Gast's pamphlet, summarised in the second chapter, speaks of eighty million people "reaching upward and now setting their feet on the first steps of their life-journey." The expression may seem a little inappropriate and, at first sight, even a little derogatory. But it is true: and, on reflection, no South American need feel hurt at this description, which is in fact a justification of the past history and present position of his country. These countries are young. They have known the turbulence of youth. Now they are pushing their way, vigorously enough, towards maturity and clearly developed form. The fact was distinctly stated by a Brazilian, lecturing lately in King's College, London, who said: "The Nineteenth Century was the age of experiment; the Twentieth Century will be the age of fulfilment." These countries still require interpretation to Europe. Hampered at their first start, at the epoch of emancipation, by the exhausting and confusing character of that long struggle, by want of political experience, by the ignorance of the masses and, in some parts, by ethnological difficulties, they were obliged to spend a generation or two in clearing up the aftermath of that revolution; and in most cases their political constitutions (although in form they are models of constitutional law) are in their actual working only now emerging from the stage of experiment, sometimes confused and shifting experiments, sometimes rough-and-ready expedients. For example, in the Argentine Confederation and also in the United States of Brazil, the relations between the Federal Government and the Governments of the States have not attained that regular equilibrium which prevails in the United States, an equilibrium which was there only procured at the cost of a tremendous civil war. In most of the republics the relations between the Executive and the Legislature have scarcely reached a stable adjustment. We should remember that Brazil only shook off the monarchical form of government in 1889, and that it was some years before that revolution was really completed. Again, in the republic best known to England, the Argentine Confederation, the multifarious and cosmopolitan mixture of immigration from all the Mediterranean lands has hardly yet coalesced to form a definite national type. The origin of these states, though superficially resembling that of the United States, was in fact fundamentally different. For every one of the thirteen British colonies of North America was, in a sense, grown up and a developed entity at the moment of emancipation, since they had all possessed local parliamentary constitutions of the British type from the beginning of their colonial days. The initial condition of the Latin-American states was much more formless and their early difficulties were much more complex.