ready. He led the Spaniards to think that he might cross the Andes almost anywhere, and succeeded in scattering their forces so as to enable him to bring the main body of his army over the most practical route, the Uspallata Pass.
The expedition was successful, and in 1818 San Martin had the satisfaction of administering such a decisive defeat to the Spaniards at Maipo as to insure Chilean independence. With the aid of a remarkable soldier of fortune, Thomas Cochran, Earl of Dundonald, and an interesting group of Anglo-Saxon seamen, San Martin drove the Spaniards from the West Coast and captured the city of Lima. The aid which was given him by Buenos Aires and Chile was not sufficient to enable him to penetrate the great Andes of the interior and totally destroy the last Spanish army. He sought Bolivar’s aid, but that proud Liberator would only come as Commander-in-chief. So, rather than sacrifice the cause of independence, San Martin, with unexampled self-effacement, gave up his well-trained veterans to Bolivar and Sucre and quietly withdrew to his modest home in Argentina. His unwillingness to enter into political squabbles, his large-minded statesmanship, and his dignified bearing did not endear him to his fellow countrymen, and he was forced to pass the declining years of his life in Europe, an exile from his native land.
The history of the period is full of petty personal rivalries and absurd political squabbles. Against these as a background the magnificent figure of San Martin, efficient soldier, wise statesman, and unselfish patriot, stands out plainly distinct. His achievements are worthy to be remembered with those of the greatest heroes of history. His character, the finest that South America has ever produced, has few equals in the annals of any country.
For many years he was disliked by his fellow patriots because he openly expressed the belief that they were not fit for pure democratic government. Since his day many South Americans agree with him.
The most serious criticism, however, which we can lay at the door of the South American is his lack of political cohesion. The border provinces are everlastingly rebelling against the decrees of the central government. Furthermore, when the Spanish colonies secured their independence, they either did not combine or else combining soon fell apart. The reason for this lack of solidarity may be found in the history of the Hispanic race and in the geographical conditions that exist in the southern continent.
In criticising South American habits of mind and political tendencies, one must remember that the moral and intellectual characteristics that form the soul of a people have been developed by its entire past and represent the inheritance of its ancestors. For the motives of its conduct, one must look to its history.
Historically, the Hispanic race was led to develop individualistic rather than coöperative action. The forces at work in the peninsula were centrifugal rather than centripetal. A small handful of brave mountaineers were almost the only inhabitants of the peninsula that were able to defy the Moorish conquerors. The process of the Christian re-conquest of Spain was so slow that it took nearly eight centuries for her to grow from the lonely, rocky fastness of Covadonga to the group of Christian kingdoms that embraced the entire peninsula. During these eight hundred years, preceding the Conquest of America, the Spaniards fought almost continuously against an ever-present enemy. This developed a strong municipal spirit, for the towns on the frontier were in constant danger of attacks from the Moors, and it was necessary to grant them very considerable powers. As the boundaries of Christian Spain extended southward, new cities came to be frontier posts, but the old ones retained the powers and the semi-independence they had previously gained.
The result was a race of men devoted primarily to their cities; only secondarily to the province or kingdom to which their city belonged, and quite incidentally to Spain as a geographical and linguistic unit. Such a racial tendency could not help developing that disregard of large national interests in preference to petty local concerns which has been a most unfortunate trait in the history of the South American republics. For while it may be true that the conception of the city as the soul of the native country has always been effective from the point of view of the development of civilization, it has been disastrous in its effect on national progress. It was just that loyalty to the municipality that prevented the growth of the Greek Empire.
Another result of the eight hundred years of Christian warfare against the infidel Moor, was the development of moral and physical qualities that made possible the marvellously rapid conquest of America by small companies of conquistadores. Brave, bigoted, courageous, accustomed to continuous hostilities, ardently devoted to a cause for which they were willing to lay down their lives, fighting to the last ditch, it is not surprising that the ancestors of the South Americans were able to achieve such wonderful results in the early sixteenth century.
Only a vigorous and rising nation could have accomplished the great work of exploring, conquering, and colonizing America which was done at that time.
As a matter of fact, a wonderful transformation was then taking place in Spain. The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella had united by personal bonds what had formerly been a handful of detached kingdoms. These countries each had their own laws, their own peculiar customs and separate administrative systems. Some of the provinces were inhabited by people of different stock. The process of unification was almost contemporaneous with the conquest and colonization of America.
For a career destined to be as great as that of any of the larger empires of history, Spain had at the beginning of the colonizing period an inadequate political organization. Spanish racial unity and religious uniformity were of recent growth. The European progenitors of the conquerors did not fight for Spain as a whole, but rather as citizens of a municipality or as vassals of a petty king. The spirit of a centralized, unified government whose citizens are willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of their nation, did not run in their blood. They belonged to a fragmentary and embryonic group of nations. Spain did not adopt a policy of centralization long enough before the acquisition of her American colonies to allow the results of such a change in methods of government to affect popular habits of thought. In the meantime, South America was being colonized by men who had no sense of racial unity and few tendencies towards concerted political action.
Hence it is not at all surprising that their descendants, the heroes of the Wars of Emancipation, did not find it easy or natural to unite under one government. It was in accordance with the history of their race that they should form separate political establishments. It was also in accordance with that Spanish colonial policy which forbade communication between the different colonies and in no way encouraged a community of interests.
Historically then, there was little to cause the South American colonies on achieving their independence, to unite, even had they not been separated by tremendous natural obstacles.
Although the basins of the Amazon, the La Plata, and the Orinoco offered many thousands of miles of navigable highways, the masses of water were too copious and too irregular to be controlled until the era of steam navigation. In the great valleys east of the Andes, the excessive fertility of the soil has produced an enormous area of continuous woodlands, a mass of vegetation that has defied the efforts of centuries to effect clearings and roads. This densely timbered and sparsely inhabited region keeps Venezuela from having any dealings with Bolivia more effectually than if an absolute desert lay between them.
There is nothing that separates one of the United States from another that is at all comparable to the lofty chain of the Andes and the impenetrable jungle that lies for hundreds of miles on the eastern slope of the Cordillera. The more one considers the matter, the more it seems as though nature could not have placed more impassable obstacles in the way of intercommunication if she had set out with that definite purpose in view. In comparison with the difficulties of travelling from Lima, the centre of the old Spanish domain, to Buenos Aires, a journey from New York to Charleston in the days of the American revolution was a mere pleasure jaunt, and yet it seemed difficult enough at that time! Nowhere in the English colonies existed such impediments to communication as the deserts of northern Chile and southern Peru, the swamps of eastern Colombia and western
