Chileans

“ To have opened a sketch of Chile with a reference to a poetical conception is not to argue that the Chileans are a dreamy and over-poetical folk. They are, on the contrary, practical, hardy, and courageous—courage which, in their conflicts with their neighbours in the past, and in their own internecine strife and revolution, has at times given way to cruelty and savagery—a condition, however, not confined to these more southern inhabitants of the South American Continent. ”

“ The Chileans did not fly to any Americans for sanctuary and tell of their woe, for they had no way of knowing that one American might be better than another. Rioting and brawling were so common in the city that many who heard it from afar thought it only a little more loud and persistent than usual; and the Hounds, having thoroughly cleaned the Chilean quarter, searched like the heroes that they were among the abandoned household effects for trinkets, jewelry and pawnable stuff.
4 That evening Judge Deering and Hales stood together in the Magnolia. ”

“ Things move slowly in Chile, you know, and, although it may appear rather strange to you, coming from a European country, Chileans are not accustomed to see, and do not expect, radical alterations effected in their country. ”

“ What is very remarkable for a Chilean, he neither smokes nor drinks. He has some means, and is going to California to make more. We pray much in secret that God will open his heart and give him to us for a help in the ministry.
The Chileans are a mixed race of Spanish and Indian blood—say four-fifths Indian—consequently coarse features, black hair and eyes, low foreheads, high cheek bones, broad faces, and in most cases copper color in its various shades and degrees, whilst a few are white and even fair and beautiful. In general they are ignorant and devoted Catholics. ”

“ The cultivable areas of Chile are relatively small; and the Chileans themselves seem to think they need more land for their national development. To one558 who travels through southern Chile there seems, however, to be still room for a greatly increased population in its well-watered valleys, which enjoy a delightful climate. ”

“ A democracy that is experiencing economic growth and that in the past 16 years has helped millions of Chileans out of poverty. Chile is integrated with its neighbors and in the region looking at the world. ”

“ The successful conclusion of the war with Peru and Bolivia began a new era in Chile. The control of the nitrate fields meant an immense revenue for the government, and everyone wanted a chance to reap some profit. Politics absorbed the public attention, and the holding of office became the most popular occupation. Material prosperity followed. The Chileans believed themselves invincible on land and sea. With outside troubles settled for the time being internal dissensions arose, and the fight between the clergy and the anti-clericals broke out with renewed energy. ”

“ Hundreds of young British and American engineers entered Chile at this period of early construction, while native-born Chileans still lacked technical training, and scores of them remained in the country permanently, settling and founding families. ”

“ Puerto Montt, like Valdivia, drew a strong part of its population from Germany and has today 8000 people; Punta Arenas, with less than two 335hundred inhabitants in 1865, has 25,000 people. Forty per cent of these are calculated to be foreigners, chiefly Scots, or Falkland Islanders of Scots blood, and Yugo-Slavs; the only other city showing so large a proportion of foreign-born residents is Tarapacá, while Antofagasta has 16 per cent of non-Chileans.
Vital statistics in Chile are carefully kept and promptly published; they do not always give satisfaction. ”

“ Henceforth the opened territory received continual additions of energetic people from many parts of the world, Chileans themselves went south, and today there is no better developed and managed part of Chile.
Araucanian Lands A new spurt of immigration occurred after 1881, when the Mapoche Indians obstinately held claim to 294sovereignty over the broad belt of lands known as Araucania was finally destroyed by the republican forces of Chile. With the frontier barrier overthrown, farming lands lay open, and the Government made a fresh bid for European settlers. ”

“ The floor is usually the earth beaten down hard and covered with sheep skins. The cooking and other household utensils are of the very crudest and simplest design. Some of the Araucanians are very good farmers, and have even progressed to the point where they have adopted American ploughs and reapers. Many work on the haciendas of the rich Chileans, and they are said to make very good hands. The government allotted lands to these people with a condition that it can not be sold, which was a very wise provision. ”

“ As in the Hacienda of San Pedrero, so throughout the country one encounters fifty coloured men of all shades for one full-blooded white. In Chile, on the other hand, one has to penetrate deep into the interior before one finds any traces of the Indian stock, while of negro population, (and this is the greatest advantage enjoyed by that Republic over Peru,) there is absolutely none. In the settled parts along the coast of Chile there are none but whites, and even the working classes are Spaniards, English, German, Italians, and North Americans. ”

“ At the opening of the 19th century Chile was a colony whose resources had hardly been touched, with a population of about 500,000 persons, of Spanish and mixed Spanish and Indian blood: a people endowed with the vigour of character bred by a mountainous country and a bracing climate and by a hard struggle for existence, but ignorant through lack of education, shut out by a narrow-minded commercial system from knowledge of the outside world, and destitute of the character-training that free institutions afford. ”

“ In the Argentine some eighty per cent. of the population is said to be foreign born; in Chile, certainly in Santiago, not one person in ten suggests such an origin. Very strict immigration laws forbid negroes, Chinamen, and most Orientals to enter Chile, but though the country usually welcomes white foreigners with open arms, they are not greatly in evidence. The inhabitants of all classes have the west-coast characteristics, indefinable but unmistakable, which distinguishes them decidedly from the people of eastern South America. ”

“ For a number of years the largest contributor of blood to Chile has been Spain, but there are no colonies such as those created by the Brazilian system, newcomers of today usually finding industrial employment in cities, or the coal, nitrate and copper camps. For several years before 1914, when immigration practically ceased, the average entry was less than 2000, of whom at least 75 per cent were Spaniards. Chile’s first batch of regular immigrants arrived in 1850, following the efforts of an energetic agent in Europe. ”

“ Population—.The population of Chile is largely concentrated in the twelve agricultural provinces between and including Coquimbo and Concepción, though the next six provinces to the south, of more recent general settlement, have received some foreign immigrants, and are rapidly growing. In the desert provinces the population is limited to the mining communities, and to the ports and supply stations maintained for their support and for the transport, smelting and export of their produce. ”

“ There has been a much greater proportion of west European blood in Chile than in Peru; the native races were of completely different speech and customs; and climate has done its share in modifying the modern population of each country. It is a serious error to class any two South American peoples together, and the characteristics of Bolivian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian and Chilean are strongly marked. Nor, between Peru and Chile, was cordiality invariably marked in colonial days, from the time when Almagro’s returned followers opposed the Pizarros and were set apart as “Men of Chile.” ”

“ The native element too were probably the hardiest of any of the native races of South America. Notwithstanding the difference in numbers, the Creoles, the name given to the descendants of Spanish immigrants, rule the country absolutely and own the most of the property. In few countries have the landed aristocracy exercised such absolute power as [192] in this narrow and elongated republic. The half-breeds form the labouring class of Chile, and one will find those two classes all over the republic, with the lines between the two strongly marked. ”

“ From earliest times the history of Chile upon this coast has been a tortured one—the barbarities and the sufferings both of the early Spanish conquerors, the reprisals of the Indians, the bloodthirsty and unsubduable Araucanians, the feuds between the Spaniards themselves, the toll of earthquakes and tidal waves, the battles between Spaniard and colonist and between Chilean and Peruvian and Bolivian, the dreadful pages of revolutionary and civil strife. It is veritably a blood-stained coast, and both man and nature might well cry to Heaven for surcease. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Chile’s appreciation of art and her policy of securing able foreign talent to teach her youth are greatly in her favor. She is in fact a young and vigorous nation. Her people are bred in a splendid climate, well suited to the development of a strong race. In fact the Araucanian aborigines were superior to anything that the Spaniards found in either North or South America. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For people who want to settle permanently, there is no better land in the world than Chile, he declares; there is good level land, very healthy and pleasing, and the winter lasts but four months. In summer the climate is delicious, and men are able to walk without danger in the sunshine. The fields give abundant returns, and cattle thrive.
Live stock, in fact, throve so well that within twenty-five years of the settlement the Indians of the south possessed flocks and herds, and, learning from the Europeans, went mounted on horseback into battle. ”

“ Thinking of Chile, one sees a picture of southern orchards and wheat fields, of cattle pastures, of pine forests; of copper mines in the inhospitable heights of the mountains; or perhaps of the great, burning nitrate pampas of the north. Rarely is a thought given to the southernmost city in the world, Punta Arenas, with its tributary sheep-raising plains, its beech woods and fisheries, coal and gold mines, and its extraordinary rise from misery to immense wealth in the course of a few years. ”

“ In Chile one leaves triumphant modernism and now enters the realm of antiquity and romance, the home of Spanish tradition and old-world stateliness. Not even on the Peninsula have the Spanish tongue, the Spanish dignity and the old Castilian ideals been preserved in their pristine charm and perfection as they have in Lima, and the three ancient seats of colonial splendor hidden away in the fastnesses of the northern Andes—Quito, Bogotá and Caracas, the capitals of the countries next in order. ”

“ Commerce.—In the aggregate, the commerce of Chile is large and important; in proportion to population it is exceeded among South American states only by Argentina, Uruguay and the Guianas. Unlike those states, it depends in great part on mining and its allied occupations. The values of imports and exports (including bullion, specie and re-exports) in pesos of 18d. ”

“ But with all its isolation, its long struggle to gain a place among civilized nations, its history of cruel and uncivilized warfare, Chile possesses natural resources and attractions which intervening years have made known, and which in the short period of her national life have won for this long neglected daughter of the Spanish colonial family, a reputation for wealth and beauty that has given to it a fame as wide as the world. ”

“ The free State of Chile enjoys a higher degree of tranquillity than any of the former Spanish dependencies of South America, 281and in climate, in fertility, and in liberal institutions, transcends all others in affording the European emigrant the best prospects of a prosperous future. ”

“ I think that no one who knows Chile today will dispute the suggestion that her fertile soil has chiefly contributed to her social well-being. It has brought white European settlers, able to rear families in a magnificent temperate climate; it has offered permanent homes and not a temporary field for the fortune-hunter. There is a spring of life about the farming region of Chile, a sense of energy, health and freshness that is extraordinarily exhilarating. ”

“ 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 ”