BOOK V

INTELLECTUAL EVOLUTION

Spain founded universities in America, where she exercised a true monopoly of ideas. The Revolution in her colonies was inspired by the doctrines of the French Encyclopædists. Since then—that is, during the whole of the nineteenth century—the metropolis has been losing the greater portion of her ancient intellectual privileges. Political and literary ideas, romanticism and liberalism, faith in reason and poetic enthusiasm, all these have been imported from France. It is interesting to study the results of this lasting influence in philosophy and letters.

Chapter I

Political Ideology

Conservatives and liberals—Lastarria—Bilbao—Echeverria—Montalvo—Vigil—The Revolution of 1848 and its influence in America—English ideas: Bello, Alberdi—The educationists.

The revolutionists of America hastily sought for an ideology which should ratify their victory. By virtue of French ideas they had demolished an ancient organisation, had thrown off the Spanish tyranny, and had exalted anarchy in speech and in verse. To raise future cities in the wilderness they had need of a political gospel.

They founded the Republic, imported institutions from abroad, and granted all the political liberties to an amorphous crowd. The first disputes were already audible between the defenders of the old order and the radicals who sought to destroy it; conservatives and liberals appeared at an identical moment of republican life. Militarism, revolutions, and the warfare of caudillos were in part explained by the profound differences between the champions of tradition and the soldiers of liberty.

Dominated by the need to live, these nations created a political philosophy. They disregarded criticism and analysis; they affirmed and constructed; they required a faith as intolerant as the archaic dogmas. Democracy and liberalism were the essential articles of this secular religion. To the eyes of the new orthodoxy the convictions of the monarchists and absolutists were dangerous heresies: royalists were prosecuted as free-thinkers had been of old. Thought was not divorced from action. It reflected the political unrest; it prepared or justified political transformations. A species of pragmatism was characteristic of American thought. Poetry was rhymed oratory, lyrical declamation; the poet condemned any form of civil autocracy; he execrated tyrants, or evoked ingenuous liberties; he could not conceive of pure thought as divorced from life. Alberdi, an Argentine thinker, wrote: "Philosophy is meant for politics, morality, industry, and history, and if it does not serve them it is a puerile and a trifling science." He condemned the analysis of the eighteenth century, which "dissolves and corrupts everything"; to vain ideology, to the question whether "ideas and sensations, memory and reminiscence are distinct faculties," he preferred "an Argentine philosophy in which are distilled the social and moral needs of our country; a clear, democratic, progressive, and popular philosophy, with ideas like those of Condorcet; human perfectibility, continual progress of the human species; a philosophy which inspires men with the love of country and the love of humanity."

The champions of liberalism defined the principles of the new social state; they were brilliant commentators, their subject being the ideas of French and Spanish philosophy. Their action in a society in which the old colonial prejudices were still triumphant was categorical and magistral. They created institutions and laws, and applied foreign doctrines to the troubles of the time. Sometimes they seemed inspired in the Biblical sense; they prophesied and condemned, as did Bilbao and Echeverria.

Lastarria, Bilbao, Montalvo, Vigil, and Sarmiento were the leading figures of this romantic period; with them intellectual activity was inseparable from politics. Lastarria and Bilbao opposed the authoritarianism of Chili; Montalvo and Vigil respectively, the clericalism of Ecuador and Peru; Sarmiento, the tyranny of Rosas. Their works were pamphlets, their theories were always practical: criticisms of contemporary reality, or constructive sketches of the State of the future.

Lastarria and Bilbao were the professors of liberalism in Chili. The liberalism of the first was tempered by the influence of Comte, and the study of philosophy and history; that of the second, indisciplined and prophetic, was eventually the bitter protest of a misunderstood evangelist.

Lastarria was the great Chilian reformer, as Bello was the prudent master who disciplined youth and defended tradition and the classic ideology. He was, like Bilbao, a pupil of Bello's, but to the conservative doctrines of the latter he opposed a generous liberalism. He was professor of legislation at the National Institute of Santiago from 1841, and from his professorial chair he criticised Chilian laws and prejudices. At first he followed Bentham in his lectures on constitutional law, and then the French liberals. He was influenced by Herder, by Edgar Quinet, a jurist and a disciple of Krause, and by Ahrens. Finally he accepted certain ideas of Comte's—for instance, the theory of the Three Estates—and endeavoured to reconcile his teaching with that of John Stuart Mill, Toqueville, and Laboulaye.

He believed, as did the romantics, in indefinite progress, liberty, universal harmony, and the power of man as against the inevitability of physical laws; in 1846 his political studies won the eulogy of Edgar Quinet. From a liberal standpoint he studied the evolution of Chili from the Conquest to the Republic.

In the defence of his political faith the professor intervened in the struggles of his country; academic dissertations did not satisfy him; he felt the need of action, of parliamentary agitation. As deputy and publicist he opposed the influence of Portales, the representative of the Chilian oligarchy, and the Constitution of 1833, that admirable piece of conservative legislation. "The State," said Lastarria, "has for its object the respect of the rights of the individual: there is the limit of its action." Portales, on the other hand, considered a strong central authority, a stern tutelage, to be a necessity in the South American republics, subject as they were to crises of anarchy. Liberty seemed to him a premature gift where the crowd was concerned. Lastarria opposed the positive work of the dictator by a vague idealism: liberty of conscience, of work, of association; an executive powerless to limit these liberties; municipal government, federation—such were the fundamental items of his propaganda. In the generality of American constitutions he disapproved of the vague definition of individual rights, the attributions of the public powers, the irresponsibility of these latter, and the amalgamation of colonial political forms with the administrative centralisation of the French régime.

Two Presidents, Bulnes and Montt, from 1841 to 1861, continued the despotic system founded by Portales; against them the liberal professor commenced his magnificent campaign. He was exiled in 1850. He travelled, and continued to publish his political writings. He had studied Comte, Mill, and Toqueville, and he now completed his education in certain directions. His next book, Lessons in Positivist Politics (1874), applied the principles of the Positivist school to the evolution of South America and to Chilian history in particular. He studied the organisation of the powers of the State, of society, and government, and abandoned his former radicalism. He recognised the fact that where Catholicism is the religion of the majority (as in Chili) the State may protect the national Church while exercising the moderate supervision that is known as "patronage."

Lastarria influenced the destinies of Chili. At his death the liberals came into power, and politicians like Santa-Maria and Balmaceda, who supported liberal legislation, may be regarded as disciples of the author of Positivist Politics.

Lastarria was a politician, Bilbao an apocalyptic dreamer. He founded the "Society of Equality," which was a democratic club. A generous and radical nature, he criticised, in a celebrated article on Chilian Sociability (1844), "the tradition, the ancient authority, the faith, the servile customs, the national apathy, the dogma of blind obedience, the respect for the established order, the hatred of innovation, and the persecution of the innovator," which he deplored in his native country. He gave a pitiless analysis of Chilian prejudices, and studied the national problems—commerce, education, marriage, taxation, the functions of Church and State—and answered them in a democratic sense. He was accused of immorality, blasphemy, and sedition. He also attacked the Constitution of 1833, and the minister Montt could not forgive him for this liberal campaign. Ten years later Bilbao was exiled for his leanings toward anarchy, and in Paris he became acquainted with Quinet and Lamennais, the evangelists of his democratic faith. In 1880, on his return to Chili, he resumed his inflammatory courses.

Montalvo in Ecuador represented the same liberal effort as Bilbao and Lastarria. But this democrat had read Montaigne and Voltaire; he was a master of satire, irony, and sarcasm. His contradictory nature united Lamartine's faith in democracy with the scepticism of the eighteenth century. He was not a politician merely, but a man of letters. His wide culture was revealed by the multiple forms in which his intellectual activity found an outlet. As an essayist, by his lyrical disorder, he recalled Carlyle. His harsh criticism of the national clergy in La Mercurial Eclesiastica is as lively as an Italian conte. He imitated Cervantes with perfection; he could make a clever pastiche of Don Quixote. He knew his Byron, Milton, Lamartine, Racine, and the Latin and Spanish classics, and would have been the completest type of the humanist which the Latin New World has produced had not his restless spirit yielded too readily to the solicitations of politics.

In contrast to Garcia-Moreno, the Catholic dictator, Montalvo was the liberal free-lance; he could not forgive the caudillo his long tyranny, his intolerant faith, his submission to the Pope as a supreme monarch. The Ecuadorian polemist believed in liberty and the republic; he detested the theocracy implanted by the Christian President.

But his activities were not destructive; Montalvo was a believer in the manner of the revolutionists of 1848. "A sane and pure democracy has need of Jesus Christ," he wrote in his liberal enthusiasm; he loved Christianity because it was the religion of the democracy. Democracy would be the law of the nations "if some day the spirit of the Gospel were to prevail." He eulogised the stoicism and virtue of the Roman Republic, in the image of which he wished to construct the Chilian democracy, and in a magnificent essay he exalted the nobility of these qualities. He was not a radical like Bilbao; a forerunner of pragmatism, he accepted all useful ideas, even Catholicism, so that it did not become a political tyranny. "There is nothing to be gained by attacking certain beliefs," he wrote, "which by virtue of being general and useful to all will eventually become verities, even if the curious and courageous investigation of bygone things could constitute a motive for doubting them."

An American thinker, he applied Latin ideas to the affairs of the continent. In his Seven Treaties, his capital work, are some superb passages upon the heroes of South American emancipation. His cult was that of Carlyle, religious and full of lyrical passion. "In what is he inferior to the great men of antiquity?" he asks of Bolivar. "Only in this, that no long centuries flow between us, for only time, the great master, can distil in his magic laboratory the chrism with which the princes of nature are anointed." He traces a parallel between Bolivar and Napoleon, between Bolivar and Washington. "In Napoleon there is something more than in other men; a sense, a wheel in the mechanism of understanding, a fibre in the heart. He looks across the world from the Apennines to the Pillars of Hercules, from the pyramids of Egypt to the snows of Russia. Kings tremble, pallid, and half-lifeless; thrones crack and crumble; the nations look up and regard him and are afraid, and bend the knee before the giant." Montalvo admires Napoleon, but he judges Bolivar the superior, because the work of the former was destroyed by mankind, while the work of the latter still prospers. "He who realises great and lasting undertakings is greater than he who realises only great and ephemeral things."

Montalvo believed in the American race, in the mestizos, "in the high, lofty spirit and the stout heart which make the aristocracy of South America." His prophetic enthusiasm exalts the future inhabitants of America, "who will be our descendants when the traveller shall sadly seat himself to meditate upon the ruins of the Louvre, the Vatican, or St. Paul's." To his work of criticism of Garcia-Moreno and the clericals we must add this religious Americanism, this tenacious faith in the destinies of the democracy.

Without the lyric fervour of Montalvo, heavy and dusty as an ancient palimpsest, Vigil represents the struggle of Peruvian liberalism against the power of the Church. Born in 1792, he was a priest, and abandoned his calling, but without retaining, like Renan, the unction of the seminarist. A stoic in his life, the champion of liberty in several Congresses, he devoted his riper years to a long campaign against ecclesiastical privilege. His admirable erudition served him in this propaganda. He defended the State against the encroachments of the clergy. An idealist, he preached universal peace, the union of all American nations, and expounded the excellencies of the democracy, in whose Christian virtues he, like Montalvo, firmly believed. He won respect, as did Bilbao, by the austerity of his life and the sincerity of his exhortations: a Socratic master whose life was harmonious as a poem.

An Argentine thinker, genial and tumultuous, Sarmiento represented a liberalism less coherent than that of Echeverria, but as a champion of the ideal and the intellectual life in the democracy tyrannised over by Rosas he deserves to be placed beside Lastarria and Montalvo. Menendez Pelayo called him the gaucho of the Republic of Letters; for his pugnacious individuality, his barbaric impetuosity, and his semi-culture, which was mitigated by admirable intuition, were inimical to all classic order or discipline. Sarmiento was a romantic by temperament; he attacked Spanish culture in the name of French liberalism, and condemned tradition, which led to slavery; he believed in the virtuality of ideas, the mission of education, and the greatness of democracy. He applied to the United States for models of popular education, and for political examples of federal life. He was a teacher, a journalist, a pamphleteer, and a President.

He analysed Argentine life and the American revolutions; in 1845 he published El Facundo, an evocation of the Argentine civil wars, with all the passion and lyrical fervour of a Michelet. Sarmiento was the enemy of Rosas, as Montalvo was the eloquent rival of Garcia-Moreno. In El Facundo are pages of pitiless criticism of the tyranny of the federal caudillo. Exiled, he founded a review in Chili, in 1842, in which he still attacked Rosas, but he did not confine himself to ephemeral journalism. He discovered eternal elements in the battles of the time; he studied the American man and the American soil, as in the prologue to El Facundo. He then studied the racial problem, and in another book described the ideal republic of which he dreamed. His work is profoundly American.

American liberalism, between 1830 and 1860, was inspired by French ideas. One revolution, that of 1789, explained in part the movement for the conquest of political liberty. Another, that of 1848, found echoes even in these distant democracies, and disturbed them by the insinuating eloquence of a new gospel. A curious parallelism may be observed between the claims of French socialism and American radicalism.

In France the Revolution of 1848 had not only a political tendency, but also a social aspect. An extension of electoral capacity was desired, and the right to work was proclaimed; men fought for the sovereignty of the people, and workshops were founded in which the State assured the subsistence of the working-classes. While the republican parties were fighting against the monarchy of Louis Philippe, Icarians and Communists were preparing for the social revolution; the proletariat was rising against the bourgeoisie, as the Third Estate rose against the nobility of old. A note of equalitarian fervour was noticeable in the protest of the crowd. The leaders of the movement against Guizot and his oligarchy of property-owners were socialists: Louis Blanc, Pierre Leroux, Blanqui, and Ledru-Rollin; they supplemented their democratic victories by a programme of social reform.

In Latin America the Revolution was chiefly political; it demanded the suffrage, equality before the law, and respect for political rights, and it condemned the excesses of authority. It did not forget to make a social protest, but the conflict of classes was not as yet very violent.

"The Revolution of 1848 was loudly echoed in Chili," wrote the historian Vicuña-Mackenna. To combat the oligarchy the young Lastarria brothers, Bilbao, the Amunategui, the three Mattas, the three Blests, Santiago Arcos, and Diego Barros-Arana founded the "Society of Equality," a secret club, "to save the people from the shameful tutelage to which it has been subjected."[1]

This tutelage was more especially political; for this reason the club proclaimed democratic principles: the sovereignty of reason, the sovereignty of the people, and universal love and brotherhood. These young men opened schools for the people. Lillo published a translation of The Words of a Believer, by Lamennais, which served the radical circle for their Bible.

But the real master of the new generation in Chili and in the other democracies was Lamartine. "From 1848 to 1858 he was a demi-god, a second Moses," wrote a historian. The "young men" formed a commentary upon the History of the Girondists. They imitated the great figures of the French Revolution: Bilbao was Vergniaud; Santiago Arcos, Marat; Lastarria, Brissot. Societies were formed, congresses were held; one exalted group called itself The Mountain.

In Venezuela, in 1846, a demagogue by the name of Antonio Leocadio Guzman offered the people the abolition of slavery and the repartition of the soil; he led a revolution against society and the Government. In Colombia the liberal Constitution of 1853 was an echo of the French Revolution of 1848, and democratic clubs were formed as in Chili. They ruled the country by means of terror, were predominant in the journals, and propagated socialism and hatred of the oligarchy of property-owners and the omnipotent clergy. The liberals evoked Christ as the first democrat, whence the faction known as Golgotha. Anarchy increased in the provinces. Bishops and conservative notabilities were pursued, the Jesuits were expelled, and in 1851 the slaves were freed. A discontent of long standing was revealed by the activities of these eloquent revolutionaries, who imitated, like the Chilian Girondists, the French politicians of the Revolution.

"Democracy," Lamartine had said in 1848, "is, in principle, the direct reign of God." His ideal was an equalitarian Republic. His political ideas were drawn from the New Testament; he saw in the French Revolution "a Divine and holy thought." Charity, the protection of the disinherited, equality, and fraternity—in short the whole democratic creed—was merely the application of Christian ideas to the world of politics. Lamartine wrote in defence of all the liberties, and wished the Government to be "an instrument of God." We can understand what enthusiasm this eloquence, impregnated as it was with idealism and the love of humanity, must have produced in America; we find the accents of Lamartine echoed in the words of Montalvo as well as Bilbao. Anarchy presently became a sort of mystic rebellion against tyrants. Throughout all South America Lamartine and the Revolution of 1848 inspired men's speech or writings, and engendered revolutions or fresh tyrannies.

The influence of France was sovereign. The influence of Guizot and the doctrinaires must be added to that of Lamartine. English ideas also were prevalent; Bentham was the great authority on political science from the earliest years of the Republic; at his death the Central American Congress, which had followed his teaching, proclaimed a period of mourning. In Colombia General Santander quoted against Bolivar phrases inspired by English radicalism and by Destutt de Tracy. Bentham harshly criticised the Contrat Social of Rousseau, and his pretended "natural rights"; policy he based upon the happiness of the greatest number. Tracy professed a moderate relativism, and utilitarian ideas, like Bentham. Bolivar, unlike these professors of individualism, believed in the benefits of a moral dictatorship.

Bello again represented English thought, not only in his philosophical work, but also in his writings as jurist. He was, like the classic legislators, the creator of the written law. His civil code, promulgated in Chili in 1855, served other nations as a model, and his Law of Nations became the international law of South America. He was born into the world for the purpose of pouring language as well as law into logical moulds. In his legislative work he displayed a severe analysis, a British prudence, and a constant recognition of social realities. He hated the vague and the nebulous, and liked to express his ideas in clear, concrete formulæ; he brought to the solution of social problems a solid common sense.

Alberdi also adopted British methods and ideas. In France he especially admired Guizot, and distrusted Lamartine. He attacked the sterile intellectualism of his fellow-Americans, and wrote in defence of Protestantism, a religion peculiarly appropriate to republics on a Catholic continent. He believed in the English constitutional monarchy, in the benefits of technical schools, and in the disastrous effects of a parasitical scholarship; he preferred strong governments, like that of Chili, and detested demagogues. "The Republic," he wrote, "has been and is still the bread of Presidents, the trade of soldiers, the industry of lawyers without causes, and journalists without talent; the refuge of the second-rate of every species, and the machine for the amalgamation of all the dross of society." Such was his verdict on the political system of South America.

He called for a monarchy as the only salvation of the country: "thus the Republics might unite themselves to Europe, whence their riches and their civilisation derive, and resist the monopoly of North America." From European influence he hoped to obtain not only culture, but also the consecration of political independence. He begged the Old World for emigrants, for capital, and for princes. In an admirable volume published in 1858 he analysed the "bases" of the Argentine organisation. This book was no Latin gospel; with the "relativity" of an Anglo-Saxon he proposed practical solutions; he ascribed supremacy to population, strong governments, laborious immigrants, and industrial wealth; he disdained the ideology of the revolutionists, and their implacable Jacobinism. His effort may be compared to that of Burke in his criticism of the French Revolution. Amid the sterile enthusiasm of romantic politicians his book stands out, in its gravity, sobriety, common sense, and realism, like a lesson for all time.

Other American conservatives were Lucas Alaman, leader of the Mexican conservatives and author of a fine history of his country; Bartolome Herrera, a follower of Guizot, in Peru; Cecilio Acosta, in Venezuela: these were in agreement with Alberdi upon certain points of his ample doctrine. Like the Argentine, Acosta wished to see more elementary and secondary schools and fewer universities, to find "practical knowledge replacing a parchment scholarship; free speech and thought the fetters of the peripatetic school; and generalisation, casuistry." The jurists obeyed the same tendency; they were positive and analytic spirits; they brought clarity and discipline to an incoherent politics. Among them we may cite, after Bello, Calvo, Garcia Calderon, Velez Sarsfield, and Ambrosio Montt. They opposed the ineffectual Constitutions of the precisians.

Liberal idealism vanquished conservative good sense. Lastarria attracted impetuous youth more than Bello and Alberdi; Guizot had few readers; Lamartine and Benjamin-Constant were popular. Liberalism, radicalism, Jacobinism: these were the various disguises of South American anarchy.

[1] Za piola, La Sociedad de la Igualdad, Santiago, 1902, p. 8.