it was to break one law could not be expected to have much respect for other laws, nor for the bribe-taking rulers and mulish legislators.
Nevertheless, against these outrageously unreasonable regulations the colonists for centuries made no armed protest. They never questioned the abstract right of the Crown to forbid them to sell what the labour of their hands had produced. They evaded but did not contest. Centuries of this sort of thing ingrained into South Americans the belief that industrial and commercial activity exists only by sufferance of the government. The right to sell, to buy, to exercise a profession or a trade, depended on the permission of the government. The people saw the executives taxing industry at their pleasure, and suppressing its very beginnings, until such a procedure came to seem a matter of course. Commercial spirit was constantly hampered and business skill deprived of its rewards. The evil effects of such a policy can be seen at every step of the development of the Spanish-American countries. It is no wonder that office-holding became the most popular of avocations. The farmer, the stock-raiser, and the merchant seemed to be allowed to exist only to pay the Spanish functionary, instead of the government's existing for the benefit of the producing community. To this day, service with the government is more esteemed than commercial pursuits. The national ideals are only slowly becoming industrial.
The King of Castile was absolute sovereign and sole proprietor of America. The continent was an appanage of his crown; it did not form an integral part of Spain; America and Spain were connected solely through their common allegiance to him. The King governed America directly, assisted not by his regular ministers, but by a body of personal advisers called the Council of the Indies. His representatives in South America were the Viceroys of Mexico and Peru. The latter's jurisdiction extended over all South America. Certain great territorial divisions had been made Captaincies-General, and though theoretically subordinate to the Viceroy, they were in effect independent of him. In the great capital cities sat bodies of high judicial and executive officials known as Audiencias. Among their functions was that of exercising the powers of the Viceroy during his absence. Charcas, the capital of the mining region of Bolivia, was the seat of an Audiencia, and since this city had no resident Viceroy or Captain-General its Audiencia was the real supreme authority over the Argentine and all the territory east of the Cordillera, from Lake Titicaca to the Straits.
Viceroyalties and Captaincies-General were divided into provinces, each of which was ruled by a royal governor. When the Spaniards permanently occupied a new region their first step was to found a city and organise a municipal government. Like the Romans, they knew no other unit of political structure. The governing body was called a Cabildo and consisted of from six to twelve members who held office for life. It conducted the ordinary judicial and civil administration through officers selected by itself and from its own members. Though the governor was ex-officio president of this body, and although its members had bought their places, they were not mere figureheads to register his will. Limited though their functions were, they represented the time-honoured governmental form into which Spaniards had always crystallised, and the Creoles could not be prevented from obtaining a preponderant influence in them. Throughout colonial times they represented local and Creole interests and operated continually as a check to the aggression of the military governors.
The territorial jurisdiction of a municipality was usually ill-defined. Indeed, as a rule, in the days of settlement it extended in every direction until the claim of another city was encountered, and the terms "city" and "province," were, therefore, usually synonymous. As population grew denser new cities were founded which as municipalities were independent of the capital town, but they were not necessarily separated from the original province. The Cabildo of the capital of a province bore a peculiar relation to the royal governor, and often tried to exercise a control over the affairs of the whole province, deeming themselves his associates and the sharers of the functions he exercised, outside of its own boundaries, as well as within them. This assumption was favoured by the fact that no general body representing all the cities of a province existed, nor any constitutional machinery by which they could act in common.
Spanish-Americans have known only two forms of government, which have everywhere and always co-existed, though they seem inconsistent. First, there is an executive—the limits of his power ill-defined, and often imposing his will by force, in essence arbitrary and personal, and feared rather than respected by the people; secondly, the Cabildos and the modern deliberative bodies. Never really elective, these have nevertheless performed many of the functions of bodies truly representative; they have checked the arbitrary executives and furnished a basis for government by discussion. For centuries the communities looked to them for the conduct of ordinary local governmental affairs, and they survived all the storms of colonial and revolutionary times. On the other hand, their importance in the Spanish governmental scheme has been a most potent influence in preventing the growth of local representative government by elective assemblies and officials. Consequently, in national matters, freely elected and truly representative assemblies have been hard to obtain. Legislation has been controlled by the functionaries, and there has been no general and continuous participation in governmental affairs by the body of the people. Government by discussion and by the common-sense of the majority is difficult to establish among a people accustomed for centuries to seeing matters in the hands of officials whom they had no practical means of holding to responsibility. The people have rarely felt that the executive was their own officer. He was imposed on them from above, he was not amenable to them, and so far as they were concerned he ruled at his own risk. The Creoles were intensely democratic in feeling and hard to control, and when they could not tolerate an executive they turned him out by force, because no effective machinery existed by which they could turn him out peaceably.
Though the colonial governor was required to give an account of his administration at the close of his term, as a matter of fact he was an irresponsible and despotic satrap, who taxed, judged, and imprisoned people at his pleasure, restrained only by his traditional respect for the Cabildos and by the fear of exciting revolt. He commanded the armed forces, and his power was, in fact, rather military than civil in origin, method, and application. The Cabildos selected the ordinary judicial officers of first resort from among their own members' list, but their authority was not very effective outside the town itself. The vast plains between the settlements were largely governed patriarchally by the ranch owners and the popular and capable gauchos who grew into leaders.
A taste for town life soon became characteristic of the Spanish-Americans, and wherever able they crowded into the towns in preference to staying on their ranches. Wealth, intelligence, and political activity, therefore, came to be concentrated in a few foci. The system of granting immense tracts of land and dividing up the Indians as slaves among the proprietors would apparently have a tendency to produce a landed aristocracy. But the money profits in colonial days were small, and the great landowner lived in the same style as his poorer neighbour. Titles of nobility did not exist, and the constitution of society was decidedly democratic. From the very earliest times no love was lost between the Creoles and the newly arrived Spaniards. The governor was almost invariably a Spaniard, while the Cabildo and its officers were usually Creoles.
CHAPTER III
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The greatest name in the history of Buenos Aires during the early years of the seventeenth century is that of Hernandarias Saavedra. Of distinguished ancestry and pure Spanish blood, he was born at Asuncion in 1561. A thorough Creole, his education was confined to the instruction he received at the convent of the Franciscan Fathers in his native town. At fifteen he left school and joined an expedition against the Indians of the Andes. He showed remarkable capacity in fighting on the plains, and his shrewdness and firmness in dealing with the aborigines were even more valuable than his courage. Juan de Garay, the far-sighted Basque who founded Buenos Aires, was the patron, model, and hero of young Hernandarias,