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Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 280, 18 April 1913, Page 4

A COXT[XKXT IN EYOIA TIOX. Not many years liavc passed away since, to tlie general reader, South America signified a place whose inhabitants spent their time in shooting each oilier ami cheating their creditors. Even accepting that summary view of flic matter, none but a few students of the historical bases and the evolution of states Inthought them of enquiring why the South Americans conducted themselves in a manner so deplorable/and whether, in the interaction of forces—intellectual, moral and physical—any symptoms of "a stream of tendency" towards righteousness were discernible. 'We learn from a recently-published work, ''Latin America: Its rise and progress," that in the three centuries fnn the conquest to the

insurrections that began early in the nineteenth century, there had been created the mestizo, otherwise the Spanish and negro crossbreed; and the Creole variety, less removed from the Spanish original, and now. the typical race of Latin America. The revolution was, i:i the main, the work of ille mixed race —though among its foremost champions there were men of aristocratic Spanish ancestry. By the third decade of the eighteenth century, the dull despotism <;f Spain, with its childish pomposities, its corrupt courts, its superstitious priestcraft, its auto-do-fes, and its three monopolies—the religious, the economic, and the administrative —had become unbearable. And yet, reform, not separation from the Spanish homeland, was all-the agitators asked for; in which respect they resembled George Washington and his associates in their earlier relations with another George (also of a Bourhonish east of mind). The "Precursors" having failed to mend the Spanish despotism, the Liberators made an end of it. They were profoundly moved by the liberation of the British colonies, but most of all by the French Revolution. Ardent, generous spirits, their inter-State Congresses, their social and

political programmes, after eighty years or more, are startlingly modern. The Liberators began their war against slavery anil the slave trade long before Christian England and Mayflower North America. They stood for education, for i self-defence, for the widest suffrage, for economical freedom, for the instruction of the young in the practical arts, for the application of scieitcc to industry, for the development of the Continent's enormous untapped wealth, for the encouragement -of European immigration, and the federation of the world against 1 war. That was their general attitude. They were next fascinated by the French and English enthusiasts of 1848. Temporary, the defeat of those exalted programmes was quite natural. The ignorant, semi-barbaric masses of a people in process of becoming, were unprepared for them. Even the Spaniards, who had cast off the Imperial yoke, relapsed into the particularism, the combative, rigid, individualism of the juntas of the old homeland.' Of the new mixed race, some, calling themselves nationalists, were for centralised republics; others, the so-call-e.i ■ democrats, for provisional administrations under, independent rulers. A large' portion of South American history is occupied with the sanguinary strife between Unionists—advocates of large, centralised States—and Federalists, who' would brook no more than a fragile confederation of independent communities. The mixed races were differentiated from and among each other by customs, capacities, proclivities, and temperaments inherited from their Indian and negro progenitors. Anarchy followed. The Continent was pulverised into internecine chiefships. The smaller "caudillo" or party leader, was displaced—or slaughtered—by the bigger ''caudillo," and the successful rival by another, bigger and abler than, himself, until at last there was evolved, inevitably, the President-Autocrat, warrior and legislator, all in one, a democratic Czar. Venezuela has had fiftytwo revolutions in ninety years. Columbia has had twenty-seven civil wars, in the last of which (1879) she lost eighty thousand citizens. To say nothing of the killed in battle, more than ten thousand men are recorded to have been hanged or shot by or for Portirio Diaz, the maker of modern Mexico. In the transition from the anarchie to tli& settle.d industrial State> despots were, as the author holds, a necessity. More than the Colonial Viceroys whom they rcade away with, they were the makers of Latin America. Though the Spanish element is still vital, it is rivalled' by the immigration—in men and in ideas—from Italy and from France—ttlie heirs of Rome's civilisation. The vast numbers' of German settlers in Brazil appear to be acquiring a South American character. A prominent quality of the Latin American is his irrepressible optimism, according to the writer. - A Montalvo forseeS the time when the Latin Arnerican, outdoing the Xew Zealander on London Bridge, "'shall meditate upon the ruins of the Louvre, the Vatican, and St. Paul's." Andrade, the poet of the new race, sings of "Atlantide," otherwise the future home of a developed Latin civilisation in South America. Latin America is making rapid progress. The Argentine is regarded as a model State of a new America, wherein unity ' is to be achieved, not thro'ugh external forms of government, but through intellectual, moral, and material' interests common to all. : Gladstone's prediction of- tlie railway as a unifier and civiliser Is verified ih Latin America. They are cheery, optimistic souls —jnd they may well be —the officers and crew who have been steering their "Latin" ship of State all tliese years, often • mutinous, and with no guiding star visible in the cloudwrack of the tempest. Whatever their destiny may Oral