Latin America: Its Rise and ProgressGarcía Calderón, Francisco
History
Latin America: Its Rise and Progress
García Calderón, Francisco
Latin America
Europe offers the Latin-American democracies what the latter demand
of Anglo-Saxon America, which was formed in the school of Europe. We
find the practical spirit, industrialism, and political liberty in
England; organisation and education in Germany; and in France
inventive genius, culture, wealth, great universities, and democracy.
From these ruling peoples the new Latin world must indirectly receive
the legacy of Western civilisation.
Essential points of difference separate the two Americas.
Differences of language and therefore of spirit; the difference
between Spanish Catholicism and the multiform Protestantism of the
Anglo-Saxons; between the Yankee individualism and the omnipotence of
the State natural to the nations of the South. In their origin, as
in their race, we find fundamental antagonisms; the evolution of the
North is slow and obedient to the lessons of time, to the influences
of custom; the history of the southern peoples is full of
revolutions, rich with dreams of an unattainable perfection.
The people of the United States hate the half-breed, and the impure
marriages of whites and blacks which take place in Southern homes; no
manifestation of Pan-Americanism could suffice to destroy the racial
prejudice as it exists north of Mexico. The {312} half-breeds and
their descendants govern the Ibero-American democracies, and the
Republic of English and German origin entertains for the men of the
tropics the same contempt which they feel for the slaves of Virginia
whom Lincoln liberated.
In its friendship for them there will always be disdain; in their
progress, a conquest; in their policy, a desire of hegemony. It is
the fatality of blood, stronger than political affinities or
geographical alliances.
Instead of dreaming of an impossible fusion the Neo-Latin peoples
should conserve the traditions which are proper to them. The
development of the European influences which enrich and improve them,
the purging of the nation from the stain of miscegenation, and
immigration of a kind calculated to form centres of resistance
against any possibilities of conquest, are the various aspects of
this Latin Americanism.[3]
[1] The United States as World-Power.
[2] _Race Improvement in the United States_. Academy of Political
and Social Science, Philadelphia, 1909, pp. 70-1 _et seq_.
[3] The Mexican sociologist, F. Bulnes, writes in his book, _L'Avenir
des nations Hispano-Americaines_: "It is more than probable that by
1980 the United States will hold a population of 250,000,000
inhabitants. They will then scarcely be sufficient for the needs of
this population, and will no longer be able to supply the world with
the vast quantity of cereals which they supply to-day. They will
therefore have to choose between a recourse to the methods of
intensive culture and the conquest of the extra-tropical lands of
Latin America, which are fitted, by their conditions, to the easy and
inexpensive production of excellent cereals."
{313}
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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