HISTORIC SURVEY. 45 



Gradually the various elements of local revolution, in one place the discontent 

 of the Creoles at the appointment of Spanish or Portuguese functionaries, in 

 another racial hatreds between whites, blacks, and Indians, elsewhere the struggles 

 of " the masses against the classes '" — all was merged in the tremendous conflict 

 between the innovators and the representatives of the old conservative ideas. In 

 this conflict everybody, yielding to his sympathies, his traditions or interests, took 

 sides with the party with which his personal feelings were most in harmony. 

 Thus it happened that in the two armies, whites found themselves arrayed against 

 whites, blacks against blacks, aborigines against aborigines. And so the very 

 war itself had the effect of welding the three races in a more intimate national 

 unity. 



Oa issuing from the struggle the old Spanish colonies had, under the influence 

 of the French encyclopedists, constituted themselves republics based on the model 

 of the United States, while Brazil, still hampered in its evolution by the great 

 number of its slaves, was satisfied with a change of sovereigns ; it ceased to be a 

 colony to become an autonomous empire. 



The community of interests binding all the Brazilian slaveowners together, 

 and the national cohesion presented by the various groups of settlements along 

 the coast and on the inland plateaux, enabled Brazil to preserve a state of almost 

 unbroken public tranquillity for one or two generations. But in the Hispano- 

 American states the relations Avere very different. In these regions, differing in 

 climate, relief of the land, origin, speech and customs of its inhabitants, con- 

 flicting interests gave rise to incessant struggles. Hence the attempt proved 

 hopeless to unite in a single commonwealth of vast dimensions the Andean 

 highlands, the seaboard and inland plains, the torrid and temperate zones, the 

 Pacific and Atlantic coastlands. 



At first it had seemed natural enough to merge in a single political body the 

 immense possessions formerly owned by Spain in the New World. In fact, from 

 the purely geographical standpoint. South America is admirably suited to be 

 occupied by a united people. While resembling Africa in its general outline, it 

 differs altogether from that continent in its internal structure, and in the perfect 

 harmony of all its parts. Most of the regions on the African seaboard are com- 

 pletely isolated one from the other by solitudes and, till recently, unexplored tracts, 

 whereas the regions of South America abutting on the great backbone of the 

 Cordilleras, and watered by tributaries of the same mainstreams, stand in a relation 

 of close mutual dependence. They constitute collectively a geographical unit of 

 a strikingly simple character. 



But if the salient features of the continent and the disposition of its relief 

 forecast political unity in a more or less remote future, the actual distribution of 

 the populations in widely diffused groups, and unconnected by any common 

 trading relations, necessarily tended to create independent centres of political life. 

 Federal decentralisation, followed by complete separation of the several states, 

 was brought about by the very force of circumstances in each of the new 

 republics. 



