| CERTAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SOUTH AMERICANS OF TO-DAY |
By Professor HIRAM BINGHAM
YALE UNIVERSITY
UNTIL very recently, the average newspaper article and the talk of the average person, so far as it went, took it for granted that South America was a region devoted to revolutions and fevers, where individuals called South Americans spent their time in a cheerful state of anarchy. There are novels and plays that still maintain this pleasing fiction, although, thanks to a recent enlightened secretary of state and an energetic director of the Bureau of American Republics, we know much more about South America than we did. In fact, we are beginning to distinguish to a certain extent between the stable republics of Argentina and Chile and the troublesome ones like Venezuela, but we still like to speak of the people as "South Americans" and it is fair to do so.
A race is rising in South America that is different from anything that the world has yet seen. It is a hybrid product composed for the most part of the blood of Spaniards and South American aborigines, such as Quichuas, Araucanians and Abipones. There is also an infiltration of various European stocks. It is true that there are differences between the peoples of the several South American republics, just as there were great differences between the aboriginal Indian tribes. At the same time, there is so much of the blood that came from the Hispanic peninsula and this has been for so many generations the dominant factor, that it is possible to consider the people of South America more or less as a whole.
It must also be admitted at the beginning that there are many South Americans who can not be included in any general criticism. There are many families of pure Castilian ancestry who rightfully resent any implication that they are hybrids because they are South Americans. And they would also prefer not to have the pure-blooded Indians counted as South Americans, although the latter constitute a majority of the population in several republics, notably Bolivia and Peru. We ought easily to be able to appreciate the fact that such a broad term as "South American" must include many diametrically opposite types, for foreigners are finding it increasingly difficult, nay almost impossible, to define and fix the limit of our own characteristics as "Americans." A hundred years ago it was simple enough. People of English descent dominated things everywhere. To-day we are a
