SOUTH AMERICAN PEOPLES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1178, 29 November 1913, Page 4

SOUTH AMERICAN PEOPLES.

The civil dissensions at present raging in Mexico have turned the eyes of the world upon the republics of South America. The following is a description of the peoples of those States as seen through the eyes of a native of one of them: —“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. ludiscipliufcd, superficial, brilliant, the South Americans belong to the great Latin family ; they are the children ol Spain, Portugal, and Italy by blood and by deep-rooted tradition, aud by their general ideas they are the children of France. A French politician, M. Clemenceau, found iu Brazil, the Argentine, and Uruguay ‘a superabundant Latinlsm ; a Lalinism of feeling, a Latinism of thought and action, with all its immediate and superficial advantages, and all its defects of method, its alternative of energy and failure iu 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. The mulatto is more despised than the mestizo because he often shows the abjectuess of the slave and the indecision of the hybrid ; he is at once servile and arrogant, envious and ambitious. His violent desire to mount to a higher social rank, to acquire wealth, power and display, is, as Senor Runge very justly remarks, a ‘hyperaesthesia of arrivism.’ The zambos have created nothing in America. On the other hand, the robust mestizo populations, the Mamelucos of Brazil, the Cholos of Peru and Bolivia, the Rotos of Chili, descendants of Spaniards aud the Guarani

Indians, are distinguished by the'.r pride and virility. Instability, apathy, degeneration all the signs of exhausted race —are encountered far more frequently in the mulatto than in the mestizo. The European established in America becomes a creole ; bis is a new race, the final product of secular' unions. He is neither Indian, nor black, nor Spaniard. The castes are confounded and have formed an American stock, in which we may distinguish the psychological traits of the Indian and the negro, while the shades of skin and forms of skull reveal a remote intermixture. If all the races of the new world were finally to unite, the creole would be the real American. He is idle and brilliant. There is nothing excessive either in his ideals or his passions ; all is mediocre, measured, harmonious. His fine and caustic irony chills his more exuberant enthusiasms ; he triumphs by means ol laughter. He loves grace, verbal elegance, quibbles even, and artistic form ; great passions or desires ; do not move him. In religion he is sceptical, indifferent ; and in politics he disputes in the Byzantine manner.”