Latin America. Its Rise and Progress

There are two Americas. In the north, the "Outre-Mer" of Bourget, is a powerful industrial republic, a vast country of rude energies, of the "strenuous life." In the south are twenty leisurely states of unequal civilisation, troubled by anarchy and the colour problem. The prestige of the United States, their imperialism, and their wealth, have cast a shade over the less orderly Latin republics of the south. The title of America seems to be applied solely to the great imperial democracy of the north.

Yet among these American nations are wealthy peoples whose domestic organisation has been greatly improved, such as the Argentine, Brazil, Chili, Peru, Bolivia, and Uruguay. They must not be confounded with the republics of Central America, with Hayti or Paraguay. French writers and politicians, such as M. Anatole France, M. Clemenceau, and M. Jaurès, who have visited the Argentine, Brazil, and Uruguay, have remarked there not only an established Latin culture, but noble efforts in the direction of augmenting the internal peace of the nations, and extraordinary riches. They are agreed in declaring that these young countries possess economic forces and an optimism which will yield them a brilliant future.

Several of these states have lately celebrated their first centenary. Their independence was won during the first decade of the nineteenth century. The year 


1810 was the beginning of a new epoch, during which autonomous republics were formed, not without tragedy, upon the remnants of the Spanish power.

The time has come, it would seem, to study these peoples, together with their evolution and progress, unless we are willing to take it as proved that the United States of North America are the sole focus of Transatlantic civilisation and energy.

We propose to draw up the balance-sheet of these South American republics. This is the object of this book. We must seek in the history of these states the reason of their inferiority and the data which relate to their future.

First of all we must study the conquering race which discovered and colonised America. We must analyse the Spanish and Portuguese genius, the Iberian genius, half European, half African. After the conquest new societies sprang up under the stern domination of Spain and Portugal. They were over-seas theocracies, jealously guarded from all alien trade. Unlike Saxon America, where the Dutch and English immigrants held themselves sternly apart from the Indians, pursuing them and forcing them westward, in South America conquerors and conquered intermingled. The half-castes became the masters by force of numbers, conceiving a thirst for power and a hatred of the proud and overbearing Spaniards and Portuguese. War broke out between the Iberians and the Americans; it was a civil war. Then new states were rapidly formed, without traditions of government or established social classification.

These states were dominated by military chieftains, by caudillos. From barbarism and periodic anarchy proceeded the Dictators. We shall be able to study some of the representative personalities of this period, and to disentangle from the monotonous development of events the history of certain nations, such as 


Brazil, in which the social medley has been dominated by the principle of authority. In the Argentine, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Chili we shall perceive a new industrial order, by means of which political life grows less disturbed and the caudillos lose their authority (Books I. and II.).

The study of intellectual evolution shows us how great is the power of ideology in these rising democracies. They imitate the French Revolution; they submit themselves to the influence of the ideas of Rousseau and the Romantics, and of the doctrines of the individualists. America, Spanish and Portuguese by origin, is becoming French by culture (Book III.).

Here we proceed to the study of the part played by the Latin spirit in the formation of these peoples, and the perils which threaten them, whether these proceed from the United States, from Germany, or from Japan, and to consider the faults and the qualities of this spirit (Book IV.). Then follows an analysis of the problems and the future of Latin America (Book V.).

The conclusion to be drawn from this examination is that the political life of the Ibero-American peoples is as yet chaotic, but that some of them have already cast off the fetters of an unfortunate heredity. Across the ocean liberty and democracy are steadily becoming realities. In the battles of the future the support of America will be valued by the great peoples of the Mediterranean who are struggling for the supremacy of the Latin race.

Here is a book that should be read and digested by every one interested in the future of the Latin genius. It is written by a young Peruvian diplomatist. It is full of life and of thought. History, politics, economic and social science, literature, philosophy—M. Calderon is familiar with all and touches upon all with competence and without pedantry. The entire evolution of the South American republics is comprised in the volume which he now submits to the European public.

M. Calderon, a pupil in the school of the best modern historians, seeks in the past the laws of the future development of the Latin republics. By means of a scholarly and painstaking analysis, he shows us, in the South American Creole, a Spaniard of the heroic age, slowly transformed by miscegenation and the influence of climate; he sees in him, modified by time and enfeebled by cross-breeding, the most ancient characteristics of the Iberian race; and he expounds, in a few pages, the heroic epoch in which the individualism of Spain broke out into the audacious adventure of the conquistadores and the savage mysticism of the Inquisitors.

Then comes the colonial phase, with its disappointments, its illusions, its abuses and errors; the domination of an oppressive theocracy, of crushing monopolies; the insolence of privileged castes, and the indignities of the Peninsular agents. A thirst for independence gradually possesses the Spanish and Portuguese colonies; they rebel not merely against the economic and fiscal tyranny which is crushing them, but also against the rigours of a political and 


moral tutelage that leaves them no political liberty. It is a great and terrible crisis. The movement of liberation fulfils itself in three phases: firstly, the colonies seek to obtain reforms of the metropolis, still anxious to remain loyal; then they consider the question of submitting themselves to European monarchs; and, finally, the republican idea appears, develops, and is victorious.

A cycle of pioneers and a cycle of liberators: M. Calderon expounds this tragic history with a sense of gratitude. He examines with remarkable insight the fundamental causes of the Revolution—the excesses of Spanish absolutism; the influence of the Encyclopædia and the doctrines of 1789; the example of North America; the gold of England, and the intervention of Canning; the various converging forces whose fulminating combination created a new world, ill prepared for social life, fragmentary, and in travail.

M. Calderon transports us into certain of the portions of this newborn America. He makes this the occasion of setting before us a whole gallery of vigorously painted pictures. The field of vision is occupied successively by Paraguay, with the long dictatorship of its first caudillo, the gloomy, taciturn Francia, with his authoritative traditions and warlike instincts; Uruguay, with its intensely national life; Ecuador, bearing the heavy imprint of Garcia Moreno; Peru, with its tormented history, the powerful but fortunate dictatorship of Don Ramon Castilla and Manuel Pardo and the epidemic of speculation, the insanity of the saltpetre and guano booms, the abuse of loans, warfare and anarchy, and the present effort towards economic recovery and national stability; Bolivia, with the cold and crafty ambition of Santa-Cruz; Venezuela, with the gross and material audacity of Paez, and the empirical despotism of Guzman-Blanco, that politician without doctrines, avid of power, but a patriot and a paternal 


ruler. As M. Calderon says, the history of these Republics is difficult to distinguish from that of their caudillos, those representative men who personify, at any given moment, the virtues and vices of their peoples.

After the magnificent epic of Simon Bolivar, which M. Calderon recalls with the enthusiasm of gratitude, there commenced a troublous era of military anarchy. The ambition of the caudillos rent South America and multiplied her states. But the soul of germinating nationalities was steeped in the blood of battles, and in the heart of each people a national conscience was awakened. This was the troublous epoch of wars and revolutions.

The South American lived a life of danger, like the Florentine of the Renaissance or the Frenchman of the Terror; but presently, in the shadow of military power, wealth was evolved and order established; property became more secure, and existence more tame and normal; it was the advent of industry, commercialism, and peace. It seems to me that M. Calderon rather regrets having been born too late into a world already too old. What he terms the twilight of the caudillos fills him with a melancholy nostalgia for the bygone days. The tyrants, who were as a rule supported by the negroes and half-castes, helped to destroy racial differences and oligarchies. They have thus founded democracies which the liberal mind of M. Calderon cannot regard without goodwill, but which, to his mind, are too far lacking in the sense of solidarity; they are clumsy, inorganic, incapable of associating human effort; the rivalry of families and the hatred of factions absorbs and disturbs them, as it did the mediæval republics, and under the brilliant polish of French ideals they mask a confused medley of Europeans and Indians, Asiatics and Africans.

In these turbulent republics, however, M. Calderon is able clearly to perceive the reassuring symptoms 


of a powerful vitality, and he does not despair of seeing them profit in the near future by the influence of Latin discipline. From the scholastic erudition of the colonial epoch, he attentively follows the intellectual evolution of the South American populations, through the troublous mists of political ideology, to the hitherto pallid imitations of European philosophies. Despite the diversity of races intermingling in the southern continent, he is convinced that the constant and secular action of the Roman law, a common religion, and French ideals, has given these young republics a Latin conscience, intangible and sacred. And he expresses the hope, very wisely and reasonably, that the peoples of South America will continue in the path of self-improvement without breaking with the traditions that are natural to them, and without subjecting themselves to alien influences.

He goes on to review the German peril, the North American peril, and the Japanese peril. He does not fail to realise the extent of the first named, and he complains of the progress of the commercial immigration of Germans, especially in the southern provinces of Brazil; but he considers that the German element, in the very process of fecundation, will disappear amidst the mass of the nation. He is, on the other hand, very keenly concerned with the North American peril. Not that he fails to do justice to the marvellous qualities of the Anglo-Saxon race; not that he is indifferent to the prestige of the great northern Republic, or that he is forgetful of its services to the cause of American autonomy; but he feels the increasing weight of a tutelage originally beneficent, and anxiously demands, Quis custodiet custodem? He is not oblivious of the fact that the Monroe doctrine is changing, that it has insensibly passed from the defensive to intervention, and from intervention to conquest, and this metamorphosis gives him food for reflection. Whatever the qualities of Yankee civilisation, it is not Latin civilisation, and 


M. Calderon would not have the latter sacrificed to the former. He implores South America to defend itself against the danger of a Saxon hegemony, to enrich itself by means of European influences, to encourage French and Italian immigration, and to purify its races by an influx of new blood.

In the Japanese, as in the German, M. Calderon sees an indefatigable emissary of the Imperialist idea. According to him, no antagonism is more irreducible than that of America and Japan. Japanese artisans are invading the shipyards and foundries of Chili, Peru, and Brazil. They form a refractory element which will never be assimilated. He foresees that the supremacy of Japan may shortly extend over the entire Pacific, and that the whole of America will find it no trivial task to oppose this formidable power. From beginning to end of this book we hear the rallying-cry of the Latin republics. I believe that at heart M. Calderon regrets the excessive division of the states of South America. But the problem of unity, often brought to the fore in congresses and conferences, appears to him insoluble, and in default of this he would be content with intellectual alliances, with economic or fiscal unions, which would still permit the various republics to draw nearer to one another, to know one another better, and in time and on occasion to associate their defensive efforts.

I do not feel competent to criticise the advice which M. Calderon offers his compatriots.

In particular I cannot speak of his opinions concerning the presidential system in the republics of South America, and their constitutional methods, which differ so sensibly from our French parliamentary methods.

I would only remark that M. Calderon is right in warning the American states against a plague of which we in France know something, but which in young societies, deficient in established traditions, and without ancient and well-tried organisations, may 


well be exceptionally dangerous—the invasion of a parasitical bureaucracy, which would increasingly develop itself at the expense of the healthy portions of the nation, and which would gradually infect the soundest and most vital tissues.

Finally, without indiscretion, I may perhaps express my approval of M. Calderon's stern requisition against the policy of excessive loans. It is by running into debt over unlicensed extravagances that certain of the South American republics have gained in Europe the reputation of being financially unsound or dishonest, and have thereby, by mere force of proximity, injured the repute of wiser and more economical states.

Since the republics of South America have need of European money, they would be greatly at fault did they alienate it by excessive or reckless budgets.

Never, I believe, shall we see the dismal hour which M. Calderon's imagination hears already striking; when, expelled by Slavs and Teutons, the Latins of the old world will be forced to take refuge on the shores of the blue sea that bore their floating cradle; and a Frenchman may be forgiven for refusing to believe that the capital of classic culture will ever pass from Paris to Buenos-Ayres, as it has passed from Rome to Paris. But without lingering over such alarming anticipations as these we may delight our eyes with brighter and more immediate prospects. May South America, while remaining herself, while cultivating, as M. Calderon advises her to cultivate, the American ideal, grow ever more and more hospitable to the literature, the arts, the commerce, and the capital of France. Thereby the great Latin family can only gain in material prosperity and moral authority.

RAYMOND POINCARÉ

(of the French Academy).


(M. Poincaré wrote this Preface in December, 1911, before he became President of Council and Minister of Foreign Affairs.)