Leaders of the american independence movements thought in concepts of natural law and natural rights. They assumed that a society not only should but could be based upon reason and liberty rather than authority or tradition. Even those who took the more dismal Hobbsian view believed that there was a large measure of rational consent to the laws which necessity forced upon men who were dominated by passion rather than by reason. In any case, Nature was believed to have a universal character, and differences in geographical background were thought to have relatively little importance in shaping society and civilization. Nor did they think in terms of the historical determinism, whether idealistic or materialistic, which dominated nineteenth-century thought. The New World was held to be the seat of liberty and equality, not because American soil necessarily produced freedom, but because in America man had freedom to reach his fullest development. The New World thus differed from the Old chiefly in the institutions and civilization which man had created here. Incidentally, this rationalist view had much in common with the older Utopian concept of America, from which, in no small measure, it was derived. Moreover, the very idea of Utopia was partly American in origin. Thomas More, for example, based his Utopia upon what he knew of Inca civilization. For a long time, therefore, Europeans had thought of America as a Utopia in which liberty, equality and opportunity for the immigrant were natural products of man’s freedom to live a life more in accord with Nature than Europe permitted.

Before the argentine revolution of 1810, land was the principal source of wealth and the sanction of social position in the otherwise resourceless Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata. The revolution of May did not significantly alter the fundamental social, political and economic relationships between the masses of the people, the landowners and the soil. And although the administration of Rivadavia in the 1820’s and the dictatorship of Rosas in the next two decades were poles apart in their philosophies of society and government, each bore the same fruit in the further concentration of land in the hands of a relatively few men. After the fall of Rosas and the return of the exiled unitarios in 1852, the position of the landed gentry was not changed, despite the work of men like Urquiza, Mitre and Sarmiento, who applied themselves to the task of awaking Argentina from its long sleep of reaction. These victorious leaders were liberal and pragmatic, but there was no Argentine Homestead Act during their administrations. They accepted the land system as it was and tried to build upon it by spinning out the means of communication and transportation and technical development that would make it workable and by bringing in immigrants to make it fruitful. Aside from the establishment of a few colonies, the methods of land distribution and the laws of landownership remained essentially unchanged. Indeed, the governments that came after the Rosas regime, needful of revenue and concerned with the white elephant that was the government domain, embarked on much the same types of real estate deals as had the tyrant. In one case, in 1857, the government leased 3,000,000 hectares of land to 373 people; in 1867 Mitre’s government sold this land on easy terms to its renters.

Though born into a distinguished family in the Mexican capital, in 1894, Francisco Monterde Garcia Icazbalceta did not find his road to success easy, smooth or direct. At fourteen he had to face the struggles of life alone, having lost his father when he was eight, and his mother only six years later. So precarious was his lot that for a time it seemed as if his education would have to be interrupted. With the encouragement of friends, however, he was able to complete his secondary education at the Escuela Nacional “Fray Francisco Aparicio” (1907), and a regular academic course at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (1909). With limited resources, and lacking parental support and guidance, young Monterde could not decide at once upon his life’s work. His aims and ambitions at that time were not quite clear even to himself, and his prospects and possibilities were also uncertain. His course was destined to be circuitous: he had to pursue his studies as best he could and as opportunities presented themselves. He took up the study of commerce and finance at the Escuela Nacional de Comercio “Doctor Mora,” graduating in 1912, and then embarked upon the study of dentistry, which he completed at the University of Mexico in 1916.

Charles Auguste marie Joseph Count de Forbin-Janson (1785–1844) had one of those rare natures whose essential spirit is that of the Christian apostle. That he was born to be a missionary is the only explanation of the single-minded, lifelong dedication of this greatly gifted nobleman whose apostolate included a dramatic and outstanding contribution to the mission record of the United States and Canada and who, although he did not die in America, was a martyr to his labor for its evangelization.

The poorest, the most abandoned, the most isolated of the Spanish possessions in North America was the province of Costa Rica. Despite valiant efforts made by the royal governors to build roads and to stimulate the production of items for export, the colonial history of the nation indicates a vegetating and unstimulated economy. The smallest settlements made by the Spaniards were scattered throughout the country, and the greatest concentration of population was in the fertile Meseta Central, which had no easy access to the sea. All of the early settlers were “miserably poor with no prospect of finding mines to bring them quick wealth, no export crop in demand in world markets, and no means of bringing such a crop to the coast had it existed.”