BOOK VI

_THE LATIN SPIRIT AND THE GERMAN, NORTH AMERICAN, AND JAPANESE PERILS_

From a racial point of view, it is true, one cannot call the South American republics Latin nations. They are rather Indo-African or Africo-Iberian. Latin culture--the ideas and the art of France, the laws and the Catholicism of Rome--have created in South America a mental attitude analogous to that of the great Mediterranean peoples, which is hostile or alien to the civilisation of the Germanic or Anglo-Saxon peoples.

New influences, whether they come from Germany or Anglo-Saxon America, and even more those that come from Japan, are dangerous to the Latin-American nations, if they tend to destroy their traditions.

{283}