BIG BROTHER l8l
flashing smile, a touch of perfume, and a wicked air—in
fine, the " bad man " from Mexico. He may set hearts
fluttering ; but he is ultimately foiled by a more unassuming
blond. All the misgivings with which fair-haired races
regard the sleek heads of their darker neighbours are heaped
upon him ; and the most that any author will concede to
him is that he has admirable manners. But however low
he sweeps his hat, however gallantly his spurs may jingle,
the audience retains its grave doubts as to his moral qualities.
For he remains eternally the " bad man " from Mexico.
Are there, one is inclined to ask, no " bad men " from Kansas
City ? Is life in Chicago a tedious procession of civic virtue ?
Are there no villains in Dubuque ? This dependence on
foreign sources of supply for wickedness is surely morbid;
and, what is more, it has definitely warped the whole coun-
try's view of South America. For the New Yorker, as
he sits beneath his Tammany vine, regards the citizen of
Buenos Aires as a helpless victim of unnameable corruption ;
fresh from a political Convention, with the ballyhoo still
ringing in his ears and a vivid memory of its deliberations
punctuated by brass bands and the timely interventions of
vaudeville stars, he views Southern politics indulgently as a
mere comic opera.
That is the fundamental error of the United States about
their Spanish-speaking neighbours. For they have failed to
catch the high gravity of Spain, the solemn eloquence that
loves to theorise interminably as Don Jose theorised in
Dona Emilia's drawing-room, where Joseph Conrad caught
more of the mood of South American politics than is im-
prisoned in all the papers of all the research students that
ever sailed from New England ports for South America.
It was so tempting to regard the actors on that lively stage
as merely voluble and picturesque. They were voluble, of
course, because an animated language moves swiftlier than
the staccato interchange of grunts which Anglo-Saxons mis-
take for conversation. And they were picturesque; for
who could fail to be upon a sunlit scene between those