Читать книгу Spanish America: Its Romance, Reality and Future - C. Reginald Enock - Страница 7

Who has not felt at some time the lure of Spanish America, the attraction of those half-mysterious lands—Peru or Panama, Mexico or Brazil, and all that galaxy of far-off States, with the remains of their ancient civilization and their picturesque modern setting—beneath the equatorial sun, beyond the Western sea? They drew us in our youth, were it but in the pages of Prescott, when with Cortes and Pizarro the Aztec and Inca Empires lay before us; they draw us even in maturer years.

Yonder lies the Spanish Main, glittering in the sun as when we sailed it first—in that long-foundered pirate craft of boyhood; there stretch the tropic shores of wild Guiana; there the great Andes rears its towering crests, and over golden sands the Orinoco and the Amazon pour down their mighty floods; whilst, in slumberous and mysterious majesty beyond, wide as the sea of Time, the vast Pacific echoes on its boundless shores. And for those, who would seek the true El Dorado of the West the great Sixteenth Century has not closed yet, nor ever will; the days of ocean-chivalry are not dead, the Elizabethan mariners come and go, for their voyages have no end within those spacious days of history.

Spanish America, in fact, is enshrouded in an atmosphere of romance and interest which time does not easily dispel, and remains a land of adventure and enterprise. Its sunny shores, its picturesque folk with their still semi-mediaeval life, despite their advancing civilization—the great untravelled spaces, the forests, the mountains, the rivers, the plains, and all they contain, the lure and profit of commerce and of trafficking—all these are matters we cannot separate from the New World as peopled by Spain and Portugal.

It is, moreover, peculiarly a world of its own, born in an impressionable period, indelibly stamped with the strong individualism of the Iberian people who overcame it, and it remains apart, refusing the hegemony of the commercialistic age—a circumstance for which we may be grateful, in a sense. Its future is on the lap of the unknown, offering always the unexpected: geography has everywhere separated it from the Old World; temperament keeps the seclusion.

Whatever be our errand in this new world—erroneously termed "new," for it is old, and had its folk, its Toltecs and pre-Incas, in the apogee of their ancient culture developed a shipbuilding as they did a temple-building art, they might have come sailing around the world and found us here in Britain still "painted savages"; whatever, I say, be our errand there, we shall not understand Spanish America and its people, just as they will never understand us, the people of Anglo-Saxon race. The gulf between us is as deep as the Atlantic, as wide as the Pacific. The incomprehensible Spaniard has added himself to the unfathomable Indian, the red-brown man who sprang from the rugged soil of America (perhaps from some remote Mongolian ancestry), who, inscrutable as a dweller of the moon, is still sullen and secretive as he was and well might be—after the rapine which followed on the white man's keel and sail upon his shores four centuries ago; the white conqueror, who in his adventurous greed destroyed the Egypt and the Chaldea of America and trampled their autochthonous civilization in the dust.

And as to the Spaniards, it is their strong individualism which presents a marked attraction here, though one which may not generally have been put into words: the individualism of nations founded upon historical and geographical bases, as has already been said. We approach here, not a mere United States of Spanish America, not a confederation of vast municipalities or provinces whose borders are imaginary parallels or meridians, but a series of independent nations, each stamped with its own character, bearing its own indelible and romantic name, whose frontiers are rivers and mountain ranges.

Is there any virtue in these things? In the day when prosaic commercialism, when megalomania and money so sway us, there is a refreshing atmosphere about the refusal to conglomerate of these picturesque communities, whose names fall pleasingly on our ears. Yet there are penalties too. Rugged and difficult of approach—the vulgar gaze may not easily rest 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? Did not some one once describe Chile—if you look at the map—as a country two thousand miles long and two inches wide? Again, striving to give an idea of the vast length of Chile, one writer of the country has graphically remarked that you may conceive it as a "long, narrow trough of which one end could be placed at Queenstown and the other near New York, but along which luggage could not be rolled." No offence is here meant to the enterprising people of that land, who resisted so stoutly the pretensions of their neighbours of Argentina in order that this narrow width might not be pared down still closer, a contention finally ended by the arbitration of King Edward of Britain.

For both Argentina and Brazil seem to have been bent, at one time or another, on carrying out the principle that to him who hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath, for both of them sprawl—geographically that is—across the South American Continent and crowd their smaller neighbours into its margins or corners, if crowding be possible here. As for Brazil, it must have more political frontiers, one imagines, than any other nation in the world.

AVENIDA CENTRAL, RIO DE JANEIRO.

Vol. I. To face p. 20.

The traveller sometimes finds it necessary to explain that Colombia has nothing to do with British Columbia. It is a republic quite unassociated with our Imperial outpost of British Columbia. As for Venezuela, only those who have been there can ever be expected to know where it is, notwithstanding that it is the part of South America nearest to Europe and was that first sighted by Columbus. The Guianas are rightly associated by many with Demerara sugar, but Demerara, it has to be mentioned, is not the whole of British Guiana, and there are in addition French and Dutch Guiana. British Guiana and British Honduras—which latter, let us remark, is not in South but in Central America (location to be explained later)—are the only foothold of the British Empire on the mainland of Spanish America. Guiana, moreover, has nothing to do with Guinea, in Africa, or New Guinea, in Asia. Few people at home know where these places are or who lives there or what they do. As to the first-named, it is interesting to see that a deputation has recently arrived from the colony in the Mother Country, to remind that parent of her offspring's existence.

Both these small places—they are as large as England—are perhaps among the most backward portions of the Empire. It is not their fault, or not alone. It is largely due to the stupidity or lack of interest of the Home Government. It is also due, in general terms, to the stupidity and ignorance of British folk in general, who take little interest in their possessions overseas, and who from one point of view do not deserve to have them. The tropical colonies of Britain, and among them are these of South and Central America—not to mention the magnificent heritage of the West Indies, which of course are geographically part of America—are most valuable charges, most essential elements of the national food supply. They are at least geographical larders, and it is time they were much more fully developed and cared for.

It is well to recollect, moreover, politically, that Britain has scarcely given an efficient object-lesson of development, social and economic, to the backward States of Spanish America in her control of these two Crown Colonies.

But we digress. If the geography of the South American States is nebulous to the ordinary person at home, how much more so is that of Central America? In the first place, it may be asked, where or what is Central America? Many well-informed people do not know. North America and South America are easily realizable as geographical entities, but where can a third America exist? Central America is not the centre of the South American Continent, as some well-meaning people think, but is that part of America lying between the two continents, and includes no less than six independent Republics, together with British Honduras. The Panama Canal cuts through it; the Tehuantepec and other railways cross it. Thus when we are asked where is Costa Rica or Nicaragua or Salvador, Honduras or Panama, where perhaps the latest revolution has just broken out, or the Government have just repudiated a loan, or managed to pay an instalment of the interest due upon a loan, we may reply in Central America.

And Paraguay—ah, Paraguay! Where is it? And Hayti, too?

Many people in England have relatives in Spanish American countries, and it is interesting to be able to inform them where the particular localities are situated, and how to get there, also the distances approximately places are apart. "I have a cousin who is Chargé d'Affaires in Revolutia," says a lady at a reception. "I do trust he has not been injured by that terrible South American earthquake we saw in the paper this morning." We are able to assure the lady that the earthquake was in San Volcania, at least two thousand miles from the enterprising Republic where her relative carried on his doubtless invaluable diplomatic duties. "Have you ever been in—— (we will call it Santa Andina)?" says a stout, bald-headed gentleman, who looks like a company promoter (and we afterwards found that he was such), referring to a well-known Spanish American capital, adding that he thought of going there, and had heard that no great difficulties attended the journey. He thought oil concessions were to be obtained there. When he learned that you take a river steamer, then a train, then a canoe, then a steamer again, and lastly a mule, his wanderlust seemed somewhat to abate. The story of the lady who had a relative in New York, and hoped he would call one morning on the brother of another person present who lived in Buenos Ayres has often been told, but I am inclined to regard it as far-fetched. The point is that the lady, knowing that both places were in America, imagined they must be in easy daily radius of each other.

The traveller who knows Spanish America and speaks the Spanish language—which language is a veritable delight when you know it—will often wish that English people would set out to acquire at least a slight knowledge of the pronunciation of Spanish words and place-names. He does not like to hear, for example, Buenos Ayres spoken of as "Boners' Airs," or Callao as "Cally-oh"! And the pronunciation of señor as "seenyor" is most offensive. Again, why will the English Press persist in depriving "señor" and the Spanish letter "ñ" generally of its ~, or in using Don where Señor should be used (as is done even in The Times), or in the rendering of the Spanish (or its Italian or French equivalent) Viva! as "long live." It does not mean "long live," but "live" or "may he live," and is generally followed by que viva! "Let him live." It would be better translated as "Hurrah for So-and-So." However, the Press does not generally treat Spanish America very seriously. There is an opéra bouffe element.

The Spanish language is perhaps the most beautiful and pleasing in the world, when we take into account its virility and brevity. It says what it means at once, and every letter, except the aspirate, in every word is pronounced. It is a simple language, easily learned. It is spoken over an enormous part of the earth's surface, and there is little variation between the Spanish of Castile and that of Spanish America.

When we converse—in their own language—with the educated Spanish American folk, we find them full of wise saws and modern instances. They are shrewd and philosophical, and the Spanish language abounds with proverbs and aphorisms applicable to the things of everyday life. They are born statesmen and lawyers and orators. They go back to the remote classics for their similes. All this is very delightful in its way, and the Englishman, after a course of years of it will come home and think his own countrymen rather stupid and unimaginative; that is if his own common sense does not balance their own more solid qualities against the more surface attainments. What he wishes is that the one race might partake more of the qualities of the other, and vice versa. Oratory and theory cannot replace practical politics and justice, but we miss the amenities.

Mucha tinta y poca justicia!

so says the Spanish American (or the Spaniard), referring to the national power of document-compiling and red tape; that is to say: "Much ink and little justice."

Nor yet can the most delightful spirit of hospitality make amends for the insufferable defects of the fonda and the inn, and

De tu casa a la ajena

Sal con la barriga llena!

is the soundest advice in Latin America to the traveller in the interior, or, as one would say, "From your own to a stranger's home, go forth with a well-filled belly."

The Spanish American people, as we have remarked, are of a poetical and sentimental temperament, given to oratory, and they produce many poets, many of which, however, would, if criticism is harsh, be termed versifiers. They are fond of what might be termed descriptive embroidery; what, indeed, one of their own race has termed desarollos lyricos ("lyric developments"). Love verses are an absorbing theme, and their small magazines overflow therewith, and even the daily Press does not disdain such. It might be said that versifying in Spanish in matters amorous may be facile, because amores (love), flores (flowers), olores (perfume), and dolores (grief) all rhyme! One cynical Spanish American poet, however, has propounded the following, descriptive of the social and natural ambient:

Flores sin olor

Hombres sin honor

Mujeres sin pudor!

That is to say: "Flowers without perfume, men without honour, women without modesty." It is true that the flowers in the New World here sometimes lacks perfume, where we might have expected to find such, and that at times men and women lack the cardinal virtues, but the same could be said anywhere, and is merely an epigram.

The verse-making of the young poets is often erotic and neurotic, addressed to the object of undying affection, or to the shades of night, or the cruelty of destiny—which tears lovers apart or carries them off to early graves. In this connexion Byron is well regarded (but let us say nothing derogatory of Byron) and Shakespeare appreciated.

However, it is to be recollected that these are rather symptoms of youth in a nation, and if the more blasé and practical Briton—and the still more practical and less poetical North American—finds their verse hackneyed (if he be able to read it, which is not frequently the case), this sentiment has its valuable psychical attribute. The English, indeed, are regarded by the Spanish American as of a romantic temperament, or of having a reputation for romance, and this is possibly due in part to Byron.

But let it not be forgotten that there are famous Latin American poets, to which space here forbids even the barest justice to be done.

The Spanish Americans are great panegyrists, moreover. The most extraordinary adulations of public personages are made and published, such as it might be supposed would cause the object thereof to blush. The late President Diaz of Mexico was always to his admirers—or those who hoped to gain something by his adulation, and this it is not necessarily unkind to say is often the motive of the panegyric—a "great star in a Pleiades or constellation of the first magnitude," and similar matters are found in all the republics. A stroke of ordinary policy becomes thus "un acto de importancia transcendental," which sufficiently translates itself; and so forth.

Of course, it is the case that the Spanish language lends itself peculiarly to "lyric developments"; it is expressive and sonorous, and even the uneducated person has in it a far wider range of thought and expression than has the apparently unimaginative and tongue-tied Briton, or American of Anglo-Saxon speech. Upon this theme we might greatly enlarge, but we must refrain.

As I have already remarked, the general conception of the Spanish American people by English folk is a vague one. To such questions or remarks as: "Are they mostly Indians?" or "I suppose they are not mainly niggers, or at least half black?" in brief terms, the reply is that the Spanish American people are a blend of the aboriginal Indian race—which possessed an early civilization of its own in certain districts, as in Mexico and Peru, and has many valuable qualities—and of the Spaniard, or in Brazil of the Portuguese. They are not "half-breeds" now. We might as well, in a sense, call the English half-breeds, because we are a mixture of Celt and Saxon and Norman.

The "Indians" of Mexico and Peru—they are, of course, not Indian at all in reality, that was an error of Columbus—had, before the Spaniards destroyed it, a fine culture of their own and practised the most beautiful arts. As to the modern culture, or that of the upper strata, it surprises good cultured English folk to learn that in matters of serious culture, knowledge and social etiquette, and knowledge of the world, they themselves would have difficulty in holding their own. The world, or outlook, of the educated man or woman of Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, or any other of these States, is a wider one than that of the British middle-class folk: that great respectable body of persons so closely engaged upon their own affairs.

Some writers have deplored the separate autonomy or absence of "unification" of the Latin American States. They would like to see a "United States of South America" or a Federation of Central America.

But this largely arises, perhaps, from the peculiar ideas of hegemony which the last and present century brought to being. We were to have vast empires. Weaker nations were to be controlled by stronger. There were to be great commercial units. Is this advisable, or will it be possible? The condition of the world after the Great War would seem to indicate the negative. It would seem to show that small nations have their own destiny to work out.

As regards Spanish America, its different States are, in general, better in being separated. Both geographical conditions and those of temperament support this. These States, or their capitals and centres of population, are generally divided by Nature from each other, often by tremendous barriers of mountain chains, rivers or impenetrable forests. How could a single or centralized government be set up to control either their home or foreign policy? Where would it be, and how would it operate?

It might be said that similar topographical conditions obtain in the case of the United States, Canada, or Australia, which prefer to live as federations. But the natural geographical barriers of Spanish America are, in reality, much more formidable. Again, the present multiplicity of states, each with its complement of president and state officers, gives opportunity for more intensive political training, more pleasing social life and a greater general opportunity for partaking in government by the people than does a centralized government.

Let us thus refrain from judging too hastily or too harshly the Spanish American people. Their temperament, their environment is different from ours. They have not chosen or been able to follow the more prosaic, more useful life of England or North America in the commercial age. They had not our inventive, our mechanical gifts. Under their warmer skies idealism played a stronger part. They could not agree to live together unless idealistic conditions were to dominate them—conditions which were impossible of course, and they never were able to oil the wheels of life with that spirit of compromise which providence—if it be a providential gift—gave to us. Moreover, they have a dreadful history of oppression behind them, and the dead-weight of a great Indian bulk of folk who were ruined by the arrogant Spaniards, who despised them without a cause.

Rather let us see that they are endowed with many gifts, and that a different phase of world-development and civilization may give these people an opportunity to display their best qualities, of overcoming their serious errors.

The thoughtful traveller will find matter of interest in Spanish America wherever he journeys, in the delightful place-names he encounters, which a little trouble will enable him to pronounce, and often whose pleasing origin some study will permit him to understand. Here are no duplications of "Paris," "Berlin," "London"; no monstrosities of "Copperville," "Petroleumville," "Irontown," and so forth, such as in Anglo America, the United States and Canada, the developers of that part of America in some cases hastily assigned to their places of settlement or industry, either through lack of or laziness of search for original topographical nomenclature. Here in Spanish America its old and rightful folk had given poetical baptism to their localities. Such were often the abiding places of deities or spirits. Yonder mountain, for example, was "the home of the wind god" of the Quechuas; yonder point the "place of the meeting of the waters" of the Aztecs, or the "field of the fruitful," or the "forest of the dark spirits"; and thus is imprinted upon them for all time the poetic fancy of their founders. There rises the "snow-forehead" of the Andes, there is the "cañyon of a thousand ripples," there is the "pompa of the Holy Saints." The names flow liquidly from the lips of the Indian, perhaps our harsher tongues can ill articulate them in comparison.

Moreover, let us remark the wealth of topographical nomenclature, both in the native languages of Mexico and Peru, and all the sisterhood of states, and in the later Spanish tongue. Every hill, hill-slope, stream, wood, plain, valley, desert, every kind of hill, feature and topographical change of form is designated.

The present chapter, it is seen, is, in some small degree, designed to prime the intending traveller to Spanish America—or, if not the traveller, the person athirst for information concerning the region—with such geographical detail as he or she may assimilate without mental indigestion. In accordance with this purpose we may consider a few figures, which are indispensable if we are to gather any intelligent idea of extent and distance.

There are twenty independent republics of Spanish, or rather Latin America, ranging from the enormous Brazil, with an area of three and a quarter million square miles, down to little Salvador, with only seven thousand two hundred and twenty-five square miles. Among these twenty States we include Hayti and Santo Domingo, places which, although often mentioned with a smile when independent republics are spoken of, are nevertheless worthy of geographical respect.

THE ANCIENT CIVILIZATION: STONE STELÆ AT QUIRIGUA, CENTRAL AMERICA.

Vol. I. To face p. 32.

Between these great extremes of area mentioned above we have such countries as Argentina, with over a million square miles, and Mexico, Bolivia and Peru, with from nearly to over seven hundred thousand square miles, Colombia, Venezuela and Chile, with from over four to under three hundred thousand, Ecuador and Uruguay with half and a third those areas, and the remaining nine States of from about seventy thousand square miles down to about a tenth thereof.

The total area thus covered of this very diversified part of the earth's surface is about eight and a quarter million square miles, with a total population in the neighbourhood of eighty million souls.

It is of interest further to recollect that Brazil is larger than the United States or Canada, or larger than Europe without Russia. Even the little but progressive country of Uruguay, crowded by Brazil and Argentina into a corner of the Atlantic coast, is much larger than England.[1]

It is to be recollected that the areas given to these countries themselves in some cases include territory claimed by their immediate neighbours, for there are unsettled boundaries and frontiers, especially in the Amazon Valley. They must be regarded as only approximate.

The same remark holds good with regard to the population of these States. Exact enumeration is impossible, for the reasons both that the inhabitants are often enormously scattered over vast territories and that they often refuse to be numbered, or escape the census, fearing that they are to be taxed, or pressed into military service against their will, which latter condition has been a curse of Spanish America all through its history.

Much of our earlier knowledge of Northern South America and Mexico was due to Humboldt, the famous German savant and traveller. He was born in Berlin in 1769, but it would appear that Berlin was certainly not his "spiritual home." Paris was the only centre congenial to him, and he settled there in 1808, after his travels, in order to be able to secure the needful scientific co-operation for the publication of the results of his work. "The French capital he had long regarded as his true home. There he found not only scientific sympathy, but the social stimulus which his vigorous and healthy mind eagerly craved. He was equally in his element as the lion of the salons and as the savant of the institute and the observatory. The provincialism of his native city was odious to him. He never ceased to rail against the bigotry without religion, aestheticism without culture, and philosophy without common sense, which he found dominant on the banks of the Spree. He sought relief from this 'nebulous atmosphere' in Paris."[2]

It was by an accident that Humboldt directed his steps to Spanish America, for he had hoped, with Bonpland, to join Bonaparte in Egypt, but in Madrid he determined to make Spanish America the scene of his explorations. He explored the Orinoco, crossed the frozen Cordillera to Quito, investigated the mighty avenue of the Ecuadorian volcanoes—the farm he occupied still exists at their foot—and did much else in South America and in Mexico, geological, archæological, and botanical.

The foregoing glimpse of Berlin which Humboldt's view of his native city affords is not without interest to-day, when the savagery of the German character—a curious development of that earlier obscure philosophy—has been brought so prominently before the world and has brought Germany to moral ruin, and what is in part financial ruin and the loss of her colonies.

As has been said, methods of travel here are less inviting to the ordinary tourist than the well-prepared fields of the Old World. Its hotels—apart, perhaps, from a few here and there—are primitive, its railways are conducted for commercial purposes, there are no planned centres of delight and ease. No roads traverse the countryside whereon the motor-tourist may spend his hours. Between the primitive mule-trail or the bypath which the simple Indian has found sufficient for his purposes since the world began, and the railway, there is no via media. The coaching days of England never had their counterpart in Spanish America. The caballero, the horseman-gentleman, transplanted from old Spain, and all he represented embodied, and still embodies, the philosophy of the road. Here no one may walk the countryside, except the necessitous Indian. The dust would smother him, the naked rocks would cut his feet, he would lose caste for being on foot. No "local" botanist, antiquarian, nature-lover sallies forth from Spanish-American villages. The country squire is unknown, the landed estate is a hacienda, a hive of peones, dependent body and soul on the will of their masters. There are no week-end cottages; the "picnic," though its English name is not unknown, is a rare event. Sport, where it exists, is an institution engrafted from abroad.

Woman here is much enclosed in the seclusion of her home, save when she ventures to the temple and the priestly Mass, or to well-chaperoned and formal events—she dare not traverse the road alone, and, it may be said, with sufficient reason! The Spanish American youth, with his patent leather shoes and breadth of cuff and collar, loves not to leave the easy pavements of his towns, or their bars and cafés, for the unknown world beyond, whose beginning is the squalid Indian quarter which fringes the place around—unless indeed he may have turned revolutionist, a phase which does not usually take place much before middle age, when the Latin American generally takes on his serious political habit. Then indeed he must take to the road, unless a fortunate golpe de estado[3] shall complete the uprising within the city plaza.

The inland method of travel is the horse or mule: the saddle. Unfortunately the horse is not very happy here. In the Day of Judgment, if the beasts of the field ever bear witness against man, the horse will have a severe indictment to bring against the Spanish American people. He and his relative the mule have nowhere perhaps been so dreadfully ill-treated as in these lands of mountains and deserts. In Mexico we see him ridden to death by the callous vaquero; his thin and starving body passing like a swift shadow across the wilderness under the stimulus of enormous spurs. Or he is gored to death in the bull-ring. In South America he climbs, with enormous loads, the dizzy ridges of the Andes, under the blows and curses of the arriero, and, stumbling over the precipice, finds rest at times a thousand feet below, where his mummified carcass remains a warning to his kind. Or he passes his life on high uplands where pasture is unknown: his fodder a little dry straw.

The fact is that the Spanish American lands, in great part, did not seem fitted by nature for the equine race, and there was no horse in America before the Europeans introduced the animal there. There was nothing but the llama, the friend of the Indian, which is not ridden, but bears a small burden. The Indian himself at first displayed great terror of the horse (especially with an armoured Iberian on its back). He himself was accustomed to carrying his burdens. When he was told to take a horse he said: "No, horses get tired; we do not." When a Spaniard rode across the Isthmus of Panama upon a jackass he met some Indians, and the animal brayed, and the Indians fell down in terror and offered up their gold ornaments!

Yet the Latin Americans are perhaps the most expert of horsemen, and train and manage their steeds as no one else can.

Spanish America is not a land for the huntsman, not a land of big game. Its zoology is stinted. The lion and the tiger are represented only by some almost insignificant felines, and the other huge quadrupeds of the sportsman's rifle came not to being in the New World, or deserted it by now fallen land bridges before their skilled tormentor appeared upon the earth. There is, relatively, but little game, and the traveller who might think to subsist upon it in his passage through the wilds will do well to ponder the experience of the early Conquistadores, some of which have been set down briefly in these pages.

Thus far the picture of travel here. There are phases on the other side to be considered. It is the explorer, the pioneer, who will find material for his desires in these lands. The geographer, the antiquarian, the naturalist, the ethnologist has before him a field which is the equal of any region, and the engineer, that most practical and valuable of travellers, has work before him in this score of independent states whose magnitude has, so far, no limit.