Henry Clay of Kentucky first offered his American System as a plan to guide the growth of the United States during the period of awakening nationalism that followed the Peace of Ghent in 1815. When asked just before his death in 1852 to make up a list of his most important public services for use by some friends who were having a medal struck to commemorate his career, Clay prepared a list of fourteen items which included the American System with the date, 1824. Thus, at the end of his long career, the Kentuckian identified this phrase with his most famous speech in support of the protective tariff. It may then seem surprising that his first recorded use of the term came on May 10, 1820, in a speech supporting recognition of the emerging nations of Spanish America. Clay’s use of “American System” in these two apparently different areas of discussion has led to two separate connotations for the phrase. The two meanings call for careful discrimination. Equally important, however, is the significant connection between them in the thought of Henry Clay.

The Lautaro lodges of revolutionary South America had their roots in Spain and England where creole patriots dreamed and plotted the overthrow of Spanish colonial power. The name was that of an Indian chief of the Araucanians of Chile, immortalized by the poet, Alonzo de Ercilla y Zúñiga. There is general agreement among Latin American historians that the Lautaro lodges played a significant role in the struggle for independence. Still debated is whether or not they were masonic or merely resembled the Freemasons in organization and principles.

An affinity for urban living has frequently been cited as one of the peculiar characteristics or long standing traditions of the Spanish people. Whether one accepts the existence of medieval Iberian cities as a heritage from the Roman municipium or as a necessary defensive establishment against the attacks of the Moors, it is evident that town life was flourishing in the Middle Ages. Municipal governments were formed to administer the communities, and as new towns were captured or created, the old models of organization were carried with the expanding frontier. In Castile the local councils were called concejos or cabildos and until the fourteenth century were often elective, representative institutions with increasing influence and power. But from the reign of Alfonso XI (1312-1350) their strength began to wane as the Castilian kings attempted to control their domains by appointing local officials and dispatching royal agents to work with them. By the sixteenth century the success of the centralizing methods was evident, for the municipal councils had become virtually the tools of the Castilian Crown.

Scholars are in substantial agreement that Latin American constitutionalism leaves much to be desired.

First, there is the wide gap between constitutional formulations and actual political practice. No one would contend that any constitution, Latin American or otherwise, corresponds exactly to reality. There are provisions in the United States Constitution which are no better observed than are those of the Latin American documents. Even so, there can be little doubt that the gulf between theory and reality is far wider in much of Latin America than it is in many other parts of the world. Though many provisions of other constitutions do not correspond to actual political practice, Latin American stipulations on significant principles of government are often so much at variance with reality as to be totally misleading for the description of their political systems. Professor Martin C. Needler puts it quite bluntly:

The Historia de España y de la civilización española by Don Rafael Altamira was published nearly 70 years ago in Barcelona (June, 1899) by Juan Gili. In character it is a manual, as the author himself admits in the prologue to the first edition: