Spanish America: Its Romance, Reality and Future (Complete)

Who has not felt at some time the lure of Spanish America, the attraction of those half-mysterious lands—Peru or Panama, Mexico or Brazil, and all that galaxy of far-off States, with the remains of their ancient civilization and their picturesque modern setting—beneath the equatorial sun, beyond the Western sea? They drew us in our youth, were it but in the pages of Prescott, when with Cortes and Pizarro the Aztec and Inca Empires lay before us; they draw us even in maturer years.
Yonder lies the Spanish Main, glittering in the sun as when we sailed it first—in that long-foundered pirate craft of boyhood; there stretch the tropic shores of wild Guiana; there the great Andes rears its towering crests, and over golden sands the Orinoco and the Amazon pour down their mighty floods; whilst, in slumberous and mysterious majesty beyond, wide as the sea of Time, the vast Pacific echoes on its boundless shores. And for those, who would seek the true El Dorado of the West the great Sixteenth Century has not closed yet, nor ever will; the days of ocean-chivalry are not dead, the Elizabethan mariners come and go, for their voyages have no end within those spacious days of history.
Spanish America, in fact, is enshrouded in an atmosphere of romance and interest which time does not easily dispel, and remains a land of adventure and enterprise. Its sunny shores, its picturesque folk with their still semi-mediaeval life, despite their advancing civilization—the great untravelled spaces, the forests, the mountains, the rivers, the plains, and all they contain, the lure and profit of commerce and of trafficking—all these are matters we cannot separate from the New World as peopled by Spain and Portugal.
It is, moreover, peculiarly a world of its own, born in an impressionable period, indelibly stamped with the strong individualism of the Iberian people who overcame it, and it remains apart, refusing the hegemony of the commercialistic age—a circumstance for which we may be grateful, in a sense. Its future is on the lap of the unknown, offering always the unexpected: geography has everywhere separated it from the Old World; temperament keeps the seclusion.
Whatever be our errand in this new world—erroneously termed "new," for it is old, and had its folk, its Toltecs and pre-Incas, in the apogee of their ancient culture developed a shipbuilding as they did a temple-building art, they might have come sailing around the world and found us here in Britain still "painted savages"; whatever, I say, be our errand there, we shall not understand Spanish America and its people, just as they will never understand us, the people of Anglo-Saxon race. The gulf between us is as deep as the Atlantic, as wide as the Pacific. The incomprehensible Spaniard has added himself to the unfathomable Indian, the red-brown man who sprang from the rugged soil of America (perhaps from some remote Mongolian ancestry), who, inscrutable as a dweller of the moon, is still sullen and secretive as he was and well might be—after the rapine which followed on the white man's keel and sail upon his shores four centuries ago; the white conqueror, who in his adventurous greed destroyed the Egypt and the Chaldea of America and trampled their autochthonous civilization in the dust.
And as to the Spaniards, it is their strong individualism which presents a marked attraction here, though one which may not generally have been put into words: the individualism of nations founded upon historical and geographical bases, as has already been said. We approach here, not a mere United States of Spanish America, not a confederation of vast municipalities or provinces whose borders are imaginary parallels or meridians, but a series of independent nations, each stamped with its own character, bearing its own indelible and romantic name, whose frontiers are rivers and mountain ranges.