Spanish America: Its Romance, Reality and Future. C. Reginald Enock
Powers, and hardy buccaneers and privateers streamed forth to dispute Spanish pretensions. Drake intercepted the stream of gold with which Philip was enabled to equip his armadas and thus performed a marked strategic service for England.
Moreover, such pretensions would never have been respected, especially under the influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation.
The restrictions upon colonial trade by Spain were, we see further, an element in the downfall of the empire. The natural development of South America was seriously hindered. All trade must come via Panama, and anything opposed to Spanish interests was suppressed. The growing trade between Acapulco and China was suppressed; Hidalgo's vineyard in Mexico was destroyed by the Spanish authorities because Spain alone must grow grapes. "Learn to be silent and obey, and not to discuss politics," ran the proclamation of a Mexican viceroy, near the end of the eighteenth century.
When—unlawfully—the throne of Spain came to be occupied with kings having French sympathies, these short-sighted methods were modified. Audiencias or law courts, of which, from the reign of Philip IV there were eleven, in Santo Domingo, Mexico, Panama, Lima, Guatemala, Guadalajara, Bogota, La Plata, Chile, and Buenos Ayres, acted as counsel to the Governors, with civil and criminal jurisdiction. Appeal could be had to the Council of the Indies, that great colonial body at Seville. For centuries the history of Spanish America is made up of the deeds and misdeeds of the viceroys.
The political and commercial control of the colonies was thus entirely in the hands of the Crown. The territories were expected to send quantities of gold and other precious metals home to Spain with regularity, and indeed Spain later became a mere sieve into which this treasure from the Indies was poured. They were also bound to send raw material and to take all their manufactured goods from the Mother Country.
It must be recollected that the ill-treatment meted out to the natives of these lands was mainly the work of the Spanish settlers. They generally both despised the Indians, and wished to enrich themselves from their labours. They were, for the man of Iberian race, inferior creatures, to be used at his will, and the forced labour in the mines was a cause of the reduction of the population. Questions have been raised by historians as to whether the dreadful treatment of the American native by the Spaniard was worse than that meted out to him by the Anglo-Saxon settlers in North America. There have been grave abuses in the latter field. The Indians in Spanish America, however, numbered many millions, as against a few hundred thousand elsewhere. The Spanish Crown and Government certainly did not countenance the excesses carried on by the colonists, but strove to protect the Indians.
As for the English colonies in America, they enjoyed a greater measure of self-government and had taken firm root under more prosaic but more fruitful form. The same policy, however, on the part of the Mother Country was enacted in commercial matters; that trade should consist almost exclusively of exchange of colonial raw material for English manufactured articles. French colonies in America were less noteworthy or prosperous, but they played their part in history, for the fall of French control in North America was in reality the beginning of independence for all colonies in the New World; as did the ideas of the French philosophers, which found a ready soil in the Spanish American folk. The establishment of the United States was but the precursor to the establishment of the numerous Latin American States. The Spanish Government saw its danger, but was too apathetic to move. However, some reforms were introduced, and it may be said that Spanish America was well governed at the time of revolution, and was prosperous.
But it has been said that "across the face of all human reform are written the words 'too late,'" and this is in effect what happened in Spanish America. The French Revolution, and the defeat of British expeditions to Buenos Ayres by the colonists in 1806 and 1807 had their effect. The struggle for Independence lasted from 1810 to 1826, until the flag of Spain was entirely ousted from the vast territory of Spanish America, upon which she had stamped her individuality, language, laws and all else, with much that was splendid and enduring, and much that in the future development of the world may have a value so far scarcely apparent.
The dark pictures of misrule of the century of republican life of the twenty Latin Republics are interspersed with pages of a more pleasing nature, but it is a chequered history, whose end we cannot yet foresee.
Among elements making for disorder and bloodshed in Spanish America, religion has played a prominent part. Many States developed bitter antagonism between clerical and non-clerical parties. Some would overthrow the Church and the all-pervading priestly power; others would uphold it, whether out of pious conviction, whether because it was a convenient party upon which to hang their own pretensions and ambitions. Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Central America, Chile—in fact, all have as part of their history the deadly struggles between these factions. To-day this very fierceness has flamed out, in the main, to be succeeded by a thinly veiled materialism. What more can be expected of a hemisphere which was cursed by the Inquisition?
In many instances the "reform" parties of these States having triumphed by force of arms, confiscates all Church property—and this often was enormous—which was handed to secular and public purposes, or enriched the pockets of politicians. In Mexico, where at one time it was not safe to pass along the street unless seeming to be muttering a prayer, the power of the Church was entirely overthrown, and convents, monasteries and other religious establishments were forbidden to exist. In Ecuador similar things were brought about, accompanied by massacre and other dreadful deeds. But it would be unjust to pick out any state as over-prominent in these acts.
The Church, in large degree, brought these troubles upon itself. It sought for too much power, spiritual and temporal. The priests exploited the superstition and needs of the poor, of the Indian, and themselves often lived immoral and corrupt lives. But let us do it justice. It protected the poor and oppressed often against the grinding exactions of the civil authorities; its vicars often exposed themselves in humane works. Often priests dashed in with upraised crucifix to save the victims of dreadful passionate and sanguinary revolutions, and themselves were torn to pieces. Often the devout fathers spent their lives in the most desolate and savage regions of the untamed wilderness, seeking by their piety and devotion to better the lives of the poor Indians, the poor, ignorant children of the mountain and the forest.
The Roman Catholic religion ingrafted itself with wonderful strength upon the mind of the aboriginal of Spanish America. In some respects it seemed a development of his own earlier superstitious culture, and became blended with it. Tawdry images held for them and their miserable lives the hope of eternal joy, of reprieve of sin, of comfort in misery, and to-day we cannot enter a simple church of the remote villages in those boundless Cordilleras and deserts without stumbling over the prostrate forms, bent upon the earthern floors, of poor, black-clothed Indian women passing their silent hour in supplication and orisons. Men are not there: the women, as ever, seem to link the material and the spiritual. May heaven succour these poor Indian women-folk, and bring them a happier destiny yet.
A glance now at the earlier cultures of these lands and the earlier religions of their people.
Who, upon beholding the beautiful ruined structures of the early folk of America—for by America here we mean Spanish America, where alone these vestiges are found—in the decaying sculptured walls of their temples, or the massive stories of their fortresses and palaces, or of the strange pyramids they raised, has not felt his conception of the New World undergo a change? Nay, do we even study the printed page which sets them forth, not having had the privilege of journeying to where they stand, wrapped in the silence of the jungle or stark upon the rocky ranges of the hills, we feel that here is a page in the book of mankind whose turning opens to us a vista little dreamt of.
The story of those strange old cultures of Mexico and Peru has always fascinated us: the Aztec and the Inca stand forth from the dry lore of archæology with a peculiar charm, which we may not have felt even in contemplating the more wonderful and ancient cultures of the Old World. For here we feel that the intellect and art of man sprang unaided from the dust, to write his pathetic story in the stones of a continent unvisited by the Jehovah of the Israelites, unknown to history, unblessed of Christianity, unrecorded and obscure. Here the reaction of man from his environment came forth from no recorded Eden; no tree of knowledge, of good and evil, opened his eyes; no Abraham here walked with God, no Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar