BOOK VII

PROBLEMS

Serious problems arise from a consideration of the Latin democracies, which are in the full tide of development. They are divided, in spite of common traditions, and they comprise races whose marriage has not been precisely happy. In spite of the resources of the soil, and its fabulous wealth, these States live by loans. Their political life is not organised; the parties obey leaders who bring to the struggle for power neither an ideal nor a programme of concrete reforms. The population of these States is so small that America may be called a desert.

We will consider all these problems minutely: problems of unity, of race, of population, of financial conditions, and of politics.

Chapter I

the Problem of Unity

The foundations of unity: religion, language, and similarity of development—Neither Europe, nor Asia, nor Africa presents this moral unity in the same degree as Latin America—The future groupings of the peoples: Central America, the Confederation of the Antilles, Greater Colombia, the Confederation of the Pacific, and the Confederation of La Plata—Political and economical aspects of these unions—The last attempts at federation in Central America—The Bolivian Congress—The A.B.C.—the union of the Argentine, Brazil, and Chili.

A professor of the American university of Harvard, Mr. Coolidge, writes that if there is one thing that proves the backwardness of the political spirit of the Latin Americans, it is precisely the existence of so many hostile democracies on a continent which is in so many respects uniform. With so many points in common, with the same language, the same civilisation, the same essential interests, they persist in maintaining the political subdivisions due to the mere accidents of their history.[1] And he advises in all sincerity that these inimical nations should associate themselves in powerful groups, a means of defence which no nation could oppose, neither the United States nor Europe. If, for example, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay were to unite with the Argentine Republic; if the old United States of Colombia were re-established, and if, as formerly, Venezuela and Ecuador, with perhaps Peru, were to form a confederation; if the republics of Central America were at last to succeed in forming a durable confederation, and were perhaps to join Mexico—then Latin America would consist only of a few great States, each of which would be sufficiently important to assume by right an enviable position in the modern world, and to fear no aggression on the part of any foreign power.

The Latin Republics pay no attention to this wise counsel; we observe among them a tendency toward further disagreement, toward an atomic disintegration. Originally a different and a wider movement, in the sense of the close union of similar nationalities, did manifest itself. The contrary principle prevails to-day, and it results in the separation of complementary provinces and the conflict of sister nations.

During a century of isolated political development, and under the influence of territory and climate, divergent characteristics have manifested themselves in the nations of America. Mexico is without the tropical eloquence we find in Colombia; the Chilian inflexibility contrasts with the rich imagination of the Brazilians; the Argentines have become a commercial people; Chili is a bellicose republic; Bolivia has an astute policy, the work of a slow and practical people, which has given it a new strength; Peru persists in its dreams of generous idealism; Central America remains rent by an anarchy which seems incurable; Venezuela is still inspired by an empty "lyricism." Some of these republics are practical peoples governed by active plutocracies; others are given to dreaming and are led by presidents suffering from neurosis. In the Tropics we find civil war and idleness; on the cold table-lands, in the temperate plains, and in the maritime cities, wealth and peace.

But such divergences do not form an essential separation; they cannot destroy the age-long work of laws, religion, institutions, tradition, and language. Unity possesses indestructible foundations, as old and as deep-rooted as the race itself.

From Mexico to Chili the religion is the same; the intolerance of alien cults is the same; so are the clericalism, the anti-clericalism, the fanaticism, and the superficial free thought; the influence of the clergy in the State, upon women, and the schools; the lack of true religious feeling under the appearance of general belief.

To this first very important factor of unity we must add the powerful and permanent influence of the Spanish language, whose future is bound up with the future of the Latin Transatlantic peoples. Sonorous and arrogant, this language expresses, better than any other, the vices and the grandeur of the American mind; its rhetoric and its heroism, its continuity of spirit from the feats of the Cid to the Republican revolutions. The Spanish tongue is an intimate bond of union between the destinies of the metropolis and those of its ancient colonies, and it separates the two Americas, one being the expression of the Latin and the other of the Anglo-Saxon genius.

The language is always to a certain extent transformed in these democracies; provincialisms and Americanisms abound; the popular tongue differs from the autocratic Castilian. Don Rufino Cuervo predicts that Spanish will undergo essential alterations in America, as was the case with Latin at the time of the Roman decadence. An Argentine writer, Señor Ernesto Quesada, believes that a national language is in process of formation on the banks of the Plata, and that the barbarisms of the popular speech are forecasts of a new tongue. In Chili an exalted patriot has upheld the originality of the Chilian race and language in an anonymous book, claiming that they derive from the Gothic. Thus is the effect of the national spirit exaggerated. Among the Ibero-American republics there is a profound and general resemblance in the pronunciation and the syntax of the language; the same linguistic defects even are to be found in all. The Spanish of the Peninsula loses its majesty overseas; it is no longer the language, lordly in its beauty, solemn in its ornaments, of Granada, of Mariana, of Perez de Guzman. Familiar, declamatory, pronounced with a caressing accent, the Castilian of America is uniform from North to South.

More effectual than religion and language the identity of race explains the similarity of the American peoples, and constitutes a promise of lasting unity. The native race, the Spanish race, and the negro race are everywhere mingled, in similar proportions, from the frontier of the United States to the southern limits of the continent. On the Atlantic seaboard European immigration, an influx of Russians, Italians, and Germans, has given the supremacy to the white race, but this influence is limited to small belts of land, when we consider the vast area of the continent.

A single half-caste race, with here the negro and there the Indian predominant over the conquering Spaniard, obtains from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There is a greater resemblance between Peruvians and Argentines, Colombians and Chilians, than between the inhabitants of two distant provinces of France, such as Provence and Flanders, Brittany and Burgundy, or between the Italian of the north, positive and virile, and the lazy and sensual Neapolitan, or between the North American of the Far West and the native of New England. The slight provincial differences enable us the better to understand the unity of the continent.

This identity explains the monotonous history of America. A succession of military periods and industrial periods, of revolts and dictatorships; perpetual promises of political restoration; the tyranny of ignorant adventurers, and complicated and delusive legislation.

It is in the great crises of its history that the essential unity of the race is revealed. The Wars of Independence were a unanimous movement, an expression of profound solidarity. In 1865, after half a century of isolation, the democracies of the Pacific once more united to oppose Spain's attempt at reconquest. Soldiers of different nations, who had already fought in bygone battles, but against each other, now fought side by side for the common liberty. The same unity of inspiration has brought the nations together in opposition to many projects of conquest: the expedition of Flores against Ecuador, of France against Mexico, and the Anglo-French alliance against Rosas. At the second Hague Congress in 1907 Latin America revealed to the Western world the importance of her wealth and the valour of her men, and supported her ideal of arbitration; to the Monroe doctrine she opposed the doctrine of Drago, and, without preliminary understanding, asserted her unity.

No other continent offers so many reasons for union, and herein lies the chief originality of Latin America.

In Europe states and races are in conflict, and the unstable equilibrium is maintained only by means of alliances. Religions, political systems, traditions, and languages differ. History is merely a succession of turbulent hegemonies: of Spain, England, France, and Germany. We find artificial nations, like Austria; unions of democratic and theocratic peoples, like the Franco-Russian Alliance; rival empires of the same race, like England and Germany; political alliances of alien races, like Germany and Italy; and the dispersion of peoples painfully seeking to recover their lost unity, like the Poles, the Irish, and the Slavs. The federation of Europe is a Utopian dream.

Africa is not yet autonomous; it is a vast group of enslaved peoples of primitive races, colonised by the great European powers. There the Anglo-Saxon genius is seeking to establish a political union between English and Dutch, and one day, perhaps, the empire dreamed of by Cecil Rhodes will stretch from Cairo to the Cape. But the unity of Africa is impossible; for the colonists come to the Dark Continent as conquerors, as the representatives of hostile interests; they can but quarrel over Morocco, Tripoli, and the Congo. Oceania possesses only a partial unity in the Australian commonwealth, the work of England. In Asia it is still more impossible to guess whence a future unity might arise. Mussulmans and Buddhists share India; Japan has won only an ephemeral superiority; China retains all her irreducible independence; in Manchuria and Korea Russian and Asiatic interests are opposed; in Turkestan, Persia, and Tibet the conflicts of race and religion are enough to destroy any hope of union.

In America and in America only the political problem is relatively simple. Unity is there at once a tradition and a present necessity, yet in spite of this fact the disunion of the Latin democracies persists.

Forty years ago Alberdi thought it necessary, and believed it possible, to redraw the map of America.

To-day the Latin nations overseas are less plastic; the frontiers seem too definitely established, and prejudices too deeply rooted to allow of such a recombination; but the formation of groups of nations is no less urgent. If the unity of the continent by means of a vast federation in the Anglo-Saxon manner seems impossible, it is none the less necessary to group the Latin-American nations in a durable fashion, according to their affinities. While respecting the inevitable geographical inequalities which give certain peoples an evident superiority over others, and the no less inevitable economic inequalities which create natural unions, it would still be possible to found a stable assemblage of nations, a Continent.

There is a spontaneous hierarchy in the Latin New World; there are superior and inferior democracies, maritime nations and inland states. Paraguay will always be inferior to the Argentine Republic; Uruguay to Brazil; Bolivia to Chili; Ecuador to Peru; Guatemala to Mexico; as much from the point of wealth as in population and influence. The preservation of the autonomy of republics which differ so greatly in the extent and situation of their territories can only be removed by federative grouping. To oppress and colonise these countries is the desire of all imperialists, no matter whence they come; but the peace of America demands another solution; which is, not the synthesis which some one powerful State might enforce, but the co-operation of free organisms. By grouping themselves about more advanced peoples the secondary nations might succeed in preserving their threatened autonomy.

Central America, exhausted by anarchy, may aspire to unity; these five small nations maintain a precarious independence in the face of the United States. Until 1842 Central America was only one State, and subsequent attempts at unification proved that this was not merely the artificial creation of its politicians. When the Panama Canal has divided the two Americas, and increased the power of the United States, these nations, together with Mexico, might form a true Spanish advance-guard in the North.

Moreover, the free islands of the Caribbean Sea might be united in a Confederation of the Antilles, according to the noble dream of Hostos. Greater Colombia might be reconstituted, with Ecuador, New Granada, and Venezuela. Their greatest leaders have desired their union, as a preventive of indefinite and fractional division and internal discord. On the basis of common traditions, and for important geographical reasons, these three nations might form an imposing Confederacy. Once the Canal is open, this group of peoples, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, on the northern extremity of the continent, would form a massive Latin rampart, a country capable of absorbing European emigration and of opposing to Anglo-Saxon invasion the resistance of a vast populated and united territory.

Bolivia, the inland republic, deprived of her coast-line by Chili, has already been twice united to Peru; in 1837, under the authority of Santa-Cruz, and in 1879, to oppose the supremacy of Chili on the Pacific. What should henceforth separate it from a people to which it is united by so many historical and economic ties, and a similitude of territory and race from Cuzco to Oruro? Chili and Peru will be either two perpetual enemies, or two peoples drawn together by a useful understanding. Their geographical proximity, their mutually complementary products—the tropical fruits of Peru and the products of the temperate zones of Chili—might contribute to bring them together. Have we not here an actual economic harmony? In the moral domain the very causes which have engendered hatred between Chili and Peru, from the time of Portales to that of Pinto, might equally prove to be the elements of future friendship. Peru, impoverished by the Chilian conquest, and deprived of her deposits of nitre, would no longer be the victim of the Chilian greed of gold, nor the hatred of a poor colony for the elegant vice-kingdom. Chili is wealthier than Peru, and her people have more energy and more will-power, although they may have less imagination, less nobility of character, and less eloquence. The Peruvian vivacity and grace may be contrasted with the prosaic deliberation of Chili; the anarchy of the one country with the political stability of the other; the idealism of Peru with the common-sense of Chili. Physically and morally these two countries complete one another. The economic necessities of each might form the permanent basis of a possible alliance. The Confederation of the Pacific, formed by Peru, Bolivia, and Chili, would be a safeguard against future wars in America. Unhappily Chili professes and seeks to enforce a superiority founded upon victory, just as, when the German Empire was confederated, victorious and warlike Prussia enforced her superiority over artistic Bavaria.

The Confederation of La Plata, the heir to the traditions of the colonial era, might be formed of Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Rosas did seek to create this great federal organisation. During the course of the century Uruguay has extended her sympathies alternately to the Argentine and to Brazil, and Paraguay, during a period of epic grandeur, defended her isolation. The union of these republics was prevented by national rivalities and the ambitions of their caudillos, but it will surely be effected in the future under the pressure of the power of Argentina. It is true that Uruguay has only too definite an originality in the matter of intellect, from the point of view of liberalism and education, but the federation of the future would not be the imposition of a harsh hegemony of one nation over others, but rather the co-operation of republics with equal rights which had at last understood the poverty of their isolated condition. Paraguay, remote and concealed, ruled sometimes by a Jesuitical and now by a civil dictatorship, has need of a place in such a vast confederation of cultivated peoples.

These groups of nations will thus form a new America, organic and powerful. Brazil, with her immense territory and dense population; the Confederation of La Plata; the Confederation of the Pacific; Greater Colombia: these will finally establish the continental equilibrium so anxiously desired. In the North, Mexico and Central America and the Confederation of the Antilles would form three Latin States to balance the enveloping movement of the Anglo-Saxons. Instead of twenty divided republics we should thus have seven powerful nations. We should have not the vague Union of which all the Utopian professors since Bolivar have spoken, but a definite grouping and confederation of peoples united by real economic, geographical, and political ties.

To realise these fusions there are both economic and political methods. Hasty conventions would be powerless to uproot the hatreds and the narrow conceptions of patriotism peculiar to the American peoples. The organisation of the continent should be the work of thinkers, statesmen, and captains of industry, a work fortified by time and history. To the tradition of discord we must oppose another, the tradition of union.

A series of partial commercial treaties, navigation treaties, railway systems, customs unions, and international congresses (like those recently held at Montevideo and Santiago) may all be indicated as means of realising unity. The railways above all will create a new continent; for isolation and lack of population are the enemies of American federation.

To-day these peoples do not know one another. Paris is their intellectual capital, where their poets, thinkers, and statesmen meet. In America everything makes for separation: forests, plains, and mountains. What does Venezuela know of Chili, Peru of Mexico, Colombia of the Argentine? Even in the case of neighbouring nations the political leaders do not know one another. The psychology of neighbouring peoples is a mystery; whence traditional errors and disastrous wars. American journalism is ignorant of nothing in European life—the sessions of the Duma, the ministerial crises of Roumania, the nobility of the Gotha Almanac, the scandals of Berlin; but of the public life of the American nations it publishes only the vaguest and most erroneous news. By stimulating the love of travel and building railroads these peoples would escape from an isolation so perilous. "Every line of railroad which crosses a frontier," said Gladstone, "prepares the way for universal confederation." The Yankees have understood this, which is why they are preparing to build a great Pan-American railway to unite the two Americas under their financial sceptre.

The line which has recently united the two capitals of the South—Santiago and Buenos-Ayres—has contributed to the formation of a solid understanding between Chili and the Argentine. That which will unite Lima and Buenos-Ayres in the near future will bring the culture of the Argentine to the Bolivian table-lands, as far as Cuzco, the centre of Inca tradition; it will draw together the seaboard populations of the two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, and will prove a powerful agent of civilisation and unity. The great rivers of the Amazonian basin from the Putumayo to the Beni, the affluents of the Rio de la Plata, the Magdalena and the Orinoco, united by new railroads, will also contribute to the continental unity by multiplying international relations. One may well repeat the celebrated phrase, that to govern is to lay rails. Railways vanquish barbarism; they attract the stranger, people the desert, civilise the native. Political organisation and internal peace correspond with the development of the means of communication. With the appearance of the rails the caudillos lose their influence, and a double transformation is effected; in the interior by the civilising action of commingled interests, and at the exterior by the new relations which the multiplication of railways involves.

Customs unions in Germany created the Imperial unity; Mr. Chamberlain thinks that a Zollverein would increase the power of the British Empire. The economic grouping of nations prepares the way for future confederations. The frequent congresses which unify law and jurisprudence, and bring together politicians, men of letters and scientists, all tend to the same result. To increase the number of these assemblies, to hold them in different capitals of the continent, and to replace the Pan-American Congresses, whose plans are somewhat indefinite, by racial Latin-American Congresses, would be equally to the profit of the economic and intellectual unity of the continent, and the harmony of its politics and its laws. An undivided, uniform American law,[2] a single monetary system, a similar policy in respect of protectionism and free trade, the unification of methods of teaching, and the equivalence of academic diplomas and university degrees, are questions that might be discussed at these general assemblies. Each nation would have ministers in the other republics, who would be at once intellectual emissaries and propagandists, while to-day American peoples who send ministers to Austria or to Switzerland have no accredited representatives in the capitals of adjacent states. The national ambitions which satisfy our politicians to-day would be replaced by a more ample and original design, embracing the future of an entire continent, as was the case a century ago.

In short, we should neglect no form of co-operation—conventions, travel, diplomatic labours, periodical congresses, commercial treaties, and partial groups of nations. Nothing but a disastrous weakness can perpetuate the present division of the Latin peoples in the face of the unity of the United States.

The nations of the South are not unaware of this necessity, and after a century of independence they are seeking to reconstitute the ancient unions. Central America, disturbed by periodic wars, is endeavouring to create a Confederation. In 1895 a treaty between Honduras, Nicaragua, and Salvador formed the Republic of Central America; only Costa Rica and Guatemala held aloof from this union. In 1902 all these nations, with the exception of Guatemala, accepted a convention of arbitration. In 1905 the presidents of the five republics met at Corinth in order to honour the work of Morazan and Rufino Barrios; spontaneously, or at the instance of the United States and Mexico, they signed various treaties intended to realise the unity of the sister nations. A Central American Pedagogic Institute was created, and a "Bureau of the Five Republics," with the same object of unification. In 1907, after nine different conflicts in the interval, a conference of these same nations was assembled at Washington. On this occasion a tribunal of arbitration for Central America was installed, and the neutrality of Honduras was recognised. This tribunal, which sits at Cartago, in Costa-Rica, is to judge the conflicts between states and the diplomatic claims of the governments and of individuals. Moreover, the Republics of Central America have agreed to a declaration which provides that they will recognise no government which has been enforced by a revolution or a coup d'État, and that they will not intervene in the political movements of neighbouring countries.

The Court of Arbitration thus established had already, in 1909, settled differences between Salvador and Honduras, and between Guatemala and Nicaragua, by rejecting the pretentions of Honduras in the one case and of Nicaragua in the other.[3] In short, the United States and Mexico are leading these peoples, who used to be in a condition of perpetual discord, towards the unity necessary to their progress.

A Congress met recently (1911) at Caracas, which was attended by the representatives of the states liberated by Bolivar—Venezuela, New Granada, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru. This was a truly Bolivian assembly in honour of the national hero. The object of this Congress was to reconstitute Greater Colombia with the three Republics which formerly made part of it—Venezuela, New Granada, and Ecuador; this would be a return, after the lapse of a century, to the harmonious union of the sister peoples, which would truly give them a common future.

The formation of a great Bolivian State, after a period of isolation lasting more than a century, is certainly the dream of generous statesmen. It is not easy to conceive of the political union of peoples as far removed as those of Venezuela and Bolivia, but this assembly might well result in a natural union of the peoples of the North; a new Greater Colombia, whose provinces would stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

In the south the A.B.C., the alliance of the Argentine, Brazil, and Chili, is the question incessantly discussed in the sensational press, and in the chancelleries, which love to surround themselves with an atmosphere of mystery. These three nations, wealthy, military powers, situated in distinct zones, are seeking confederation; their ambition is to exercise in America a tutelage which they consider indispensable. Already the understanding of May, 1902, had limited the armaments of Chili and the Argentine, and had put an end to a long conflict. The rivality between the Argentine and Brazil; the old friendship between that country and Chili, which afterwards changed to a jealous alienation; the rivalry between the Argentine and Chili in the matter of wealth and power; discord, threats of war, uneasy friendships; all this is insufficient to restrain the military ambition of the three great nations. The statesmen of Buenos-Ayres, Rio de Janeiro, and Santiago are labouring to effect the realisation of an alliance between the three most highly civilised and organised and most advanced nations of the continent. Once this union is accomplished, to the indisputable influence of the United States will be added the moderative influence of the three great States of the South, and the equilibrium between Latins and Anglo-Saxons would be its immediate result.

There are writers in America who defend the chauvinistic autonomy of small countries as against the natural supremacy of such combinations of States. It is, however, certain that these alliances do not in any way threaten the countries which take part in them; they respect their internal constitution, and their historic organisation; they confine themselves to a fusion of general and external interests, to matters of commerce, and of peace and war. These utilitarian partisans of the independence of each separate nation cannot conceive of the grouping of nations as in the Greater Colombia, the Confederation of the Pacific, or the Southern Alliance, without the existence of obvious commercial interests. It is certainly true that the Zollverein, or permanent customs agreement, was the basis of German unity. But there are moral interests as powerful and as obvious as the interests of commerce. Should not a common danger, such as the Yankee peril in Panama and Central America, impel nations toward federation and unity?

Moreover, federation is not always the result of purely commercial ties. Our century tends to synthetical action. As modern nations were formed by overcoming the old feudal anarchy, so metropolis and colonies are uniting in our days to form formidable empires which merely commercial interests could not explain. What economic tie served as the basis of the South African Federation, a group of hostile races retaining a memory of autonomy? Did not North and South in the United States enter upon a terrible war of interests, and, in spite of this utilitarian antagonism, is not Lincoln, the founder of the Union, as great to-day as Washington, the founder of nationality? The enormous power of the North American nation is the result of this unity. If the patricians of the South had been victorious in the War of Secession, if they had succeeded in annihilating the Federal bond, then instead of the Republic which overawes Europe and aspires to Americanise the world there would be two powerless and inimical States; in the South an oligarchic nation served by slaves, and in the North a feeble assemblage of Puritan provinces, while the Far West would be incapable of resisting the Yellow Peril.

But there are economic ties between the Latin nations, which may assist the preparation of respectable unions. Between Brazil and Chili, Peru and Chili, Bolivia, Chili, and Peru, or the Argentine, Paraguay, and Bolivia, there are actual currents of commercial exchange, of agricultural products from complementary zones, and therein a basis of union may be found.

Latin America cannot continue to live divided, while her enemies are building up vast federations and enormous empires. Whether in the name of race or commercial interests, of common utility or true independence, the American democracies must form themselves into three or four powerful States. The Latin New World is alone in resisting the universal impulse toward the establishment of syndicates and federations, trusts and trades unions, associations and alliances—in short, of increasingly vast and increasingly powerful organisations.

[1] The United States as a World-Power.

[2] See A. Alvarez, Le Droit international americain (Paris, 1910), in which the reader will find an interesting list of problems respecting frontiers, immigration, and means of communication, affecting Latin America in particular, which have on several occasions met with solutions which form the basis of a new law (pp. 271 et seq.).

[3] Alvarez, ibid., p. 189 et seq.