upon them by the mere passport of a tourist's ticket—as are these vast territories of forest, desert and Cordillera, Nature, though grand and spacious, is ill at ease, and the mood might seem to be impressed upon the people of the land that neither is there peace for them. For they have soaked their land with the blood of their own sons, and we might at times despair of self-government here.
But we need not despair. The malady is but part of one that afflicts the whole world, whose cure awaits the turning of the next page of human evolution—a page which can be turned whenever slothful humanity desires to do it.
Spanish America is really one of the most interesting fields of travel in the world, even if it does not make great pretension of its attractions. From the point of view of the holiday-maker it has remained undeveloped. The traveller who requires luxuriance of travel, of hotel and pleasure-resort, such as the playgrounds of Europe afford, will not find such here, except perhaps in a few of the more advanced cities. It is a continent which, despite its four centuries of discovery, has so far done little more than present its edge to the forces—and pleasures—of modern life. Nature is in her wildest moods: it is an unfinished world; mankind is still plastic. The mountain trail and the horse are more in evidence than the railway and the motor-car; the fonda rather than the hotel. Here, moreover, Don Quixote de la Mancha has taken up his abode, and we may find him often, to our pleasure if we like his company, as some of us do.
But let us dismount. Here are beautiful cities too. A sensitive and developing people, the Spanish American folk would resent any aspersion of their civilization. They have all the machinery of culture to their hand. Here the Parisian toilette rubs shoulders in their streets and plazas with the blanketed and sandalled Indian; the man of fashion and the man of the Stone Age walk the same pavement. Here in these pleasing towns—some of them marvels of beauty, some of them in an atmosphere of perpetual spring, some miles above the sea—are palaces of justice, art and science. Here are republican kings and plutocrats, rich with the product of the field and mine, here are palms and music, homes of highly cultured folk, speaking their soft Castilian: shops stored with all the luxury of Europe or the United States. Here are streets of quaint colonial architecture, and courteous hosts and hostesses, and damsels of startling beauty in all the elegance of the mode.
Here, too, are smooth-tongued lawyer statesmen, dominating (as they always do) the Senatorial Councils. It is true that from time to time there are disturbing elements when rude soldier-politicians break in upon the doctor-politicians with the clatter of a mule-battery, on the pavement, and the sword takes the place of the bauble; it is true that the walls of the streets are pitted here and there with bullet marks, from some whiff of grapeshot, and that there are stains of blood upon the pavements; and it is true that against the white walls of justice, science, art and oratory stands silhouetted the figure of the poor Indian, or peon, who slinks humilde amid the palms and music—doffing his hat as he passes the Cathedral precincts—and that the veneer of civilization, torn aside, reveals at times both the cultured and the uncultured savage.
Here, too, congregate the merchants and traffickers of all the world, Old and New, from all the four corners of the earth to buy and sell. Here is the Frenchman with his emporium of finery, the Spaniard with his groceries, or the Italian with his wares, the Arab with his little shop, the Chinaman with his laundry (and his peculiar affinity with the Indian, perhaps of the same mother-race), the German with his hardware, drugs and cheap jewellery and much besides; the English or American with every commodity, and in addition his mining schemes and railways and steamers, or his municipal stocks and bonds. For Spanish America is now a peculiarly attractive Mecca of the international merchant and pedlar, who does it services both good and ill.
Here, in this financial and business field, the Englishman has been predominant (though that predominance may not always be, for he is closely pressed now and must not muddle on).
England, indeed, soon conquered a world commercially which she bungled in overcoming in conquest. She early scorned Columbus, or would not help him; at Cartagena, Callao, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Buenos Ayres, and elsewhere, her admirals and generals seem to have failed, and she secured but a couple of small footholds on the continent and some rich islands off its coast. Perhaps it was destiny; perhaps we would not now have it otherwise, and the Spanish American civilization develops more interestingly alone. But interesting too would have been a British Indian Empire in America, perhaps with possibilities and results of value to the world.
But, despite all this, the British name here stands high, and heaven grant it always may.
Not for all her past misdeeds, nor the present defects arising from them, shall we forget the gifts that Spain has made to the New World. To-day it might indeed be said that some of the main problems of colonial empires are but beginning (as witness Egypt and India under British rule). Spain made nations, even it they afterwards fell from her by misgovernment or from natural causes. She implanted her religion, literature, culture, language, architecture over hundreds of thousands of miles of forbidding desert and Cordillera, as we shall see in these pages. Over a zone of the earth's territory seven thousand miles long, from the Mexican border with the United States, throughout the twenty Republics of Central and South America, to the tapering end of Chile, the Spanish language is the medium of communication, a language-area vaster than any in the world.
And Portugal, the patron of great voyagers and explorers, has left her mark and language upon her half of the New World, the old empire of Brazil, with a population greater than that of all her neighbours combined. Less dominating than the Spaniard in the long run—for Portugal has always said of herself that she could conquer but not colonize—Portugal has left her own Iberian culture in Latin America.
Here, indeed, are the elements of life in the making, of a civilization whose life is before it rather than behind it; often picturesque, often sombre, always, as we have said, a world of its own, and possessed of its own peculiar attractiveness.
Some rather serious doubts have assailed my mind in regard to the succeeding portion of this chapter, as to how far the weighty matters of geography and travel-description may be treated informally. Dare we "speak disrespectfully of the Equator," or too lightly tread over Cancer or Capricorn?
But the home-returned traveller knows that treatment of geography and travel is generally informal—not to say casual—especially among our good English folk, and at dinner, where white shirt-fronts do gleam, and feminine elegance is displayed, he may have to answer somewhat elemental questions upon the whereabouts of this or that land, region, or locality he has visited, or upon the nature and customs of its particular inhabitants.
Nor is this confined to Society chatter alone at such pleasant moments. In the London Board Room perhaps some stout and comfortable director of possibly half a dozen companies whose operations are of no meanly distributed geographical range may ask where such and such a country is, with most complacent ignorance of maps and globes; perhaps, also, in a few words doing what it was long since said we could not do, "drawing up an indictment against a whole nation," for doubtless weighty (financial) reasons of his own. As to the general public, it goes on its way careless of where places are—except that, by reason of the Great War, it has grown accustomed to looking at the maps so beneficially inserted in the columns of our daily Press, and strives to hold the balance between kilometres and miles.
The foregoing lack of familiarity with the round world and they that dwell therein is especially true of the lands of Spanish America (or Latin America, to use that more cumbrous but more accurate term). "Where in the world is Ecuador, or Costa Rica, or Paraguay?" some one may impatiently exclaim if we mention that we were held up by quarantine in Guayaquil on account of yellow fever, or other incident of other spot. "Where is Bolivia?" is another not infrequent query, but generally made in ignorance of its first and classical utterance, it is reputed, in the anecdote relating to Lord Palmerston and the President—many years ago—of that Republic.
Some think Mexico is in South America, and, no doubt drawing their ideas from their or their parents' study of Prescott in the Victorian age, ask if the Mexicans really wear feathers and carry knives. The position of Peru puzzles many good folk, although it is generally believed to be somewhere in South America, which of course is right. Chile, again; where does it lie?