CHAPTER I

CHILETODAY AND TOMORROW

CHILE

TODAY AND TOMORROW

CHAPTER I

Physical Characteristics.—North, South, and Central Chile.—Brilliant Hues.—Climate.—Wet and Dry Seasons.—Social Problems.—Far-flung Cities.—Formation of Character.—Animals and Plants.

Chile is a ribbon of a country, an emerald and gold strip stretched between the snow-crowned wall of the Andes and the blue waters of the Pacific.

This ribbon is up-tilted all along its western edge to form the coastal range defending the long central valley. It is lightly creased transversely where, from east to west, streams fed with snow-water drain down from the Andean peaks. Below the fortieth degree of south latitude the ribbon is twisted and ragged, with the tilted edge half sunk in stormy waters. Thirty times as long as it is wide, Chilean territory runs from the seventeenth to the fifty-sixth degree of south latitude, for, with a Pacific coast measuring nearly three thousand miles the average breadth is no more than ninety. It is a land of extreme contrasts; of great violence, of great serenity: but whether harsh or smiling, Chile is a stimulating, a promising land holding the mind and the heart. It is a breeder of men and women of forcible character.

To the north lie the tawny and burning deserts where not so much as a blade of grass grows without artificialhelp, where no rain falls, year after year, where every form of life is an alien thing. In the south are broken, rocky islands and inlets, matted forests of evergreen trees with their feet in eternal swamps, of furious gales and cruel seas, where turquoise glaciers creep into the dark fiords. Eastward stands the great barrier of the Andes, snow-covered for half the year, with proud peaks rising at least eight thousand feet higher than the head of Mont Blanc. To the west, Chile looks out upon a waste of waters, with New Zealand as the nearest great country.

Shut in or defended by these barriers from each point of the compass, it is plain that Chile has had no sisters closely pressing upon her threshold. One might reasonably expect to find here a race possessing characteristics in common with island folk, a homogeneous people with a distinct nationality. Today, when all natural barriers have been overthrown by mechanical transport, no nation escapes exterior influence, but the Chilean does certainly retain the islander’s self-contained habit, physical hardihood, and power of assimilating rather than yielding to aliens. I do not think that the modern Chilean owes his traits so much to inheritance from the Araucanian as to the fact that he has been nurtured in the same cradle, for, without doubt, here is a personality and attitude of mind that distinguishes the man of Chile from his continental brothers.

Between the forbidding lands of the extreme north and far south and the frontiers of mountain and sea, lies fertile Chile—fruitful, gentle, brisk, well-watered. Nitrate and copper have their great populated camps, but they are artificial towns; the Magellanic city of Punta Arenas has a firmer root, but both north and south are new, and have received rather than produced. The Central Valley of Chile is the great garden of SouthAmerica, one of the most enchantingly lovely, the most frankly friendly, regions in all the world.

It seems as though nature had deliberately tried to compensate here for the arid and the stormy end of the belt by showering beauty upon the intervening strip. There is none of that strange illusory quality, the sense of living in a mirage, that attends upon tropical regions. Central Chile is fresh, dewy-bright, with the familiar sweetness of the temperate zones of western Europe. Here are fine cattle, sheep and horses, pleasant orchards of pears and plums and apples; olive groves and grapevines; the long green lines of wheat fields, the spires of the poplars, the blackberry hedges edged with gorse and bracken and purple-headed thistles, are all familiar. The stock of the farms, every kind of crop—except those invaluable American contributions to the world’s list of foods, maize and potatoes—were introduced from overseas, but they have long been absorbed into the economic life of Chile. If the visitor is lulled into forgetfulness of his real milieu by the sight of neat wooden fences, by the bramble-bordered and fern-edged lane, he is recalled by the sudden glimpse of a shining white cone suspended in the transparent air, the snowy head of a far volcano. Or he may see in the thicket beside the road a trail of copihue with its bright rosy bell, or note that the farmer, ruddy-cheeked and bright-eyed, riding a fine horse along a deep muddy road, wears a gay poncho and a pair of enormous silver spurs.

It is the Chilean south that has brought to the Pacific Coast its fame as a land of beautiful pictures. Before Puerto Montt is reached, the edge of Lake Llanquihue is skirted by the railway, and the sight of this splendid sheet of water is an introduction to the wild and lovely scenery that was still unknown fiftyyears ago. The mountain and lake regions of Chile have even yet not been thoroughly explored, and that so much of this magnificent territory has been charted is partly due to the ancient uncertainty of exact boundary limits with Argentina, and, after long negotiations, the surveying work of Holdich at the head of the commission of 1898, reporting to King Edward VII as arbitrator. Between Chile and Argentina lies a series of exquisite lakes, many lying in old volcano cups. There is no more lovely body of fresh water in the world than Todos los Santos, with emerald heights rising clear from the mirror of the water; Rupanco, Riñihue, Ranco, and Viedma are beads upon a splendid chain of fine waters.

Chile is a land of brilliant hues. The dark waters, shouldered by tree-clothed mountains, of the Strait of Magellan, reflect yellow and russet leaf-changes as bright as in the maple woods of Canada. Blue glaciers, pure snow heads and the delicate green of fern brakes are contrasted with the crimson of wild fuchsias and the mass of glorious bloom of apple and cherry orchards. Farther north, where poplars stand like tall flames against the background of the hills in the Chilean autumn, and the willows line the rivers with gold, all is soft and glowing; but beyond the northern limits of vegetation where nothing meets the eye but masses of orange mountains that seem like glowing draperies hung against the unchanging blue sky, there is an extraordinary clarity of line and tint.

When the sun descends, quick flushes of pink and yellow, sheets of pale green and violet, flood the burning desert and the deeply scored heights; there is no movement, no sound, and yet the wide scene appears instinct with life, to move beneath the waves of pure light.

Lake Todos los Santos.

Every smallest thread of water is here edged with a lush growth of bright emerald plants, every bush is a mass of orange or purple flowers. And in the settled spots there is grace in every tree, a picturesque quality in each little thatched hut by the wayside, an insouciance that lends charm to ’dobe walls and maize patches. The beauty and the kindliness of Chile are, in fact, apt to destroy one’s critical faculties.

The weather in Chile may be called extremely obvious. It is impossible to ignore it, as in some other countries, despite the situation of the greater part of Chilean territory within the temperate zone. The remarkable topographical conditions of this strip force each barometrical change upon the attention.

In the rainless north, modifications are chiefly confined to the effects of the curious sea-mist, thecamanchaca, spreading over some parts of the pampas to fifty miles inland; appearing about six in the evening, these fogs screen the coast and promptly lower the temperature, so, that, scorching at midday, one shivers under blankets at night. In the extreme south, among the islands and channels of the Magellanic region, boisterous seas and violent winds, cold and rain, made it the terror of sailors for three hundred years. The prevailing weather displays traits almost as unvarying as in the sharply contrasted north. Fine and calm days are rarities, although the climate is certainly not unhealthy, as Punta Arenas demonstrates.

But it is in the central region lying between Coquimbo and Valdivia that changes of weather have the most spectacular effect. In the valleys of the Aconcagua, the Mapocho, the Maule and the Bio-Bio we have perhaps the most striking results when the rainy season begins, usually towards the end of April. In thelowlands a blinding deluge descends that promptly clears town streets of pedestrians and frequently reduces cabs and street cars to temporary inactivity, while every country path and highway is transformed by a few hours’ rain into a deep morass. But whenever it rains in the central Chilean valleys snow is falling upon the Andean heights, and presently the eyes that for months have glanced with the indifference of custom at the far-distant, blue-shrouded, tawny mountains are astonished with a vision of giant peaks and shoulders that seem to have made an immense stride forward to the edge of the next field, their serene magnificence covered with shining white.

The effect upon the foothills is no less striking. During the last months of the dry season—enduring in the vineyard regions for some eight months—every inch of ground that is not artificially irrigated has taken on a uniform sandy hue. The whole earth is parched and the roads are a foot deep in dust. But within a week of the first rain a shimmering veil of light green tinges the land; in ten days every knoll and hillside has its carpet of young grass, and in a month the whole face of the country is changed, awakened, brilliant, bursting out with sturdy fertility. Such rivers as the Aconcagua and the Mapocho, dwindled to rippling threads among the wide stone-strewn beds, are changed in a night to raging torrents, fed from the sides of the mountains. More than once these silver streams have swept from their shallow banks, torn down protecting barriers, and done serious material damage, besides changing their courses—a matter of great import in regions where water-rights are the chief causes of quarrel among farmers.

Balmaceda Glacier.

With the setting in of the definite dry season at the beginning of September, the upper part of Central Chile thenceforth forgets the sound of rain for over half a year. Bright blue skies and unrelenting midday heat are almost unchanged; the watered country is a series of orchards, and the famous big black grapes, the peaches and plums and apples of Central Chile, succeed the strawberry crops. Chile in the early part of the dry season is a garden of flowers, and the fruitripening at the end of the year fills the valleys with busy scenes. There are thousands of workers in the orchards, grain fields and vineyards, and the heavywheeled ox-carts send up swirling masses of dust in every lane. Before the New Year the snow has melted under the summer sun from almost every part of the Cordilleras, although I have seen it linger in deep folds of Aconcagua and Tupungato until late February. Down south in Magellanic territory the permanent snow line comes down to a couple of thousand feet above sea level, and cold weather is the rule. The squalls of the Strait are generally rain-laden.

Aconcagua, highest peak of South America, is not actually a Chilean mountain, lying just across the Argentine frontier; but it is so familiar a feature of Central Chile that it is constantly annexed in thought. Mercedario, another magnificent height, also just escapes the boundary line. Beautiful Tupungato, 21,300 ft., is outclassed among Chilean peaks, as regards altitude, by Tocorpuri and Llullaico farther north, and is closely rivalled by a number of less famous mountains—Socompa, Baya, San Pedro and San Pablo, Peña Blanco, San Francisco, Muerto, Solo, Salado, Tres Cruces and Toro; below Central Chile the average height of the crests of the great volcanic wall drops from fifteen to nine thousand feet, but even such comparatively modest peaks as Osorno, Llaima, Calbuco, Lonquimay, Villa Rica, and the most southerly Paine,Burney, Balmaceda and Sarmiento, are striking and dignified with their snow crowns.

The long dry season of Mid Chile, and the violence of rains in the wet months, render the construction of permanent roads a task necessitating immense outlay. Chile has 35,000 kilometres of highroads, but reckons only a few thousand kilometres in first-class condition: a recent Road Law aims at a reform of vital importance to the Chilean farmer. But if roads are scarce, Chile has an excellent system of railways, serving the main length of her territory, connecting with all exporting points along the coast, and linking Valparaiso to Buenos Aires. The adequate equipment of ports—of which there are sixty, important or embryo—has always presented difficulties, owing to the shallow character of almost every indentation, with the notable exception of Talcahuano, and the prevalence of heavy ground swells and strong gales from the north and the southwest.

The social problems of Chile are no more and no less than the problems of any other country of the temperate zone inhabited by a progressive white population. The difficulties of adequate transport to serve her growing industrial and farming regions; questions regarding a large working population crowded into great mining camps; political and educational problems, are all hers: but she is aided towards solution by the homogeneity of her hardy race.

Chile has no “black” or “yellow” population. There are in the country only four African Negroes, and the foreigners resident are mainly Western Europeans and the nationals of sister states. Peruvians, prior to the friction of 1920, formed 20 per cent of the foreign population; Bolivians number 22,000 or 16 per cent; there are 20,000 Spaniards, about 13 per cent; Germans, 11,000, or 8 per cent; French, 10,000; British, 10,000; Italians, 13,000; Swiss, 2000; North Americans, 1000; Chinese, 2000; Argentines, 7000.

Volcano San Pablo, on the Bolivian Border of Chile.

In Northern Antofagasta Province.

Desert in Atacama Province.

The River Loa in the Dry Season.

The various foreign elements are lost among Chile’s four million native-born, and the majority of all newcomers remain in the country and are presently added to the Chilean stock. There has never been, fortunately for the country, any influx of unassimilable races; and while there is plenty of room for a large population, increase is more certain when it is from the inside rather than superimposed.

Chile has, in fact, enjoyed all the advantages of being known as a poor country for many generations; there have been no periods of delirious boom or extravagance, she has been comparatively little exploited, owes comparatively little to the outside world, and has developed her soul with a certain leisure.

Politically, she has been equally lucky. Most of her rulers have been wise and cultivated men of high probity. The unhappy Balmaceda, against whom was fomented the solitary revolt in Chile since she settled down to work after Independence, bears a name that is today revered throughout the country, with no accusation affecting his integrity. No Governor or President of Chile has been assassinated during the whole history of the country, before or since the close of the Spanish colonial régime.

The genuine exercise of the vote, and the temperamental cheerfulness and sanity of the Chilean, have saved the country from many miseries suffered by less unified lands.

Two special causes of the general level-headedness and sobriety of the Chilean are, first, the strong position of women in family life, and next the high standard of education. Education provides a channel throughwhich youth can flow, and here, where state elementary schools are spread throughout the country to the number of 3000, with 1000 private and secondary schools, every boy and girl has a chance. The Chilean Government has long followed a policy of sending a number of the brightest students of the high schools and universities abroad for final courses in languages and science, and for this reason is less dependent than the majority of young countries upon the exterior world for engineers, chemists and teachers.

The fine prosperous cities of Chile possess, of course, all the equipment, all the luxury and grace, of modern cities all over the world. If one were to shut out the background of snow-crowned mountains, and happened to be out of sight of such streets as retain Spanish balconies and tiled roofs, one might imagine many a district of Santiago to be a part of a first-class French or English city. The tramways, the common use of motor cars and electricity, the good paving and good shops, the beauty and fashion of the Chilean women, the beautifully built and equipped houses, the good restaurants, the plentiful supply of newspapers, the appearance and avocations of the people, render Valparaiso and the Chilean capital among the front-rank cities of the world.

But Chilean cities vary greatly. In the central region is the great group of centres of Spanish foundation, those of the extreme north showing faces, for the most part, as youthful as those of Western Patagonia or Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan. Temuco, built after the final breaking-down of the Araucanian frontier, dates as a modern town only from 1881. Old Tarata, in the still disputed Province of Tacna, dreaming with its back to the hills and face to the desert, is a link with the past, for although it is away from the traffic stream today it was once a stopping-place on the direct Inca route between Potosí and Arica on the Pacific; Tacna owes its modern existence to its little railway; but Arica is newly alive, a busy port in a bower of gay flowers, a garden on the edge of a waste.

In the Strait of Magellan.

South of Arica lies a fringe of new nitrate towns along the sea-border of thepampas salitreras; Pisagua, Junin, Iquique (not long ago the greatest exporter of nitrate, but yielding pride of place to Antofagasta), Caleta Buena, Tocopilla, Mejillones, also overshadowed today by her younger sister, big, well-served, thriving Antofagasta; Coloso, Paposo, Taltal—all lie baking in the bright aridity of the rainless belt, precariously supplied with food and water from afar. Inland there are no populations more permanent than those of the nitrateoficinas, save here and there along the beds of snow-fed streams. Next in order from north to south comes the string of copper ports, with interior towns beginning to appear as the edge of the permanently fertile lands is reached. Chañaral, Caldera, Carrizal, points where the famous “Chile bars” of copper were smelted and shipped overseas; inland Copiapó, dependent for wealth upon copper and silver mines, but clothed with all the charm of a cloveredged oasis in the desert; the houses are built low for fear of earthquakes, roofed with red tiles and washed pink and blue; the gardens are full of scented flowers. Another oasis is Vallenar, set in the Atacama desert beside its violet-shadowed ravine and surrounded with a little ring of jade fields.

Still farther south, Coquimbo, a newer, busy little city, sweetly placed upon its beautiful curving bay a mile or two from its Spanish-built, slumbering elder sister La Serena. From this point southward thetowns lie closer together, and eastward along each fertile valley are clusters of fine fruit farms with dependent villages, filling the railway cars with figs and peaches, grapes and apricots; but where water fails, scrub and cactus deny a living. Here is old Combarbalá, there Illapel with its town-long avenue of orange trees hung with golden globes; Santa Rosa de los Andes, highroad to the chief mountain crossing; and a number of centres of the lovely grape country, younger sisters of San Felipe. Santiago, spread beneath her two famous hills, Santa Lucia and San Cristobal; Valparaiso, risen from the earthquake of 1906, solidly built on its narrow stretch of sand beneath the thousand-foot cliffs, crowned with new dwellings and reached by electric lifts, an energetic and wealthy port with its brilliant suburb, Viña del Mar. Beyond these great twin centres of movement lies all the fast-developing agricultural and manufacturing south—Talca, a rapid and promising growth; dusty Rancagua, looking towards the big interior copper camp; Chillán, head of a great fruit region; Concepción, most agreeable of cities, nestled beside the bright Bio-Bio in a bower of woods, with its fine port, Talcahuano; the coal-mining sea-border towns, Coronel, Lota, Arauco, Lebu; Temuco, one of the most prosperous of all the vigorous young southern towns, placed in wonderfully productive country; handsome Valdivia, facing a factory-covered island on the fine river flowing to Corral port, justly proud of its equipment and buildings; Osorno, a rising centre of industry; Puerto Montt, still in its youth but with good reasons for sturdy growth. And last of all, Punta Arenas, the visibly growing city, fine buildings shouldering little shacks, looking away from the beech-covered hills of Brunswick Peninsula towards the pearly distance of the Polar seas; Punta Arenas is not only a new city of Yugo-Slav and Scots millionaires, of the tributary sheep-raising country: it is the commercial key of Chile’s Far South.

Santa Lucia Hill, Santiago.

Parque Forestal, Santiago.

Municipal Offices, Santiago.

The majority of these towns are more than convenient centres for crowding populations; they owe their existence to special and widely divergent causes that have also formed the character of the people. To certain circumstances in Chilean history can be ascribed a powerful part in making the Chilean—the disappearance of the Indian as a worker, and consequent self-dependence; the great rise of the nitrate industry, and the creation of national wealth and great private fortunes; and the enlargement of the national horizon by war. But the effect of different regions and their calls upon resources have been and are still equally important. Much of the spirit of the Chilean is due to the independent life of the mineral-hunter of the north, solitary, even-tempered, enduring, deeply attached to the soil. The day of this class of miner has departed almost as definitely as that of the cunning craftsmen who, in colonial days, fashioned in copper or silver all domestic utensils of Chilean homes: but his influence lives. Marked also is the influence of the skilled horseman, the woodsman, the man of the camp who knows how to kill and cook his food, how to cross mountain passes or trackless forest or unbridged stream; the far-flung Chilean cities bear the stamp of the Chilean character created by these special circumstances, and generalisations must be made and received with this fact in mind.

The Santiaguino, occupied in finance, law, politics or trade, is addicted to cheery club life, is a country and garden lover, and has a keen understanding and affection for horses; his characteristics bring him readily into sympathetic touch with the British, allied bymany blood-ties. He is famed as a charming host, a genial welcomer of the stranger, and there is no city in the world where the visitor will be more agreeably interviewed by an acute press, more quickly and spontaneously greeted and made at home than by the frank and kindly Chilean family.

The dweller in Santiago and Valparaiso possesses a marked characteristic rare in any part of Latin America: he is a born speculator and financier, and is an active attendant and operator upon the local Bolsa (Stock Exchange). In some of the smaller and less developed states of Spanish America the Stock Exchange is non-existent or negligible: but in Chile the Bolsa is thronged daily, and the operations are active, eager, and dictated by a highly intelligent appreciation of the market conditions of the world. The cables are incessantly used in this connection, and many a Chilean fortune has been made and lost by the follower of exchange fluctuations. The Chilean understands and is accustomed to investment, and is not alarmed as are many American nations at the prospect of investing his money abroad. He has gone afield for a century, and, operating in Antofagasta and Tarapacá long before they were Chileande facto, has since their acquisition ranged farther into the mining districts of central Bolivia. Chilean capital and technical skill are responsible for half the mines operated in that sister state. Operations in Bolivian mining shares—such as the famous and spectacular Llallaguas—form a considerable item in the work of the Chilean Bolsa.

Behind the bright social life of the Chilean cities lie the great farming and mining areas, with their dependence upon that hardy Chilean worker nicknamed theroto—originally, the “out at elbows” class. Today the term has lost its depreciatory meaning, and theworkman in general is aroto. He has fine qualities of hardihood, loyalty and endurance; and although he has sometimes had a repute for free use of thecorvo, the deadly curved knife in whose use he has an extraordinary facility, it is only upon too-festive occasions or during jealous quarrels that he is apt to give way to passion. The measures taken by the Government and by large employers of workmen in industries or mines to stop the traffic in the worst forms of liquor, and to substitute the light and innocuous Chilean wines, has lessened these troubles during recent years, and it is true of Chile as of most parts of South America that there is no organised crime. Cases of theft are common, but are ascribed mainly to the lower class of South European who comes to Chile for work and forms a part of the shifting population moving from camp to camp. Chile’sLey de Residencia, by which criminals are deported from the scene of discovered ill-deeds to another part of the coast, means very often that the north and south exchange ne’er-do-wells.

It is partly due to this perhaps too kindly system that Chile has suffered considerably from strikes during the past few years. The entry of malcontents bringing the flag and doctrines of the I. W. W. created trouble in the coal mines of the south, the copper camps and the nitrate fields of the north, and the ingenuous character of the native-born lends itself to the ready acceptance of specious theories. I have seen the flag of the Californian-bred Industrial Workers of the World paraded in Santiago, while such “red” periodicals asEl Socialistaof Antofagasta spread a hash-up of violent and hysterical propaganda, a medley of Marxian and Bolshevik ideas, amongst railway and port workmen. The women, always an element to be reckoned with in Chile, were brought into the Antofagasta railway strikein 1919, and when the first strike-breaking train was run out of the port, the wives of the strikers laid themselves down on the tracks in a theatrical attempt obviously instigated by the practised foreign agitator.

The radical administration of Señor Arturo Alessandri, with its avowed sympathy with the workers, was able to counteract the pernicious influence of the exterior trouble-maker as, perhaps, a more conservative government could not; and the firmness with which, in late 1921, the President dealt with an attempted tie-up of Valparaiso port, declaring his intention of redressing any genuine grievances but at the same time making clear his determination that the work of the port should not be interfered with, has been salutary. The powerful Workman’s Federation (Federación de Obreros) of Chile has done much good work, and is likely to do more if it is purged of foreign interference and retains the sympathies of the middle class Chilean.

The best cure for red socialism in South America is the pleasant tonic sport. No better sign of the real healthfulness of the Chilean race is to be found than the enthusiasm with which football, cricket and the recent introduction of American baseball have been taken up. All Chilean newspapers have their page ofDeportes, with much space devoted tofutbolismo, and the horse races at Viña del Mar and Santiago are eagerly attended by the peasant as well as by the Chilean millionaire.

Such sports as river fishing and boating are denied to the dweller in north, and most of central Chile, by the scarcity of streams, but there are plenty of coarse, if few sporting, fish in all rivers of constant flow. To the south, trout and salmon have been introduced with marked success and the angler’s art has developed.Bull-fighting was never a Chilean pastime; a fine breed of game-cocks was introduced about the middle of last century (through the gifts of the celebrated Lord Derby, who responded to the petition of a sporting Chilean priest) and has had a marked effect upon country strains, but in its most popular day cock-fighting was never to Chile what it is to Cuba. The whole national tendency is towards out-of-door games and sport: the Chilean is a wonderful rider, has bred an extremely fine type of small horses, is a good polo player, and owes much of his sturdy health to the national habit of horsemanship.

Chile has no noxious insects, with the exception of one venomous spider; and she has no poisonous snakes or reptiles. But she is rich in strange and beautiful birds, many singing with exquisite sweetness.

Large animals indigenous to the country are rare, although all European domesticated animals, as horses, cattle, hogs and sheep, thrive splendidly; a few forest deer are still found; the guanaco lives in the more remote uplands and cold south, and there are jaguars in the woodland.

Among plants, Chile’s special gift to the world has been the potato, invaluable to millions of households today. Different varieties ofSolanum tuberosumare found wild on the West Coast of South America all the way from South Chile to Colombia, growing in Chile from Magallanes to Arica, both near the seashore and in the foothills of the Andes. The potato has a wide native habitat, and it was and is as useful to the indigenous folk of Chile, Bolivia and Peru as to Western Europe today. Of other foods, the mealy, chestnut-like kernel of theAraucaria Chiliensisis eaten only in the country, as in the case of its cousin, the kernel ofAraucaria Brasilensis. The strawberry,Fragaria Chiloensis, appears to be wild in south Chile, with a number of small sweet berries of the myrtle and berberis tribes.

Quantities of beautiful flowers and plants, herbs and shrubs, are native to Chile and found wild only in this belt. Of them, none is more striking and lovely than theCopihue, the rosy bell of a slim vine clinging to trees in the southern woodland; the flamingTropœolum speciosais a bright mantle of the hedgerows, the brilliant blue crocus (Tecophilea) lies in sheets on Andean foothills, the turquoise and goldenPuyasare striking features of many a Chilean landscape, and the lovelyEucryphiasare shrubs as beautiful as the Fire Bush (Embothrium coccineum).

But of all Chilean offerings, none has been of more importance to the world, apart from the potato, than that strange naturally produced chemical of the northern rainless regions, nitrate of soda. Nitrate has brought millions of exhausted or semi-productive acres into rich fertility, employs a hundred thousand people in its production and transport, and is today a necessity of the farmer. Artificial production is unlikely to rival the natural deposits in the markets of the world, owing to the cost of manufacture, and the Chilean fields, immense and practically inexhaustible, form a natural treasure of prime industrial importance. Other nations besides Chile are fortunate in possessing copper, coal, iron and silver: in the possession of nitrate the West Coast is without a competitor.

The only cloud upon the Chilean political horizon, remaining since the War of the Pacific, is the problem of the two provinces now combined as Tacna, with the city of Tacna as capital. That the future of this little region troubles the West Coast is a striking illustration of the result of leaving territorial questions unsettled, for no equal shadow is cast by the provinces definitely added to Chilean soil, the valuable Tarapacá and Antofagasta.

Viña del Mar, Valparaiso’s Residential Suburb.

Race Course, Viña del Mar.

Valparaiso Street, Viña del Mar.

Mira-Mar Beach, Viña del Mar.

Not only Chile and Peru are involved in the Tacna dispute: the question of renewed access to the sea by Bolivia lends that country a lively interest in settlement, and, in addition, every South American country is concerned in the amicable resolution of a domestic problem affecting the present credit and future peace of the continent. Nor can the nationals of overseas countries investing in or trading with the West Coast remain indifferent; when, in 1922, discussions were opened in Washington between the representatives of Chile and Peru, all friends of South America hoped for a happy result from these new and direct conversations, in a region far removed from the acute feeling of the Pacific Coast.

The whole story of the Tacna question is discussed in detail in other pages.[1]

1. Chapter VI.

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