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CHAPTER XII
THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS

In A.D. 1808, when Napoleon Bonaparte, the true Liberator of Spanish America, moved his armies into Spain, the dominions of the Spanish Crown stretched south eight thousand miles from the bay of San Francisco to the Straits of Magellan. The population that was scattered thinly over that vast region was mostly native Indian, but there may possibly have been a million of pure Spanish stock and many times that number of mixed Spanish and Indian blood. All except the Indians spoke Spanish; all except the wild heathen tribes were Roman Catholics, and the white men were orthodox Catholics, with universal and genuine horror of heresy. All who were of pure European or of mixed blood followed customs and held ideas generally similar; all had been ruled by governors sent from Spain under laws and an administrative system drawn up and carried out on similar lines. In every region the Roman Church was powerful and monasteries abounded. There were no sharp local distinctions among this Spanish and Indo-Spanish population. Intercolonial trade was indeed forbidden, and permission to travel from one colony to another had to be obtained. But as all were subjects of one king and members of one Church, there was no political separation beyond that which was involved in the existence of various local jurisdictions. A native of Mexico was not a stranger on the banks of the Orinoco or the Paraná any more than the Bostonian Benjamin Franklin had been a stranger when he came to settle in Philadelphia. They could hardly be said to form one nation, for they had no national organization, but they all alike belonged to the same Hispano-American nationality.

In A.D. 1908 there were in the same area, but now between the Rio Grande Del Norte and Cape Horn (the territories now known as California, Arizona, and New Mexico having by this time become annexed to the United States) sixteen independent republics,¹⁰¹ all of which had freed themselves from the Spanish Crown between 1810, when the first risings took place in Mexico and Argentina, and 1826, when the flag of Spain was finally lowered on the fortress of Callao, the last stronghold on the American mainland of the successor of Charles the Fifth. That which had been one widely scattered and loosely connected people had become divided into many distinct communities, each with its own government, its separate historical traditions, its local prides and local antagonisms, its more or less definite and sharp-cut national consciousness. From the amorphous mass of protoplasm, so to speak, of 1808, each part of which was generally similar to every other part, there had emerged sixteen separate organisms, some markedly different and no two alike, although those distinctive features which make up national character had become much more fully developed in some than in others. That is to say, there are now instead of one people sixteen new nations.

But can we describe these sixteen republics as Nations?

What is a Nation?

It is dangerous to offer a definition which may not correspond to usage, for usage is the only true master and interpreter of words; and usage is in this case loose and varying. But it might be not far wide of the mark to say that while a nationality is a population held together by certain ties, as, for example, language and literature, ideas, customs, and traditions, in such wise as to feel itself a coherent unity, distinct from other populations similarly held together by like ties of their own, a Nation is a nationality, or a subdivision of a nationality, which has organized itself into a political body, either independent or desiring to be independent. This description would encounter some doubtful cases. The Athenians in antiquity and the Florentines in the Middle Ages were hardly nations, though they were independent states, for they were parts of a wider Greek and Italian people. The Swiss, Alemannian Germans to begin with, grew slowly into a nation, and were scarcely so to be described before A.D. 1648. Now, though they speak three languages and spring from at least three nationalities, they are as united a nation as there is in the world. The Magyars did not cease to be a nation because their constitutional freedom and rights of self-government were overthrown in 1849 and not regained till nearly twenty years later. Were the thirteen American colonies before 1776 a nation, or did they become so in that year, or not till the union of all of them was finally assured in 1791? Tuscany, though independent under its local rulers till 1859, was not a nation, and still less were the States of the Church. But is Bavaria to-day to be deemed a nation? Ireland and Scotland figure as nations in after-dinner speeches on the days of their respective saints: are they so at other times also? and if they are, is Wales a nation? Were the Transvaal and the Orange Free State nations before the South African war of 1899? They were certainly parts of a Dutch South African nationality. If Canada and Australia are nations, is the Union of South Africa one also? or does the whole British people all over the world constitute a nation?

Without multiplying doubtful cases, however, the description presented above, and any description which tries to represent current usage, would recognize the fact, that wherever a community has both political independence and a distinctive character recognizable in its members, as well as in the whole body, we call it a nation. Applying such a test to the Spanish-American republics, some of them, such as Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, are undeniably nations, while even some at least of the smaller, such as Cuba, Ecuador, and Paraguay, have attained sufficient individuality and consciousness of corporate unity to make them feel and act together and desire to preserve their independence.¹⁰² If they maintain that consciousness and that independence for another fifty years, their nationhood will be indisputable. The bud is opening, even if the form and colours of the petals are not yet fully visible.

By what process, then, and through the working of what forces did this more or less uniform common substance, this raw material for the making of states, which a century ago was spread over the vast Spanish colonial empire, become differentiated into the sixteen nations that exist to-day?

There is nothing in history more interesting than the study of the process by which nations are evolved from races or tribes. The widest range of phenomena are those supplied by the formation of the kingdoms of modern Europe through the admixture or contact of the peoples comprised in the Roman Empire with the barbarian tribes which entered it or received civilization from it. The growth of France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, England, Scotland, and (by contact with little mixture) of Poland, Russia, and the Scandinavian states, and in more recent times the creation of Greece and Belgium and Rumania and the re-creation as nations of Servia and Bulgaria, are all instances of the process. But in the case of the greater and older nations this process occupied many centuries, and its earlier stages are obscure. Here in Spanish America it has been going on under the eyes of the civilized world in an age when everything is or can be known, and it has taken only a hundred years. In all probability, nothing like this, no creation of new national entities coming about over so large an area in so short a time, can ever occur again. The causes which have produced these divergences from one type into many, turning the colonial Spaniard, who was in essentials much the same kind of man wherever he lived, into a Mexican or Uruguayan, a Peruvian, Chilean, or Argentine (to take a few of the more marked new national forms), are as interesting a subject for enquiry and reflection as could engage the thoughts of a philosophic historian.

All I can do here is to suggest some of these causes which occur to the mind of one who travels in Spanish America. To work the subject out in detail would need years of reading as well as many a journey. Hitherto few of those who have read have travelled, and few of those who have travelled have read. I have done so much less of either than the magnitude of the subject demands, that I must ask indulgence for even throwing out suggestions which are meant to urge others, better equipped than myself, to prosecute the enquiry.

The primary factor which determined the territorial limits of each republic is to be found in the existence in colonial days of certain administrative divisions. The Viceroyalties and Captaincies General constituted so many governmental areas, the inhabitants of each of which felt a sort of community among themselves, although they had no share in the government. In a few of these areas there existed what might be called the rudiments of a distinctive character belonging to the inhabitants of that area and marking them off from those who dwell in other divisions. In the larger number of areas there was not yet anything of the sort. When the insurrections broke out and as the War of Independence proceeded, the dwellers in each Viceroyalty or Captaincy General fought for themselves (with more or less help from insurgent bands elsewhere), and when they set up a revolutionary government, they tried to make the old provincial capital the seat of that government, so that in this way the boundaries of the old areas tended to remain, and that which had been an administrative division passed into a Republic. Yet it was still only a body of inhabitants in an area, not a nation. What we have to ask is – How did these groups of inhabitants occupying each its own territory, in only some few of whom did there exist the rudiments of a distinctive national character – how did they grow into Nations in the proper sense of the word?

The aim of this chapter will accordingly be: —

I. To indicate the main influences which have differentiated the inhabitants of Spanish America into distinct Nations. These influences are partly physical, partly racial, partly historical.

II. To enquire how far the process of differentiation has gone in making the people of any, and which, of the republics into true Nations, i. e. in giving them both distinctive traits of character and a strong national self-consciousness.

III. To ascertain to what extent there remains among the peoples of these republics any common Hispano-American sentiment, any sense of kinship linking them together in spite of political separation, possibly even underlying political hostility.

I. Among the causes or influences which have tended to differentiation, the first place may be assigned to geographical position. Where one part of a nationality is cut off from the other parts by the sea, or by deserts, or by dense forests, any peculiarities that already belonged to it tend to develop further and become intensified, because they are not affected by contact from without; and such a part, moreover, being isolated, attains a stronger consciousness of itself as a separate social and political entity. Two island republics, Cuba and Santo Domingo, were thus destined by nature to stand apart from those of the mainland as soon as their connection with the European sovereign had been broken. The people of Chile, severed from Peru by a wide and waterless desert, drew farther and farther apart from those of that country. The Chileans and the Argentines are divided from one another by a lofty mountain range, passable at a few points only, and at those points with difficulty, so the differences between them, which more frequent intercourse might have lessened, grew more pronounced. Paraguay stands almost alone in her forests, and till steamships began to ply on the great Paraná, could be reached from the coast only by a tedious upstream voyage or an even more toilsome land journey.

Not less important is the influence of physical environment in modifying both the race itself and the economic conditions of its life. In Mexico, for instance, the existence of a compact area of fertile soil around the lakes on whose shores the semi-civilization of the men of Tezcuco and Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) arose, created in that area a comparatively large population of pure Spanish blood and a still larger one of mixed blood which ultimately became the core of the Mexican republic and enabled it not only to hold together the outlying territories, but, also, when it got a strong ruler, to set up a strong centralized administration. Peru is cut up by the lofty and barren Andean ranges into a number of valleys, each more or less isolated. Some of its cities, like Arequipa, stand in solitary oases surrounded by deserts, while the eastern towns are severed from the capital by so many ridges and gorges that the formation of an active and homogeneous public opinion has been retarded. Chile, on the other hand, had till recently nearly all her inhabitants gathered in a comparatively small cultivable area, favourable to the growth of a united people, and similar conditions have accelerated the material progress and intensified the patriotism of Uruguay. In the vast territories of Colombia and Venezuela where, besides three or four cities lying far apart, there are only small settlements scattered through a region of mountain and forest, political cohesion and the sense of national life must needs advance far more slowly than in a level and cultivated land like Argentina, covered with a network of railways.

Climate has told for much in compelling the inhabitants of the colder regions to work hard and enabling those of the hotter to take life easily. The tropical states have on the whole lagged behind the temperate ones, and there is between them a perceptible difference in character and habits. In Bolivia the combined effect of the low temperature, thin air, extreme dryness, and poor food has not only made a large part of the plateau a sterile desert, but has also checked the advance of the aboriginal race, and has confined the population of Spanish origin to a small number of towns lying so far away from one another that common political action becomes difficult and social antagonisms remain acute.

While these physical differences have told upon all the divisions of Spanish America, they have been in some all the more efficient because they have been followed by economic consequences, and have induced certain forms of industrial life. Cattle and the horse have determined the habits of the Argentine and Uruguayan. Mining has had more to do with the Peruvian and the Mexican. No one of the nations has taken to a sea-faring life except the Chileans.

Whoever will compare Spanish America with Anglo-America (i. e. the United States and Canada) will be struck by the far greater differences of physical environment between the various parts of the former and those of the latter, where no section of the country, except Florida, Louisiana, and Texas is oppressively hot, even in summer, and where no section, till one reaches Labrador, suffers from severities of cold and wet such as check settlement in the far south of Chile and of Argentina. Nature does less to differentiate Anglo-American man into varieties than she does in the case of Spanish-American man.

Even more important than the influence of natural conditions has been the presence in Spanish America of the aboriginal tribes. These differed greatly in intelligence, courage, and a disposition to industry. In some regions they were both numerous and warlike, as in Mexico and Chile. In others they were numerous but easily conquered, as in the Peruvian highlands and Central America and Paraguay. In some they were too few to hold their ground, as in central Argentina and Uruguay, or so feeble as neither to offer serious resistance nor furnish servile labour. This was the case in Cuba and on some of the coasts of the Caribbean Sea. The differences in intellectual capacity were expressed in the degree of progress they had made towards civilization; the Mexicans and the subjects of the Peruvian Incas standing at the top, and the Amazonian savages in the east of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru at the bottom of the scale. As another chapter treats of their present relations to the European part of the population, it is enough to call attention here to the effect of the infusion of native blood in differentiating various parts of the old colonial population from one another. The volume of that infusion has been greater in some regions than in others, and the native blood has been unequal in quality. A half-Indian people tends to differ – whether for worse or for better is another question – from a white people; and a people mixed with Indians of a strong race, like the native Mexican, differs from one which has received a blend of weaker native blood. In persons of mixed race, the white element predominates, but less evidently in physical appearance than in mental attributes. The mestizos are all Christians and more generally educated; they draw their ideas and habits from their European rather than their native parentage, which, indeed, they prefer to ignore.

Besides this influence, which we may call physiological, we must further note, as a factor producing diversity, the social effect which the presence of a native semiservile class has upon the character of the ruling element in the population. Where such a class supplies labour, the ruling element generally despises and refuses manual work. Where the former is both numerous and ignorant, it usually lowers the moral and probably also the intellectual standard of the European inhabitants. In some republics the presence of this class has encouraged civil wars and revolutions by furnishing Indian soldiers who can be forced to fight and will fight well for causes in which they take no interest. It has moreover made the provisions of constitutions which confer universal suffrage seem hollow shams.

In some few Spanish-speaking countries, particularly along the Caribbean coasts and in some of the maritime towns of Colombia and Peru, the negro, imported after the Conquest, has become a race factor, mingling with the whites to produce an intermediate breed which is usually superior to the pure black, and mingling with the Indian to produce one which is deemed to have the faults of both parents and the merits of neither. But it was only the colony from Portugal which was formerly the Empire and is now the republic of Brazil that received slaves on a great scale. There are believed to be now at least eight millions of blacks and mulattoes in that country, probably two-fifths of the whole population. Such Indian blood as was mingled with the Portuguese settlers has become scarcely noticeable, except in Pará and along the banks of the Amazon. Brazil is, however, so different from the Spanish republics in other respects that one need not insist on this element of diversity.

From these physical and racial influences I pass on to those of a historical order. Chief among these were the long-protracted struggle for independence and the interminable civil wars that followed its attainment. Under the Crown of Spain the collective life both of the inhabitants of its dominions as a whole and of each section of those inhabitants had been stagnant. Independence quickened its pulses and accelerated the development of such latent forces as existed into new forms. The political events of the revolutionary epoch and of the ninety years that followed have done much not only to create new nations, but also to mould them, while they were growing up, into diverse shapes. In some republics the civil wars lasted longer than they did in others, and left the country more exhausted and distracted; in others again foreign intervention had the effect of consolidating the people and creating a stronger patriotism than had existed before. This was conspicuously the case in Mexico. The French invasion and the long struggle which ended in the dethronement and death of the unfortunate Maximilian of Hapsburg determined the fortunes of that country, extinguishing the power of the Church, and renewing the nation's confidence in itself which had been shattered by the war with the United States. So, too, the heroic efforts made by the Uruguayans under Artigas to shake off the yoke of Brazil and their subsequent conflict with Argentina, then ruled by the tyrant Rosas, left a permanent impress upon their character. In most of the Central American states, on the other hand, progress in education, in civil order, and in the turning to account of natural resources has been arrested by their incessant strife with one another as well as by internal convulsions.

The general result of the wars and revolutions which make up so much of Spanish-American history has undoubtedly been to differentiate the peoples and build up separate nations and strengthen the national consciousness of the inhabitants of almost every republic. Whether that strengthening has been a good thing or not, I do not attempt here to enquire. But apart from it, the other consequences of so long a period of struggle and bloodshed have been deplorable.

Effort and suffering do no doubt test and try a community. War, be it civil or foreign, never leaves men the same as it found them, though the common assumption that it makes them either stronger, or wiser in the exercise of their strength, is as false as it is dangerous. If war, apart from the pure aim and high spirit in and for which it conceivably may be, but seldom has been, undertaken, ennobles the soul as well as toughens the fibre of a nation, what virtues ought it not to have bred in these South American countries, where the lance was always glittering and the gun-shot always echoing?

Of the other formative and stimulative influences which the deliverance from Spanish rule might have set to work upon the peoples of the republics, of the development of science, art, and letters, and in particular of that part of intellectual life which goes deepest down into the soul of a people, theology and religious faith, of these things as influences in building up a national individuality, there is little to be said, because disturbed political conditions and the backward state of education checked all such development. Until the last thirty years it has had no fair chance, and in some republics has little even now. One may observe, however, that in such progress as can be recorded the Church has had scarcely any share. Both her claims to authority and her property have been at one time or another (though much less in recent years) a cause of political conflicts in most republics. But the unfavourable conditions referred to have told upon the Church itself, not to add that her ministers were under Spanish rule and have continued to be both less well instructed and (of course with many exceptions) less exemplary in life than the Roman Catholic priesthood of France or Germany or of the United States.

The recent economic development of some few of these countries, and especially the extension of their agriculture and their mining, have naturally tended to give a practical turn to thought and action, fixing men's minds on business, on the public improvements which wealth makes possible, and on the enjoyments to which it invites. If even old and highly cultivated nations, like the Germans and the Italians, are felt by themselves and seen by their neighbours to have been somewhat altered in spirit and aim under new conditions of industrial and commercial life, how much more must similar conditions tell upon communities intellectually younger and, so to speak, more fluid, less "set" in a definite mould. These causes have been increasing the differences between the more progressive and the more backward republics. They have been setting their stamp upon Argentina and Chile. A similar change, though it affected only a small class, was discernible in Mexico during the later years of the supremacy of Porfirio Diaz.

Immigration from Europe has not yet gone far enough to affect the "type" of any South American people, or bear a part in the process of national differentiation. It may, however, do so in the future, for in countries where prosperity has created a large demand for labour, and where public order is little disturbed, there begins to be an inflow of settlers from abroad. In Mexico and Cuba immigration is steady though not large, and is drawn almost entirely from Spain. In Peru it is small, for the Chinese and Japanese who come are too few to affect the character of the population. Some Germans entered Chile thirty years ago, and constitute a valuable though comparatively small element. A far greater number have settled in southern Brazil. Uruguay receives a considerable but at present (1912) declining immigration both from Italy and from Spain. To Argentina there come not only many Spaniards, but a still fuller stream of Italians, who now form so large an element that the Argentine of the future will be probably one-third Italian in blood.¹⁰³ Into the other Spanish-speaking parts of the New World there is at present very little immigration, nor are the tropical regions fitted for agricultural settlers from Europe. Chinese or Japanese or Indian coolies might do better, and there are already plenty of Hindus in British Guiana. Should valuable minerals be discovered in places where, as in Colombia, Venezuela, and northern Brazil, labour is scarce, the temptation to introduce Asiatics would be strong.

II. We have now to enquire what have been the results of the process of nation-building. How many, and which, of the republics that were once parts of the great Spanish dominion have now grown to be true nations? But here a preliminary difficulty meets us. In speaking of the peoples of these republics, are we to think of all their inhabitants, or only of the ruling Hispano-American element, excluding the aborigines? Are the aborigines, and such collective character as they possess, to be taken into account when we seek to determine which communities deserve to be called nations, or are they rather to be deemed subject tribes standing outside and not sharing in genuine national life?

Without anticipating what will be said in a later chapter, it is enough to remark here that from the United States frontier at El Paso in latitude 32° north, down to the Tropic of Capricorn (latitude 23° south) a very large, though unascertained and at present unascertainable part of the population – possibly a majority – consists of Indians, most of whom speak their native languages, and some of whom are mere savages. Even those who, like the Quichuas and Aymarás of the Andean plateau, are in a fashion civilized, lead a life apart, and, though in most republics legally citizens, have practically nothing to do with the government of the countries they inhabit, except as combatants in its foreign or civil wars. In Argentina the question scarcely arises, because nearly all the population is of European stock, while in Chile the Araucanians are practically the only pure Indians left. We must, therefore, restrict our view to the two other elements, the European and the mixed, these forming, for nearly all practical purposes, one body. It is of them, not of the Indians, that we have to think when we ask how far the inhabitants of each republic have advanced into true nationhood.

For the purpose of determining whether any community ought to be deemed a nation, one must distinguish two things which are apt to be confounded. The one thing is the presence in the community of a distinctive national character, the other is the presence of strong national sentiment. The former consists in the possession by the members of the community of certain attributes and certain qualities, visible in its collective action, which are peculiar to it, and mark it off from other communities. The latter is the consciousness of political unity, taking shape in the spirit of self-assertion against other communities, expressing itself in the effort to make good the community's position in the world, to push its claims and to defend its rights. The former is in practice usually accompanied by the latter; that is to say, a community whose members feel themselves to be a political entity, with distinctive ideas and traditions of their own, naturally desires to prevent itself from being overridden or swamped by other communities. The latter, however, does not necessarily imply the former. A community may have little that is peculiar or distinctive; may have no racial traits of its own, no literature, no special beliefs or customs, and a history too short to have formed traditions. Yet the circumstances of that short history, coupled with vanity (collective and individual) and a combative spirit, may have created a sensitive and inflammable patriotism which makes the community feel and act as a Nation, however little there may be to distinguish it from surrounding peoples beyond the fact that historical accidents have divided it from them and started it on a course of its own. In this latter set of cases, an observer who studies the community may discover nothing that constitutes a distinctive national character. Its citizens may seem much the same in ideas and habits as those of the other independent branches of the same nationality around them. Yet they may be found to hate those neighbours of the same speech just as bitterly as races that have been secular enemies, like Turkomans and Persians, hate one another.

Applying these tests to the Latin-American republics, it will appear that by both tests several of the greatest are indisputably nations. Chile and Argentina have each of them a distinctive national quality which so marks them off from their neighbours that even the passing traveller can discern it. They have national character as well as national sentiment. So, too, have Mexico and Peru.¹⁰⁴ The same thing is true of Uruguay, the people of which, originally the same as that of Argentina, have developed, in the course of a tempestuous history, a somewhat different type. Brazil, being Portuguese, has always had a character of its own. These six republics may all be deemed to be nations in the European sense of the word. I have not visited Paraguay, but should suppose that in it the numerical preponderance of the native Guarani stock brings about a result similar to that which an infusion of coloured blood has had in Cuba, but more marked.