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American, yet there does not exist against Englishmen the
feeling that exists against Americans.

This third explanation comes closer than the other two,
still it misses the mark. No doubt, there have been Ameri-
cans who were narrow and prejudiced, and ill-bred enough to
show it; but several hundred American residents, business
men or salesmen, scattered through a foreign country and de-
void of any official authority, attempting to assume airs of
superiority over the natives would have very little effect,
indeed, they might appear ridiculous. Moreover, the writer
during his eight years of experience has observed that the
great majority of Americans who have business dealings in
Latin-American countries are able to overcome or, at least,
hold in abeyance any prejudices they might have.

The deep-seated cause of this feeling of hostility does
not spring from the actions of Americans who go to Latin-
America but from the treatment accorded to Latin-Americans who
come to the United States. In truth, the whole question is
involved in our own national and local Negro problem.

The Latin-American people, by an overwhelming majority,
are not white people, and decidedly not in the American sense,
and the number of them, people of wealth and refinement, who
have come to the United States and been treated like "niggers"
will never be known. The same people have gone to Europe
for the Latin-American of means makes travel his chief diver-
sion—and noted the difference. These travelers have re-
turned home and facts concerning the treatment accorded in the
United States to a dark skin have been disseminated with some-
thing

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something of masonic secrecy. This secrecy is what has
made the whole question puzzling. The Negro in the
United States loudly sets forth his ~~racist~~ wrongs, but
whatever the Latin-American has suffered at the hands of
Americans on account of race discrimination he neither
discusses or even openly admits. Of course, the position
of the two groups is far from being identical. For Latin-
Americans, citizens of independent and sovereign nations,
to complain of race discrimination against them in a foreign
country, would be to attach to themselves, in some degree,
the stigma of inferiority. This is what the Japanese have
been forced to do officially. The Latin-Americans understand
this and adopt other measures.

In only one way do they take any cognizance of this question
and that is through indirect reference to it in the Latin-Ameri-
can press. Any observation of the newspapers of the capitals
of Central and South America will show that these publications
make a point of giving space and prominence to lynchings and
other outrages perpetrated against Negroes in the United States,
even though these outrages may be committed in most obscure com-
munities; and this is often done to the exclusion of other and
more important world news. It appears that they cull the Ameri-
can newspapers for these items; the writer has seen as many as
three in a single issue of a Latin-American paper. No comment
on them is ever published, but they always carry a silent warn-
ing.

The Latin-American of means and refinement is an exception-
ally

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exceptionally proud and sensitive man, and prizes his individual
honor and self-respect above any general conception of patriot-
ism. In a choice between the loss of national sovereignty and
the loss of his individual honor, self-respect and his status
as a man he would undoubtedly accept the former; and any affront
to the latter is something he will not forgive.

Ugarte, the well known Argentine patriot and agitator, has
traveled through Mexico, Central and South America, laboring to
awaken the people of those countries to the danger of imperial
aggression on the part of the United States, but that danger
does not appear to be sufficiently imminent to constitute the
chief motive for this propaganda. Senor Ugarte, whom the writer
had the privilege of talking with about a year and a half ago, is
himself a man of brown skin, and it is not unreasonable to judge
that the fear that lies closest to his heart is not that south-
ern republics will lose their independence to the United States,
but that they will fall under the bane of American prejudice, a
process which he has, without doubt, observed going on slowly
but surely in Cuba, Porto Rico and Panama.

It is idle for the United States to dream that, either
through the Monroe Doctrine---which is sometimes spoken of more
disparagingly in South America than in Europe---or through dip-
lomacy, or its Bureau of American Republics, or efforts for clos-
er trade relations, it will win the absolute confidence and good
will of Latin-American people so long as there is in this country
a Negro problem.

New York City

September 30, 1913.