are now set down as little more than a twentieth. If we take the popular estimates, we find Humboldt in 1790 putting the pure Indians in Mexico at two-fifths of the population;[1] while Alison, taking the date 1810, calculates the Spaniards in Mexico, Guatemala, and Caracas at about 1,600,000 in a total population of 8,500,000, or rather less than 20 per cent.[2] The numbers given for this year in the Statesman's Year-Book make the descendants of the Spaniard at most 1,200,000 out of a population of more than 12,000,000 in those countries. On the whole, I believe, that in Spanish America, excluding Chili[3] and the Argentine Confederation, the pure or nearly pure descendants of the conquerors are not as one in four to half-castes and Indians, and that these latter amount to about 25,000,000, pretty evenly divided.[4]
It may be admitted at once that the position of those of Indian blood is still very secondary. Still, the evidence is, that they are conquering a place for themselves in other ways than by increasing and multiplying. "General Porfirio Diaz," says Mr. Curtis, "the foremost man in Mexico to-day, and one whose public career will fill pages in the history of that republic, is the representative of mixed Spanish and Aztec ancestry, like all of the famous native leaders of the last half-century."[5] In fact, however, the most distinguished of all, Juarez, was a pure-blooded Indian, as were also Mejia and
- ↑ Humboldt, La Nouvelle Espagne, livre ii. chap. vi. Stephens says that the Indians constituted (c. 1842) "three-fourths of the inhabitants of Guatemala."—Central America, vol. i. p. 305.
- ↑ Alison's History of Europe, vol. ix. p. 185.
- ↑ Even in Chili the population is far from being of pure European descent. "The Chilian soldier is by race more than three parts Araucanian," says Mr. Morris (Dark Days in Chili, p. 283).
- ↑ See Appendix A.
- ↑ Curtis's Capitals of Southern America, p. 30.
