Renaissant Latin America; an outline and interpretation of the Congress on Christian work in Latin America, held at Panama, February 10-19, 1916

Foreword

In preparing this condensed account of an epoch-marking conference, the author has been embarrassed by space limitations which have necessitated the omission of much material quite as important as some that has been included. His aim has been to select that which is most typical of the Panama Congress and to omit duplications, so far as the completeness of separate chapters would allow. Repetitions still remain for the reason that a number of the Commissions needed to include material which had been used in a different relation in other reports; and to omit these duplicated portions would mar the completeness of a given Commission's work.

The author wishes it to be distinctly understood that this volume has been written with a constant desire to reproduce truly the ideas given expression at the Congress and not to emphasize his own judgments on many of the problems discussed. To that end, and with the concurrence of its editorial committee, he has used freely, and without acknowledging his obligations formally, the exact words of the reports and of the platform addresses. He has not inserted quotation marks always when the ordinary usage would require them. This is due to the exigencies of his desire to give the precise thought of a writer or speaker, and

Iv FOREWORD

at the same time to economize space ; so that quotation, paraphrase and condensation may occur in a single sentence, making the marks of quotation, if used, an enigma and a blemish. This editorial license will be criticised most by those speakers whose more formal addresses are summarized and extracted from in Chapter X. The author hopes that he has not sinned in the manner described by Dr. McCosh in his "Divine Government," where he remarks, "A garbled quotation may be the most effective perversion of an author's meaning." If he has transgressed seriously in this matter, forgiveness is asked publicly for scores of offenses that may be noted not only in that chapter, but more especially in the extremely concise reproductions of ideas expressed in platform discussions.

Despite the brevity and omissions of this volume, it will have failed utterly of its purpose, if it has not brought to the reader some impression of the profound importance of a congress which should mean more for the higher life of Latin America and for the awakening of Christian responsibility for aiding its leaders in national uplift than any other single factor in its social, mental and spiritual regeneration. Happily, the full significance of the Congress may be more fully appreciated from the three-volume report, containing the investigations of its eight Commissions, as well as a careful report of its platform discussions and addresses.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Foreword iii

I The Story of the Congress. i

II

As it is proposed to present in this volume each of the reports of the eight commissions in a single chapter, including the discussions connected with its presentation, — material twenty-fold more extended than the chapter itself, — it is obviously impossible to do more than select what seems of greatest importance in connection with each theme and condense even that modicum. The reader is referred for details and additional phases of each topic to the three-volume report of the Congress, containing the full statements of the eight commissions as finally edited, with the correctives due to the discussions of the Congress incorporated in the text.

To Commission I on "Survey and Occupation," whose Chairman was Mr. E. T. Colton, was entrusted the important task of laying before the delegates the results of its careful investigation of the varied conditions bearing directly or indirectly upon the missionary occupation of Latin-American lands. It was thus a preview for the other Commissions.

As delimited by the Commission, Latin America includes all the areas south of the Rio Grande, consisting of ten republics north and ten south of the Panama

Canal Zone, and of colonies of France, Great Britain, Holland, Denmark and the Zone itself, administered like Porto Rico by the United States. Inhabiting this generous territory of 8,459,081 square miles is a population of 80,203,902, — largely estimated rather than counted. These figures need to be compared with more familiar units to be fully appreciated. Thus the United States of North America, excluding Alaska, could be superimposed upon the United States of Brazil with room enough left to accommodate two additional New Englands and New Jerseys, plus New York and Pennsylvania. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland would not quite fill Ecuador, that tiny triangle on South America's map. Nearly thirteen New Englands could be packed into our next-door neighbor, Mexico; while Argentina is almost one-third as large as all British territory in North America. Compared with populations of other mission fields, Latin America's inhabitants equal in number the negroes in all of Africa, according to recent conservative estimates, or the combined population of the great mission fields of the Japanese Empire, — including Korea and Formosa, — the Turkish Empire and the Union of South Africa. Anglo-Saxon America outnumbers by little more than a third Latin America's populations.

It was prospective areas and populations, however, rather than present figures, that quickened the imagination of the Congress. While the boundaries cannot be enlarged, areas now useless were spread before the delegates as inviting fields of bright promise. Thus the forest-covered regions of Central America, Colombia, Venezuela, the Guianas, parts of Ecuador and Peru and equatorial Brazil — at present least desirable for immigration — are nevertheless well adapted to negroes, Hindus, Indians, and other races acclimated to the tropics; so that instead of sixteen millions occupying the fringes of these regions, the area and habitableness of much more of these sections can be extended to accommodate more than sixty millions. In regions more adapted to white men, Argentina, Uruguay and Southern Brazil, there are a million square miles available for settlement, where it is predieted that a population of one hundred millions of people will be found at the end of the century, with, an ultimate capacity of twice as many. Sefior Calderon predicts that in the year 2000, Latin America will domicile 250,000,000 people. While few would agree with the famous French geographer Reclus in his statement that it will finally support two billions of people, the estimate that it will one day maintain half a billion, or almost one-third the world's present population, is quite believable.

To this land of desire, the last great unoccupied area of the habitable world except sections of Africa, a stream of immigration is already setting, so that in 191 3 about a million immigrants landed on Latin- American shores while nearly half that number returned home, — forty-five percent, as against forty percent, returning home from the United States the year before. Most are from European lands, but the number of Japanese immigrants is increasing and many come from China and India. French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese arrivals do not need to change their type of civilization and are speedily absorbed; while North Americans, Englishmen and Germans require one or two generations of life in Latin America before assimilation does its work. During this period of absorption and assimilation, it is vastly important that a religious atmosphere more helpful than is found there at present should be provided.

The Commission could not omit from its purview the vast resources of Latin America, which are the bait alluring immigrants, commerce, and capital to the Latin hook, and at the same time the substantial foundation for the belief that this part of the world is one of great prospective importance from the Christian viewpoint.

Despite the fact that much of its area is an impenetrable jungle of coarse grass, rainless regions of sandy soil, swamps, miasmatic forests and lofty mountain tracts, there is incalculable wealth in products of forest, ranch, farm and mine. Half the rubber of the world comes from tropical America. Argentina alone in 1914 possessed 123,612,000 cattle, horses, sheep — eighty millions of these, — goats, mules, pigs, etc. Four-fifths of the world's coffee supply comes from Brazil, and its diamond fields supply more brilliants than any part of the world except South Africa. Virgin forests of Latin America abound in rosewood and other valuable timber, Chile's sterile land supplied in 19 1 3 nitrates valued at $120,000,000. Cuba, the greatest sugar-cane raiser of the world, in 19 14 produced 2,575,000 tons of sugar, and its capital city supplied other countries with 183,234,330 cigars. Four years ago Argentina milled 1,345,568 tons of wheat. The supposedly barren wastes of Peru the same year yielded 1,740,024 tons of sugar-cane, while from its mines were shipped nearly ten million dollars worth of copper, — and so on endlessly. Resulting from this wealth of productions, international trade has grown from two billion dollars to three billions during the last ten years; and the Hon. John Barrett predicts that in the five years following the war this trade will increase to five billions. To transport this costly product twenty-five steamship lines from North America and over fifty from Europe ply back and forth, with Japan's commercial fleets coming thither from the Far East. Here, surely, are the guarantees of future increasing populations ; here, also is the certainty of increasing, selfish greed which needs the altruistic touch of the living Christ, in order to heal the inevitable leprous growth of a materialistic civilization.

A study of Latin Americans already domiciled in these republics and the heirs of four centuries of Ibero- American environment and influence is the discovery of peoples of mingled strength and weakness. That early inheritance must always be remembered. "When the Spaniards came to the New World," writes Lord

Bryce, "they came mainly for the sake of gold. . . . Few settlers came from Spain to till the land. The first object was to seize all that could be found of the precious metals, much to the astonishment of the natives, who thought that gold must be to them a sort of fetich. The next was to discover mines of those metals and make the Indians work them. The third was to divide up the more fertile districts into large estates, allotting to each adventurer his share of labor-natives along with his share of the lands. No settlers came out to clear the ground from wood and build homes upon it, as did the colonists of New England and those who sought to create a New France on the St. Lawrence. No Spaniard thought of tilling the land himself. Why should he when he could make others till it for him? . . . Accordingly, the invaders became a ruling caste, living on the labor of their Indian serfs, and for a long time they confined themselves to the lands upon which the latter were already established." And these conquistador es, "brave, hardy, romantic and warlike," as Francisco Yanes rightly describes them, were equalled by the Paulistas of Southern Brazil who as a racial blend of Portuguese and Indian marched as bandeirantes, or banner-men, on similar errands of Indian conquest and golden achievement. Red men proving insufficient in number and unequal to the blacks as laborers, Africa was robbed to supply the eastern half of the continent with slaves. From that early period onward, the white man has been dependent largely upon these two racial elements, to the detriment of his blood and of his own best development.

And yet we of the Anglo-American race do not fairly estimate the Latin American. Quoting again from the Assistant Director of the Pan American Union, Mr. Yanes: "I may say that a charge frequently made against us Latin Americans, and in a sense true, is that we are a race of dreamers. Perhaps it is so. We inherited from our forefathers the love of the beautiful and grand, the facility for expression and the vivid imagination of our race. From them we inherited the sonorous, majestic Spanish, the flexible, musical Portuguese, and the French — language of art, and a responsive chord to all that thrills, be it color, harmony, or mental imagery. We inherited their varying moods, their noble traits and their shortcomings, both of which we have preserved and in certain cases improved under the influence of our environment,— our majestic mountains, our primeval forests, the ever blooming tropical flowers, the birds of sweetest wild songs and wonderful plumage, — under magnificent skies and the inspiration taken from other poets and writers, be they foreign or native, who have gone through life like the minstrels of old with a song on their lips and an unsatisfied yearning in their hearts." This is typical of the best Latin Americans.

Those early adventurers may have been dominated by forces that Professor Shepherd compresses within his quotation, "gospel, glory and gold;" yet be it said that the first of these was never wanting, no matter how we may evaluate it. And thus it happens that the bright lining of that dark cloud was the devotion — flaming forth again and again — in such heroic souls as animated Jesuit, Franciscan and Dominican curas, doctrineros and misioneros — priests, catechists and missionary monks — who braved danger of every description to aid their degraded charges. How the work of the Jesuits impressed itself upon Indians of the Paraguayan reductions is a miracle of missions, albeit wrought to the destruction of all native initiative and of true manliness. The author last quoted holds that the Spanish clergy had three motives in dealing with the Indians, "destruction, construction and instruction.'' Of these destruction was sometimes mere iconoclastic zeal which did not seem to conflict with the retention of much that was heathenish, kept "because of their ignorance and weak minds.'' Too often in the early years conversions, forbidden to be through force, were the result of entradas and conquistas de almas, which entries and conquests of souls were made by missionaries accompanied by soldiers who raided villages and carried off children and youths to be taught Spanish and instructed in the Catholic faith. Yet over against multitudes of these shepherds may be placed one such saint as Las Casas, the "Apostle to the Indies" — as "seamy" a saint as some of St. Paul's Corinthian charges, some historians think, yet one whose influence contributed in large measure to the enactment of humane legislation that became a feature of later Spanish policy. These are sample leaves from the history of the early centuries, turned that the reader may see the origin of many things in Latin- American life to-day that he may fail to understand otherwise.

Recalling such historical incidents, many Anglo- Americans are surprised to find what unusual men and women their Latin neighbors are. They have among them universities in Lima, Mexico City, Cordoba in Argentina and Sucre which began their work from thirteen to eighty-five years before Harvard was established, while Peru's second University at Cuzco antedates Yale by nine years. The printing press came to the New World in 1536, when its first book was printed in Mexico, Father Las Casas' plea for a better life, while South America's first book was published in Peru about 1584. Patriots of undying fame laid the foundations of Latin- American liberty: — Bolivar, called the Washington of South America, though San Martin was more like him than Bolivar; O'Higgins, the Chilean hero; Tiradentes, the forerunner of Brazilian independence; Morelos and Hidalgo, Catholic priests and martyrs in the cause of Mexican liberty. Latin-American literature ranks fairly well with Anglo-American, though ignorance of Spanish and Portuguese prevents North Americans from enjoying its treasures. Science is honored by such names as Ernesto Quesada, the sociologist, whose library contains 25,000 volumes in which his own writings fill a five-foot shelf. Estanislao Zeballos, the jurist, has a collection of 28,000 volumes, and his published works require nine feet of shelf-room. International law has been enriched by such authorities as Drago and Calvo of Argentina and Ruy Barbosa of Brazil. It was a young physician, Dr. Oswaldo Cruz, who transformed Rio de Janeiro from a "City of Death" into the healthy tropical metropolis of two years later. A Cuban, Dr. Carlos A. Finley, discovered and announced the communication of yellow fever by mosquitoes, freely acknowledged by General Gorgas and Dr. Reed as the foundation for their later elaboration and application in the Panama Canal Zone. Poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, bear Latin-American names of high distinction. And those present at the Panama Congress listened to Latins whose ability as representatives of diplomacy, law, education and religion was abundantly evident.

As the Commission was seeking for all the truth, it did not hide from view the other side of this shining shield. A brief table will show its racial basis, as roughly divided into seven classes :

Mixed White and Indian 30,000,000

Mixed White and Negro 8,000,000

Mixed Negro and Indian 700,000

East Indian, Japanese and Chinese .300,000

Of Latin America's eighty millions, it is mainly the eighteen millions of whites who are measurably what one finds in Europe or North America. The remaining seventy-seven percent, are not so cultured, and most of them are in manifold need.

Of the mixed populations it may be said that they are favored in one particular above those in North America, namely, in the absence of any distinct color line, whether red or black. One's position in society need not be affected by any degree of miscegenation, as some of Latin America's most famous men have been of mixed ancestry. Social status depends, rather, upon innate ability, financial standing, mentality and social gifts. Though more than a score of terms are in use to denote varying degrees of race admixture, Senor Calderon rightly says: "A single half-caste race, with here the negro and there the Indian predominant over the conquering Spaniard, obtains from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There is a greater resemblance between Peruvians and Argentines, Colombians and Chilians, than between inhabitants of two distant provinces of France, ... or between the North American of the far West and the native of New England. The slight provincial differences enable us the better to understand the unity of the continent." Yet he necessarily adds: "There is a spontaneous hierarchy in the Latin New World; there are superior and inferior democracies, maritime nations and inland states. Paraguay will always be inferior to the Argentine Republic, Uruguay to Brazil, Bolivia to Chile, Ecuador to Peru, Guatemala to Mexico; as much from the point of wealth as in population and influence."

As to the effects of the almost universal miscegenation, Lord Bryce's studies and South American observations find brief expression in these conclusions: (i) The fusion of two parent stocks, one more advanced, the other more backward, does not necessarily result in producing a race inferior to the stronger parent or superior to the weaker. (2) Conquest and control by a race of greater strength have upon some races a depressing and almost ruinous effect, as in the case of the Peruvians after the coming of the conquistadores. (3) The ease with which the Spaniards intermingled by marriage with the Indians, and the Portuguese with the negroes, shows that race repugnance is no such constant factor in human affairs as Teutonic peoples are apt to assume. (4) As touching the future, it seems certain that the races now inhabiting South America will all ultimately be fused. The Spanish republics — except the purely white Argentina and Uruguay — will be Ibero- American, Brazil will be Ibero-American-African, the process requiring in the Spanish republics two centuries or more. (5) Of the quality of the emerging mixed race, he writes : "One cannot but fear that the Portuguese of tropical Brazil may suffer from the further infusion of an element the moral fiber of which is conspicuously weak, though there are those who argue that the blood of the superior race must ultimately transmute the whole. It is not to be assumed that the peoples of the Spanish republics will necessarily decline, for the present degradation of the

Indians may be due as much to their melancholy history as to inherent defects. It is still too soon to be despondent. There may be in the Indian stock a reserve of strength, dormant, but not extinct, ready to respond to a new stimulus and to shoot upwards under more inspiriting conditions." Speaking elsewhere of the probable influence of the negro strain, he says: "What ultimate effect the intermixture of blood will have on the European element in Brazil I will not venture to predict. If one may judge from a few remarkable cases, it will not necessarily reduce the intellectual standard. One of the ablest and most refined Brazilians I have known had some color, and other cases have been mentioned to me."

Stated in a single paragraph, the three outstanding social groupings as they face the missionary are the Indians, the lower peon class, and the aristocratic land-owning class. Generally speaking, there is no middle class such as exists in Europe and North America, although in commercial centers one is beginning to form. Most of the Indians are still primitive, though members of the race have risen to prominence, Benito Juarez of Mexico and a number of Peru's Indian presidents, for example. To-day most of the Indians are pitifully ignorant and are practically neglected by social and religious agencies. They are prolific, but unsanitary conditions and ignorance of hygiene cause a high death-rate. The peon class, next above the Indians, is of mixed blood, the union having produced a hardy race. They are capable of enduring hard work on a meager diet and live in squalor. They are oppressed by the landed class, and neglected by the Church and by most of the states. Between the third — or aristocratic — class and the other two a gulf is fixed that can be most easily bridged by gold. Its members dominate most things, live in luxury and provide their families with every desirable means for enjoying life — like wealthy persons in most lands. Yet, as already suggested, they do not strive to keep down the lower classes, nor is intermarriage with promising women of color tabooed.

Following its detailed survey of Latin-American races, here only cursorily touched upon, Commission I presented the claims of these peoples upon the evangelical Churches of more favored lands. Immigration and commerce, the world over, tend to be destructive to morals and religion through the removal of home restraints, the absence of helps to higher living in the new and usually low environment of the fresh immigrant on foreign shores, or the convivial habits of men engaged in foreign firms, where one's associates have often little respect for morals and religion. The Commission bore testimony to the godly lives and helpful influence of many business men of Latin America, but regretted to report that in so many cases moral tragedies of colonization and commerce were the result of New World contact. Too often one derelict, hailing from Europe or North America, means the destruction or crippling of many lesser Latin craft with which there has been injurious collision. The manifest duty of Anglo-Saxon Christians is to abate the evils engendered by colonization and commerce. Where one's countrymen exploit, one must serve. The character-building forces of nations that export the products of breweries, distilleries and other instruments of debauchery should outreach and circumvent those destructive agencies.

The imminent peril to faith seen among all classes of Latin Americans is an even stronger appeal to evangelical Churches. Very few among the intellectuals have any vital interest in Christianity. The Latin-American Church, untouched by the modern learning of the nineteenth century, did not concern itself with the new rationalism, materialism, pessimism and naturalism whose full force engulfed the Latin scholar who studied in home or foreign universities where such movements were dominant. Unaided in their hour of need, the faith of educated men suffered shipwreck, or found itself in gravest peril. Four groups are noted among the intellectuals, though of varying numbers and importance : ( i ) A violent anti-clerical party, many of whom extend their opposition to religion of every form; (2) the more or less well-reasoned atheists and skeptics who look indulgently upon religion as harmless for women and for the lower classes, but who themselves are indifferent to its personal claims; (3) the dissatisfied groups who are groping their way in the darkness with the usual result of ending in cynicism and hardness of heart; and (4) those whose period of doubt and of faith's collapse is before them as they enter upon their free higher education. As one listens to the roll-call of Latin republics, one is appalled by the prevalence of all degrees of unbelief and of opposition to Christianity. Surely doubt and denial of all faiths, spreading apace and unchecked among eighty millions of people, concern the entire Christian world. Churches with modern religious scholarship and strong faith are bound to offer intellectual Latins the torch with which to relight the failing or darkened lamps of Christian belief and life.

Whatever doubt there may be about the justifiableness of sending representatives of evangelical missions to Roman Catholic Latin America, there can be no valid objection to heeding the claims of its unevangelized millions, especially the neglected Indians. That section of the Commission's report might be reprinted with profit as a clarion call, voicing the deepest of Latin-American spiritual needs. Neglect, if you will, the thirty millions of mestizos, whose nominal Christianity is little better than a "baptized heathenism," as a Romanist once described it, seventeen millions of approximately pure-blooded Indians remain for whom very little has been done. These and the six millions of pure-blooded negroes, also practically neglected, are peoples whose physical, social and spiritual condition is a mute yet moving Macedonian appeal to the evangelical Church.

The study of the Latin-American situation convinced the Commission that missions had a still higher and more subtle contribution to make to the Latin republics. The influence of spiritual and intellectual freedom upon the character of individuals and nations is a patent teaching of history. Just as the Roman Catholic Church, obedient to its sense of mission, has planted its institutions and exerted its influence in the midst of Protestant communities and states, so the evangelical Churches feel it incumbent upon them to supply to Latin America, in so far as its republics do not possess them, the foundations of intellectual freedom, the open Bible to be possessed, studied and practiced by all, and the recognition of the right and value of democracy in ecclesiastical government.

As the Panama Congress faced these responsibilities and opportunities, it was heartening to be reminded that the far-flung line of fraternity and cooperation was in the main wisely located. The major bases for present and more extended operations are so chosen as to make them, like St. Paul's strategic entrepots, natural and effective centers of out-reaching lines of diffusion to unoccupied hinterlands. Almost unequaled waterways and sixty-five thousand miles of railway, connecting most of the mission stations with each other and the ports, are available for the gospel messengers. While nearly four-fifths of Latin America lies within the tropics, elevated areas supply a temperate climate, and cities of the lowlands are becoming increasingly sanitary. Excepting the Indian tongues, the two Iberian languages, so nearly akin that Spaniard can readily understand Portuguese and vice versa, are the linguae Francae of Latin mission fields, — a fact, with their relatively easy acquisition, that is at once a help to the faithful student of these languages and a peril to the indolent missionary who forgets how the evangelical message is crippled and disparaged because of his slipshod use of the beautiful mother tongues of the Latin peoples.

Over against these favoring factors were certain opposing elements, chief among them racial relations. German assurance, English bluffness, American angularity and other barbarisms, are little calculated to win the polite and sensitive Latin — an argument for the repression of characteristics that wound or offend. The easy weapon of ridicule and the keen edge of criticism need to be sheathed, or used with the utmost tact and care. The inbred prejudice of Latins toward races whose ancestors were known only as the enemies of true religion, an inheritance from history, is present in many minds. The Latin-American fear lest their civilization should be overwhelmed through political and commercial aggression is a middle wall of partition between them and the rest of the Occidental world. Their writers linger over the North American peril, the threat of Germany, the menace of Japan; while the Monroe Doctrine is a shield whose dark side faces southward, the fear of which is hardly banished by the northern Christian's assurance, "Our call is to evangelize, not to Americanize. ,, If that assertion is made with any suggestion of race superiority, their special abomination, the words are resented. And then what if all this show of friendliness were merely the preparative for northern aggression, another case of Porto Rican occupation, of Cuban overlordship, of Canal Zone acquisition?

Religious liberty, constitutionally granted but often found only on the statute books, is a help where dominant, a hollow mockery in too many instances. Religious prejudices, almost universally present and ranging from indifferent tolerance to virulent opposition, are slowly yielding before increasing knowledge and the power of the evangelical program, so that religious openness is reported from most republics. Now is the pragmatic moment for the evangelical Churches to objectify themselves in evangelistic endeavor, in literary production, in educational work of intellectual and religious strength, in the extension of that welcome hand which has thus far been so grudgingly stretched forth in healing, and in a host of philanthropic activities so acceptable that it was hoped that the Congress might find some point of cooperation with the Roman Church in their prosecution. Such a prospect was obscured somewhat by the lack of national leadership adequately prepared for leading on to a bloodless victory the evangelical forces, — a defect to be emphasized later in this volume.