A second factor in the making of the Latin-American is his isolation for three hundred years from the currents of Western economic and political life. Practically all our North American stock of ideas and social sanctions has been developed since the Pilgrims landed in New England. The great basic impulse that sent men and women westward in search of religious liberty has persisted and widened and developed a homogeneous system of political ideal that has become the unquestioned background of our whole political system. From free consciences have come free institutions, free schools, free votes, and as long as it lasted, free land, unrestricted economic opportunity, and a welcome to the world. Upon this foundation have been reared American independence, modern democracy, higher education, the feminist movement, scientific advance, and American Protestantism. [Illustration: ONE USE FOR A HEAD] Certain influences from this stream have affected Latin-American life. The nomenclature of South American politics is that of the United States, and many constitutions contain provision for every modern practice. But these model constitutions are like a beautiful and costly piano imported into a home where no one knows how to use it. It takes a democratic spirit to get democracy out of a democratic constitution. The best piano yields only discord, and the most advanced constitution does not prevent revolution if there be no musicians or statesmen to play and administer. People living beside the stream of democratic progress have caught the names and forms drifting on the current, but only those people have advanced with the current who have not been tied to the shore by moral and intellectual despotism. The influence of geographical nearness is slight beside that of historical background and social relations. Mexico is much closer to Spain than to the United States. After twenty years of successful administration of the Philippines on the most colossal scale of national benevolence that the world has ever seen, nearly all the Filipinos who had reached maturity in 1898 are still Spanish at heart and out of sympathy with American ideals and administration. If the United States can hold the islands until every person who was ten years old or over in 1898 is thoroughly dead and safely buried, there will be a chance for some form of democracy, but the old-time leaders will retain so long as they live the ideals derived from three hundred years of Spanish administration. If there are in the mountains of the South isolated neighborhoods that have been passed by in the current of modern American progress, and are to-day practically ignorant of all that makes up American life, even though surrounded on all sides by the march of a virile and restless race, what must be the results of the isolation from this stream of North American development, of the whole Latin-American race, while maintaining close and vital connections with European standards and ideals?