These republics are not free from any of the ordinary weaknesses of the Latin races. The State is omnipotent; the liberal professions are excessively developed; the power of the bureaucracy becomes alarming. The character of the average citizen is weak, inferior to his imagination and intelligence; ideas of union and the spirit of solidarity have to contend with the innate indiscipline of the race. These men, dominated by the solicitations of the outer world and the tumult of politics, have no inner life; you will find among them no great mystics, no great lyrical writers. They meet realities with an exasperated individualism. Indisciplined, superficial, brilliant, the South Americans belong to the great Latin family; they are the children of Spain, Portugal, and Italy by blood and by deep-rooted tradition, and by their general ideas they are the children of France. A French politician, M. Clemenceau, found in Brazil, the Argentine, and Uruguay, "a superabundant Latinism; a Latinism of feeling, a Latinism of thought and action, with all its immediate and superficial advantages, and all its defects of method, its alternatives of energy and failure in the accomplishment of design." This new American spirit is indestructible. Contact with Anglo-Saxon civilisation may partially renew it, but the integral transformation of the spirit proper to the Latin nations will never be accomplished. It would be a racial suicide. Where Yankees and Latin Americans intermingle you may better observe the insoluble contradictions which divide them. The Anglo-Saxons are conquering America commercially and economically, but the {289} traditions, the ideals, and the soul of these republics are hostile to them. The Ibero-American race should seek to correct its vices without forsaking the framework of tradition which is proper to it. Without losing its originality as a nation, France is to-day triumphant in many departments of sport, and is spending her energy and inventive genius upon the conquest of the air without counting the cost; she has made her own victories which seemed to belong to the Anglo-Saxon. At the same time, if the American democracies are to acquire a practical spirit, a persistent activity, and a virile energy, they must do so without renouncing their language, their religion, and their history. The defence of the Latin spirit has become a duty of primordial importance. Barrès, an impassioned ideologist, preaches the cult of self as a remedy for barbarism; no foreign tutelage must trouble the spontaneous internal revelation. The republics oversea, wending their way under hostile or indifferent eyes, _sous l'oeil des Barbares_, must cultivate their spiritual originality in the encounter with inimical forces.