THE VENEZUELANS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVI, Issue XXV, 20 June 1896, Page 736

THE VENEZUELANS.

The Venezuelans are Spanish-Americans, speaking the sonorous tongue of Castile and living under laws and customs that are tlavoured with the tradition of old Spain. They are the descendants of the boldest spirits that went forth from Spain in the days when she was mistress of the world, while yet she was burning with the ardour and glowing with the courage of the Conquerors of Granada and before the noonday of chivalry bad declined into the twilight of bigotry. Into this warp was woven the woof of her native population, and the civilised Indian of Spanish America has shown himself intellectually and physically the equal of his Caucasian brother. Crespo, of Venezuela, like Diaz of Mexico, is the product of Spanish fathers and Indian mothers. Climate and environing conditions have united to preserve the freshness and virility in the Venezuelan which his Spanish ancestor has lost. Industrialism and commercialism, the twin curses of our civilization, are practically unknown in Venezuela, her people depending on her fields and forests, her pastures and her mines for the measure of prosperity she enjoys. Fruit and flowers are everywhere ; a fertile soil yields bountiful harvest under moderate work ; a bland and balmy climate makes hard and unremitting toil a folly. Cold and hunger, the potent allies of plutocracy, are unknown in such a land. Gaunt, red mills, whose wheels grind out at once pauperism and plethora, are fortunately few, and the bard conditions of our industrial civilization are happily absent from the land. The dreadful, future rainy day is never in the eye of the Venezuelan living in the land of plenty ; and hence the thrift and selfishness of North America are not conspicuous on the shores of the Caribbean. The hurry and rush of our life, that leaves so many nerveless wrecks at sixty, are absent from the free and careless life of the tropics ; they add neither balm nor beauty to human kind and are impossible under Venezuelan skies. The Spanish-American is a philosopher ; music and art mean much more to him than to us ; he is imaginative, and poesy appeals to him. Freedom to him is an ideal thing, a bird on the wing ; with us it is a caged canary, safely locked up to be looked at. We make a fetich of law and order ; the Venezuelan does not care to be misgoverned, insulted, and robbed under forms of law. While we bear legal outrage and law-made annoyance with the patient endurance of the ass, the Venezuelan draws his sword and destroys both the bad law and the evil law maker with one blow. Hence the ease with which he enters upon war and revolution. The Venezuelan is a man who lives out of doors very close to nature. His home is built with no idea of defying all-conquering nature, for nature is kind, if resistless, to him. The vast plains, or llanos, stretching from the Orinoco out towards Guiana, are devoted to cattle and horse raising ; and the wild free life of the plain makes the llanero as brave and free as our own cowboys of the West. He lives with his herds, owning allegiance to his home estancia, coming to the little towns on the river only when he needs a new excitement. The heat and vastness of the llano are in his fibre, and he has an honest scorn for the trader and dweller in the city. Armed with machete aud riata he fears uo foe, and it was of such material that Crespo began his successful revolution. The people are orderly and industrious from the Venezuelan point of view ; the hustling owner of a factory or a rollingmill might call them lazy and thriftless ; vet the average man will agree with the Venezuelan that the whole object of life and living is not death and accumulation. In bis bamboo house, thatched with palm leaves, equipped with a hammock and a few cooking utensils, surrounded by his tiny farm—the labouring man, the bottom of the social stratum of Venezuela, is as independent as the birds of the forest. Some coffee bushes, some rows of beans, some tobacco plants, a patch of yams, a row of mandioca trees, and the fruits of the

forest suffice to supply his physical wants. Forest and stream add to hie humble table; balmy airs ’and wholesome sunshine preserve his health ; and the grandest mountains of the continent, garbed in the richest foliage, smile down on him to preserve the sanity of his soul. Happy, contented, frugal, abstemious, kindly, and hospitable, free from care that carks and poverty that grinds, the bumble Venezuelan is a king beside our sweating, toiling worker. Among the hills and forests are thousands of streams and rivers running down

the slopes to feed the Amazon, the Orinoco, and the Margarita. Their sands are yellow with gold, the gold which for ages the Peruvian ideas gathered to adorn their palaces and temples. The vagrant, restless and adventurous, who scorn even the ease of Venezuelan rural life, plunge out into these virgin wilds with pick and cradle to gather the precious metal: and in its total, the gatherings of these gambusinos adds materially to the wealth of the land. In Caracas and the other cities of Venez uela the population in commerce and the professions are, after we discount the differences of climate, habits, customs, and language, much the same as those of any land. These cities have their educated and .refined classes, who surpass our own in their knowledge of and devotion to the higher things of life—art, music, and letters —but who, dropped down in any centre of civilisation, would be known as courteous and charming people, differing little from any others. Venezuela has her soldiers and diplomats, her scholars, painters, singers, and writers, whose standards are as high as any ; but it is beyond the city that we must look for the life that is distinctly Venezuelan, that picturesque life that adds so much to the charm of the land.