The result was a race of men devoted primarily to their cities; only secondarily to the province or kingdom to which their city belonged, and quite incidentally to Spain as a geographical and linguistic unit. Such a racial tendency could not help developing that disregard of large national interests in preference to petty local concerns which has been a most unfortunate trait in the history of the South American republics. For while it may be true that the conception of the city as the soul of the native country has always been effective from the point of view of the development of civilization, it has been disastrous in its effect on national progress. It was just that loyalty to the municipality that prevented the growth of the Greek Empire.
Another result of the eight hundred years of Christian warfare against the infidel Moor, was the development of moral and physical qualities that made possible the marvellously rapid conquest of America by small companies of conquistadores. Brave, bigoted, courageous, accustomed to continuous hostilities, ardently devoted to a cause for which they were willing to lay down their lives, fighting to the last ditch, it is not surprising that the ancestors of the South Americans were able to achieve such wonderful results in the early sixteenth century.
Only a vigorous and rising nation could have accomplished the great work of exploring, conquering, and colonizing America which was done at that time.
As a matter of fact, a wonderful transformation was then taking place in Spain. The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella had united by personal bonds what had formerly been a handful of detached kingdoms. These countries each had their own laws, their own peculiar customs and separate administrative systems. Some of the provinces were inhabited by people of different stock. The process of unification was almost contemporaneous with the conquest and colonization of America.
For a career destined to be as great as that of any of the larger empires of history, Spain had at the beginning of the colonizing period an inadequate political organization. Spanish racial unity and religious uniformity were of recent growth. The European progenitors of the conquerors did not fight for Spain as a whole, but rather as citizens of a municipality or as vassals of a petty king. The spirit of a centralized, unified government whose citizens are willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of their nation, did not run in their blood. They belonged to a fragmentary and embryonic group of nations. Spain did not adopt a policy of centralization long enough before the acquisition of her American colonies to allow the results of such a change in methods of government to affect popular habits of thought. In the meantime, South America was being colonized by men who had no sense of racial unity and few tendencies towards concerted political action.
Hence it is not at all surprising that their descendants, the heroes of the Wars of Emancipation, did not find it easy or natural to unite under one government. It was in accordance with the history of their race that they should form separate political establishments. It was also in accordance with that Spanish colonial policy which forbade communication between the different colonies and in no way encouraged a community of interests.
Historically then, there was little to cause the South American colonies on achieving their independence, to unite, even had they not been separated by tremendous natural obstacles.
Although the basins of the Amazon, the La Plata, and the Orinoco offered many thousands of miles of navigable highways, the masses of water were too copious and too irregular to be controlled until the era of steam navigation. In the great valleys east of the Andes, the excessive fertility of the soil has produced an enormous area of continuous woodlands, a mass of vegetation that has defied the efforts of centuries to effect clearings and roads. This densely timbered and sparsely inhabited region keeps Venezuela from having any dealings with Bolivia more effectually than if an absolute desert lay between them.
There is nothing that separates one of the United States from another that is at all comparable to the lofty chain of the Andes and the impenetrable jungle that lies for hundreds of miles on the eastern slope of the Cordillera. The more one considers the matter, the more it seems as though nature could not have placed more impassable obstacles in the way of intercommunication if she had set out with that definite purpose in view. In comparison with the difficulties of travelling from Lima, the centre of the old Spanish domain, to Buenos Aires, a journey from New York to Charleston in the days of the American revolution was a mere pleasure jaunt, and yet it seemed difficult enough at that time! Nowhere in the English colonies existed such impediments to communication as the deserts of northern Chile and southern Peru, the swamps of eastern Colombia and western Venezuela, the forests of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, or the gigantic chain of the Andes whose lowest point for thousands of miles is ten thousand feet above the sea.
The founders of the original thirteen English colonies not only inherited racial unity but providentially built their homes on a short strip of coast and occupied a homogeneous country, no larger than a single Spanish colony. Their union followed as a matter of course.
It was quite otherwise in South America. For, as though it were not enough that the tendency of the race was towards building up individual communities rather than federations, as though the laws forbidding the colonists from trading with one another and from travelling from one colony to another were not a sufficient preventive of union, all the forces of nature, mountains, rivers, deserts, swamps, and even winds, combined to promote the isolation of the new republics. The top of the highest mountain in the thirteen English colonies was not half as high as the lowest point in the ranges of lofty mountains that separated the Spanish colonies; nor one third as high as the Uspallata Pass by which Chile is connected with Argentina.
It is not for us to criticise the South Americans for having failed to unite and form a great nation. Our ancestors were favored by nature with a region that is comparatively accessible in all parts. It is not any more creditable to the English colonists that they united than it is discreditable to the Latin-Americans that they did not. In both cases, racial characteristics, aided by diverse policies of colonial administration made a foundation for growth which by an extraordinary coincidence, was in every possible way favored by local geographical conditions.
The English colonists, on securing their independence, had been acquainted with one another for generations; had fought side by side in the French and Indian wars; had intermarried, built up social and business friendships; united in sending agents to the mother country and in sending representatives to Congresses where the leading men of each colony came to know one another’s desires and aspirations. Placed by fate on a narrow strip of coast less in length than the seaboard of Chile alone, enabled by nature to communicate both by sea and land, separated from one another by neither deserts nor lofty mountains, what more likely than that they should have followed their natural traditions and formed a single nation? The difficulties in the way of the South American colonists following such an example were stupendous. Scattered over an enormous area, separated by the greatest natural boundaries that nature has produced, it was scarcely to be expected that they too should not follow the traditions of their race and build up local governments instead of forming a federation.
The historical and geographical reasons that prevented the formation of confederations have also mitigated against the building up of strong national governments. The citizen is still inclined to favor the affairs of his city rather than the good of his country. He finds it easier to be loyal to the local chieftain than to the central government. The cure for this, however, is already in sight. The energy and enterprise of English, French, and German capitalists are overcoming the obstacles that nature has placed in the way of intercommunication.
In time, aided by steam and electric systems of transportation, some of the Southern Republics may even unite with others. But before this comes about it may confidently be expected in the near future that the development of new transportation facilities will make possible the growth of strong national feeling and will prevent the states from falling apart. It will certainly make revolutions less frequent and bring a condition of stability that will even attract American capital and greatly augment European immigration.
CHAPTER V