ABSTRACT
Most South Americans agree that without foreign capital the continent’s future is uncertain. “This dependence is inevitable; without European capital there would have been no railways, no ports, and no stable government in America.” The great Venezuelan caudillo Guzman Blanco, who opened the doors of the country to foreign capital, stated in the year 1883 that under his authority Venezuela “had undertaken an infinite voyage towards an infinite future.” The period of construction is in fact a decisive struggle in which the organism is attempting to overcome internal antagonism. It consists of filling the hundred-year-old republican forms with economic substance; it is distinguished by convulsive efforts at relief from the remaining poisons of economic feudalism. Parallel to European tendency there developed a drift toward the adoption of the North American way of life with its tempo, uniformity, mass-production, standardization, struggle for existence, emphasis on superlatives, and money-making point of view.
