Charles Melville Pepper

“ In many of the villages of Peru which I visited I formed an impression that the natives were further advanced than in similar villages in Bolivia and Chile. There was more cleanliness, more evidence of good order and of wise local administration. They are a brooding, solitude-loving race, though not altogether spiritless. How far they still preserve the traditions and sorrow over the Incas I do not profess to know, but their gentle resistance makes it more difficult to impose civilization on them than would be sullen opposition. ”

“ THE effect of the Panama Canal on the West Coast industrial development and the reciprocal influence of this South American progress on the waterway are economic facts. The citizen of the United States who would know the subject in a wider range than the mere gratification of his patriotic impulses and his national pride, should turn to the study of commercial geography, the potential political economy of unexploited natural resources. The European statesman, jealously watchful of trade conditions in the New World and the causes which modify them, will follow these channels without suggestion. ”

“ Double-header engines drawing short trains climb the steep walls as though they were going up a ladder. After a time they wind their way to the nitrate plains and then across the dreary desert to Iquique. There is not much to be seen on the railway route, and travellers prefer to keep the ship along the sheer cliffs till Iquique is sighted through the masts of the sailing-vessels which are clustered in the harbor waiting for their cargo. ”

“ It may be that the waiting for the full fruition of the Peruvian waterway and railway projects will be a long one. The public men who are guiding the policy of the nation in the present progressive channels will have their spells of dejection, and the checks, and discouragements will cause periods of doubt. That is the history of most countries in their measures for material development, but it more especially is the history of Spanish-American republics. The Southern Railway, which was to cross the volcanic Cordilleras and reach Lake Titicaca, was long a dream. ”

“ To reach La Paz from Calamarca it is necessary to cross several quebradas, or wide ravines. Then the gravelly plain spreads out and stretches to the precipice of the circular basin in which lies the city. La Paz spreads along the inner sides of a rocky amphitheatre, a panorama of red roofs, blended blue and white buildings, church towers, and parks of willow and eucalyptus trees. The greenest and most refreshing spot in the mountain bowl, the one which gladdens the eye and rests the mind while filling it with pleasing anticipations, is the cemetery. ”

“ Closer commercial relations with the neighboring countries of South America and wider trade with all the world, the expansion of the native merchant marine until it becomes an international factor in the ocean transport trade, offer the natural outlet for the national energies while assuring the national integrity. With these economic forces recognized and given their proper sphere, the collisions and the cross-purposes of domestic politics need have no deterrent influence on the industrial future of Chile. Agriculture, mining, and trade are better for her than battleships. ”

“ As a whole, this blundering, or even stupid, English policy of investments has paid pretty regular dividends,—in all probability greater in proportion to the capital than the timid and over-cautious German investor has received. When the United States fully appreciates the field which the Panama Canal opens on the West Coast of South America, her captains of industry will be as bold as the Britishers, but not so recklessly stupid, in their preliminary plunges. ”

“ But the commercial traveller from the United States who does not speak Spanish never will compete with his German rival who talks trade in all known tongues.
This, in brief, is the commercial situation as to the English language. The business man who waits for Spanish America to come within its sphere as the world language, will not achieve success in this generation.
For those who look forward to a future in South America, either in trade or in industrial enterprises, there is only one word of advice to be given: that is, to learn Spanish and to learn it at once. ”

“ The Indian woman in Bolivia occupies a plane on an equality with the man. She has no lord and master, as has the American Indian woman in the noble red man of the West. She works, but he also must work. She accompanies him with the pack trains, all the while that she is trudging along twirling her spools and winding the wool into yarn. It is rare to see an Indian woman without her spools unless she is weaving at the loom. ”

“ The voyage is a marine trip along a great winding Continental street, with stops at many corners and turns up many lanes. Up and down the coast means putting into innumerable wayports. This makes them more or less acquainted with one another, and one coast community feels an interest in what is happening in a neighbor port a thousand miles away. The vessels bring the gossip,—usually of trade, of the value of the last cargo, of quarantine, of troubles with the native longshoremen, of disputes with the minor officials, and of political events or the latest revolution. ”

“ Walking and talking, gossiping and scolding, shouting at the llamas, tramping over the sharpest mountain-pass or plunging down into the gorges, she manages to keep the spool always twirling. It is a most peculiar process, and would drive a small boy who has a notion of spinning a top on the end of his finger wild with emulation, though he hardly would be able to imitate the process. ”

“ At this period its construction by the United States may be said to have begun. If my own deep conviction that this influence makes powerfully for their industrial development and their political stability be an illusion, the pages which follow may afford the disbelievers grounds for pointing out wrong premises or false conclusions. “We doubt” long has been the dogma of the North American and the European in everything relating to the permanency of progress in the Spanish-American Republics. “I believe” is yet only the creed of the individual. ”

“ The primary mistake is in considering the Coast Cordilleras as the principal chain. The great rampart of the Andes in places is hundreds of miles across. Productive plains and fertile valleys lie on the western side of the Continental Divide as well as on the Atlantic slope. Besides, there are many bifurcations of these lofty ranges which must be pierced toward the Pacific. The mineral belt with its incalculable wealth, after centuries only partially exploited, has its basis of profitable production and export by means of the water transport of the Pacific. ”

“ Chile herself is not a country of great private fortunes. One or two families have been enriched by mines, a half-dozen by banking and commercial development, a larger number by the nitrates. But when it is all said, the Chilean hundred families are kin of moderate means. Their main sources of income are from their landed estates. These land-owners do not tax themselves heavily. As in the majority of countries of Spanish America, the government imposts are laid on the revenue from the land and not on the land itself. ”

“ From Juliaca, a distinctively Quichua Indian collection of adobe cabins, to Puno, the railway line is again straight up and down over the mountains, cooning the ridge once more, till the road begins to follow the more crooked courses of the waterways. It winds through a rich agricultural district, plain and valley where there are many pretty farms. The live-stock industry seems to be a flourishing one, for there are great herds of sheep, alpacas, llamas, and some cattle. ”

“ Immigration, colonization, are the only means. Access, transportation facilities, ways of getting in and out, must precede colonization. Therefore the railway policy. But imperative reasons of [p. 139] state polity require that the development shall converge from the Amazon toward the Pacific instead of from the Continental Divide toward the Atlantic. Hence the inestimable value of the Panama Canal as an incentive, a stimulating cause, an influencing factor in the national advancement. It fixes the Pacific coast as the unchanging goal toward which all Peruvian industrial growth must tend. ”

“ While much is made at times of the distrust of the United States, a state of mind which is disappearing, it is usually overlooked that there is just as much distrust of one another among themselves. Though it cannot be said that racial antipathies exist, there are national jealousies. The little Republics fear the big ones. When the talk was loudest about an alliance of Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, the other South American commonwealths refused to believe that such an agreement would not mean their own destruction. ”

“ When he was explaining to me the plans of his faction, the future of Peru hinged on the peaceful succession to President Romaña.
After Señor Candamo had been chosen for a faction which had not even proposed an opposing candidate, to seek to prevent his inauguration and put in its own [p. 167] man—who never had made even a pretence of seeking the suffrage of the electors—meant to precipitate, if not actual revolution, a condition fully as bad. It meant to destroy the confidence of foreign capital, and to take from Peru the prestige which she slowly was regaining among South American nations. ”

“ The Continental custom as to meals obtains both in the tropical parts of the West Coast and in the colder climates, as in Bolivia and Chile. There is simply breakfast, or the mid-day meal, and dinner. In the morning coffee and rolls—or with most of the Spanish-Americans, coffee and cigarettes—are the sole refreshment which is expected to carry one through till noon. Americans, however, usually procure fruit and eggs. Coffee-making and coffee-drinking are arts unknown to the Yankee. Travel in South America is a liberal and much-needed education in this respect. ”

“ A fairer city never bloomed in volcanic desert. The valley of the river Chili is so vividly green that it seems alive. The snow-cap of the extinct crater of El Misti is ever in sight, while the fleecy dome of Coropuna and the glistening pinnacle of Chachani stand out like sentinels in white robes, all of them above 19,000 feet. ”

“ In reality, it is to the interests of the United States that the South American Republics should look up to them as their best friend, so that they may gradually open their markets to the enormous products of North America, and that the overflow capital of the great Republic may find good investments, so that they may hope some day to expel entirely European capital. ”

“ It is rare to find anything of a higher grade than an inn kept by a native. The best hotels are those under the control of the Frenchmen, and when a choice is to be made they should be given the preference, for there is not only good eating but cleanliness and some consideration for the conveniences of life. A Frenchman keeps the hotel at La Paz in Bolivia, and it is a good one. Another passably fair house of entertainment in the same place is kept by a Russian. At the mining-town of Oruro a North American of German descent provides excellent accommodations. ”

“ The Canal insures the industrial development of the Isthmus of Panama along the lines of tropical agriculture. It creates an international commerce and it adds to the domestic trade. It will secure an increased permanent population to replace the army of construction when the work of excavation shall be completed. This is the certainty in relation to the resources and the people. It will be good for Panama. But there is a wider good which is not local. For ten or twenty years the Canal will be a training-school in which to test and strengthen the constructive energy of the American character. ”

“ The women venders exercise squatter sovereignty on every street corner.
Ladies’ fashions are of so world-wide an interest that I digress to describe them as they were seen at Tupiza, as I had seen them in the primitive villages of Nazarene and Suipacha, as I saw them afterward at Uyuni and other places, including the capital.
The prized possession of the Bolivian Indian woman, and her chief pride also, whether she is pure Indian or chola, is her petticoat. Her dowry is in this garment. Like the Dutch woman of tradition, she carries her wealth about her. ”

“ There are a custom-house and government warehouse, good piers and wharves, and a passable hotel. A group of stocky soldiers, in part police and in part army, are in blue uniforms with heavy cartridge belts. All their faces are of the Indian type.
The life of Paita is seen in the market-place among the chattering women venders and their customers. All is animated, good-natured, obliging, but it is chiefly Indian with very little of the Spanish trace. The houses are of mortar, adobe, wild cane, or bamboo laths, some having mud roofs, and they are not bad dwellings. ”

“ Across the Mapocho, the walled and bedded river, is a church with a gaudy blue front and a dreary triangular plaza. Penury stretches on all sides. The dwellings are low, with floors below the street level and in the cold and rainy season under water. The interiors are repulsively forbidding and unsanitary. The comforts of life, let alone the decencies, cannot be acquired in such squalid surroundings. No subject of municipal legislation is more pressing than that of sanitary tenements, and no municipality has shown greater indifference to it heretofore than Santiago. ”

“ The effort to divorce economic and social forces from places and peoples in order to analyze a principle usually is so barren that I have not attempted it. Places have their significance, and people are the human material. Customs and institutions are only understood properly in their environment. So many excellent descriptive works have been written about South America that I have sought to subordinate these features ”

“ In the Sierra day labor can be had for about half a sol, which is equivalent to 25 cents gold. The American syndicate, in building the Cerro de Pasco Railway, paid the natives a sol, or 50 cents, and got satisfactory returns. But for the mining development of the future miners from Spain and Italy should supply the deficiency that will exist so long as sole reliance is placed on the natives. They may come in considerable numbers.
Irrigation of the region between the Sierra and the coast is assured, and this is going to furnish the basis for the largest and earliest increase in population. ”

“ At home their outgivings receive little attention, but in South America they are given undue importance, and often distorted into supposed policies of the government.
The other class not only entertains no idea of territorial absorption, but dreads the notion of the due and just exercise of our influence. It looks on South America as a nest of revolutions with which the United States should have nothing to do, ridicules the possibilities of commerce, and professes disbelief in the capacity for progress. ”