upon which its history since 1825 sheds little light. The wind bloweth where it listeth.
In the more progressive states, conditions are changing as fast as anywhere else in this changeful age. Here, as everywhere, the Present is the child of the Past, but the features of the child change as it grows up, and all we know of the future is that it will be unlike the past. No countries have more possibilities of change than those of South America. European immigrants are streaming into the southern republics. The white race is commingling with the aboriginal Indians in the west and with the negroes in the east. Scientific discovery is bringing its latest appliances into contact with countries still undeveloped and with peoples long left behind in the march of progress. Till the middle of the eighteenth century the world of trade, politics, and thought was practically a European world. It then expanded to take in North America, then southern Asia and Australia, and then, last of all, the ancient nations of the Far East. South America, which has hitherto, except at rare intervals, stood outside, has now begun to affect the commercial and financial movements of the world. She may before long begin to affect its movements in other ways also, and however little we can predict the part that her peoples will play, it must henceforth be one of growing significance for the Old World as well as for the New.