Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER m LATIN AMERICA TO-DAY Modern Latin America is the product of a century of republican institutions that followed three centuries of foreign exploitation. To give the student a general view of political, economic, social, and religious organization, we offer a few vignettes of what one sees in Latin America in the beginning of the twentieth century. Concrete illustrations are more numerous from the lands where Presbyterian missionaries are at work, viz., Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil and Chile. Instability of Governments.—In some of the republics, progress has been rapid and uninterrupted since they gained their freedom. In others, tribal factions and political plots have threatened cohesion. The insurrectionary spirit dies hard among Latin Americans for they seem to have a genius for disintegration and a weakness for dictators. Many disturbances have been fomented by outsiders. The pretexts for family quarrels seem trivial and ridiculous to North Americans until they interpret them as real issues in the lives of struggling men. When we remember their antecedents, and recall how little preparation for self-government some of these people have enjoyed, we cease to marvel that revolutions are chronic in some sections. As a rule, the semicivilized Indian is the most restless and seditious. Where he has been incorporated into the common blood as in Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, the situation is easier to control. Paraguay has been notorious as a revolutionary hotbed. In her prolonged faction-fights of thirty years she lost so many men that the women outnumbered the opposite sex five to one. Venezuela has had fifty-two uprisings within a century. Nobody knows just how many were stirred by foreign investors. Haiti and Central Ameri...