UNCIVILISED EQUADOR.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 243, 13 April 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

UNCIVILISED EQUADOR.

) The curtain has been drawn back for i a moment from Ecuador, and the world has been permitted to have a glimpse at J the Ecuadorians in process of conducting • a revolution. It is not an edifying I sight. General Petro Montero, an inj surgent leader and lately the idol of j the populace, has been lynched by Ms I erstwhile admirers, who then dragged the body through the streets of the capital, after which they beheaded it and then burnt the remains. From such conduct an observer is justified in •deducing that the Ecuadorians are largely an uncivilised people, and probably containing a considerable mixture of actually savage blood in the body politic. The deduction is well founded. Out of a total population of 1,400,000, more than half are Indians, including 200,000 uncivilised Indians. No fewer than 400,000 persons are of mixed blood—lndian, negro and European in varying propor- [ tions, and there are few inhabitants of | pure European blood. The half-bred in | South America is an eminently undesirable citizen from the point of view of ■those who regard the .maintenance of order in a State as an ideal of good-citi-zenship. With Indians and half-breeds preponderating to an enormous extent in the population of other South American republics than Ecuador, what chance of progressing can those countries obtain 1 Certainly nothing like the same chance that the States of the Union have obtained, and- yet the United States has decreed by its Monroe Doctrine that a back country like Ecuador, inhabited ■for the most part by violent, ferocious people, largely of savage blood, shall not be developed by being brought under the flag of any European nation. The. only alternative, therefore, if Ecuador is to be civilised at all is that it should be brought under the Stars and Stripes, but there is such a strong body of opinion in the United States hostile to further expansion that there is little chance of a move southward being made for a long time, to come. ' Much territory will have to be absorbed and digested before the American eagle can swoop down upon Guyaquil. The Ecuadorians plainly need civilising. But the United State's will not perform the task herself, nor will it allow any European Power to do so. Can that embargo remain in force indefinitely?