From a racial point of view, it is true, one cannot call the South American republics Latin nations. They are rather Indo-African or Africo-Iberian. Latin culture--the ideas and the art of France, the laws and the Catholicism of Rome--have created in South America a mental attitude analogous to that of the great Mediterranean peoples, which is hostile or alien to the civilisation of the Germanic or Anglo-Saxon peoples. New influences, whether they come from Germany or Anglo-Saxon America, and even more those that come from Japan, are dangerous to the Latin-American nations, if they tend to destroy their traditions. {283} CHAPTER I ARE THE IBERO-AMERICANS OF LATIN RACE Spanish and Portuguese heredity--Latin culture--The influence of the Roman laws, of Catholicism, and of French thought--The Latin spirit in America: its qualities and defects. Contrasting the Imperial Republic of North America with the twenty democracies of South America, we seek the reason of the antagonism which exists between them in the essential element of race. The contrast between Anglo-Saxons and Latins is the contrast between two cultures. The South American peoples consider themselves Latin by race, just as their brothers of the North are the remote descendants of the Anglo-Saxon Pilgrim Fathers; but although the United States were created largely by the aggregation of austere English emigrants, there has been no intervention of pure Latin elements in the colonisation of the South. Navigators of Latin blood discovered an unknown continent, and Spaniards and Portuguese conquered and colonised it; but there was little Latin blood to be found in the homes formed by the sensuality of the first conquerors of a desolated America. Emigrants from Estremadura and Galicia, Andalusians and Castilians, many-hued men of Spain and Portugal, were all concerned in the first interbreeding with the vanquished races; they were Iberians, in whom the anthropologists discover moral analogies with the Berbers of North Africa. The Basques, {284} rude and virile, who emigrated from Spain to dominate America, did not come of Latin stock; the Andalusian element, from Seville or Cadiz, was of Oriental origin. A Spain that was half African and half Germanic colonised the vast territories of America; two heredities, Visigoth and Arab, were united in its strange genius. The French and Italian colonists have not the importance of the Spaniards and Portuguese; they are inferior in numbers and in wealth. The Iberians have jealously defended their racial prerogative in these isolated transatlantic colonies. After three centuries, when once the continent was opened to the outside world and to European commerce, the Italians invaded the rich plains of the Argentine; there they contributed to the formation of a new race, which is more Latin than Spanish.