(^312) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
bothered Spain. As late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, the
Spanish still thought their country to be the center of European civi
lization and the paragon of faith and virtue, equating ignorance of the
Spanish language with ignorance pure and simple.)
In New Spain (Mexico), the ratio of male to female immigrants was
ten to one.^2 Interracial marriage was inevitable, and indeed, in the be
ginning before Christian monogamy constraints took hold, some of the
conquistadors collected veritable harems of Amerindian concubines. In
the event, the mestizos of Latin America became an intermediate eth
nic group, the whiter the better, few in number but more numerous
than the Creoles, lower than they in status and function, but much
higher than the pure natives. The mixed bloods became the overseers,
the foremen, the shopkeepers, the petty officials. The Indians were as
signed and conscripted to labor in fields and mines, in homes and on
the roads.^3
In this simulacrum of Iberian society, the skills, curiosity, initiatives,
and civic interests of North America were wanting. Spain itself lagged
in these respects, owing to its spiritual homogeneity and docility, its
wealth and pursuit of vanities; and Spain exported its weaknesses over
seas. How could it be otherwise? Those Spanish who came to the New
World did not go there to break the mold. They went to get rich by it
and even bribed people to obtain places and offices; a few years would
do the trick. The road to wealth passed, not by work, but by graft and
(mis)rule.
These contrasts in economic potential were matched by differences
in political capability. The North American colonists came out of a so
ciety of dissent, moderately open to strangers and new ideas. I do not
want to imply that England and its political culture were a liberal ro
mance. Some of the earliest colonists, after all, refugees from religious
intolerance, went on to afflict and harass in their new home. England
had its share of John Bully stuffiness, of class pretension and privilege;
also a tenacious legacy of older constraints, going back to medieval ex
clusions and anti-Puritan snobberies.^4
But everything is relative, and when one compares English ebul
lience and diversity with the Counter-Reformation orthodoxy and su
perstitious enthusiasms of Spain and Portugal—the power of ideas and
initiatives in North America as against discontents in the Spanish and
Portuguese dominions—one can understand the political outcome.
The British colonists made their revolution. They picked and defined
the issues, challenged their rulers, sought the conflict; and when they
had won, thanks in part to the assistance of some of Britain's rivals in
nora
(Nora)
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