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. Then the enterprise took form, was abandoned, reinaugurated, halted, and finally the government pushed a line of rails through the desert to the town of Arequipa. After Arequipa was reached came the longer and more formidable extension to Titicaca. But in time the work was done.
The Central Railway, the Oroya, was a huger task. Henry Meiggs carried it forward, with reckless confidence and superb courage, half-way up the gigantic Cordilleras, and died. Destructive war came. Peru was prostrate amid industrial ruins and political chaos, yet the forces of recuperation were not dead. After years they were vitalized. The Oroya line was pushed through to the mining-region for which it was meant to be the outlet, and there only remains the extension, in the face of lesser engineering and commercial obstacles, to the navigable waters which reach the Amazon. The Southern and the Oroya roads were contracted for in the times of riotous national wealth, the era of the guanos and the nitrates, when the saying “As rich as a Peruvian” was the common way of describing the opulence of the country and its favored classes. They were built extravagantly, as national luxuries.
Future railways can have none of this profuseness. They can be had only by husbanding the revenues; by strict retrenchment, even parsimony; by outrunning at hardly more than a hare’s pace the industrial and commercial development of the country in order that greater growth may follow. But they can be built for sound economic conditions, and patriotic reasons are their basis. If not simultaneous, their construction at least may be contemporaneous with the Panama Canal.
CHAPTER X
THE PEOPLE AND THEIR INCREASE
Density of Population in Time of the Incas—Three Million Inhabitants Now Probable—Census of 1876—Interior Country Not Sparsely Populated—Aboriginal Indian Race and Mixed Blood—Fascinating History of the Quichuas—Tribal Customs—Superstition—Negroes and Chinese Coolies—Immigration Movements of the Future—Wages—European Colonization—Cause of Chanchamayo Valley Failure—Climatic and Other Conditions Favorable—An Enthusiast’s Faith.
IN the times of the Incas the territory which is now Peru supported a dense population. The vestiges which remain of the intensive cultivation of the land show that it must have sustained a very large number of inhabitants. This population extended from the Sierra and its sides to the coast, and took little account of the forest region stretching to the Amazon. The enumeration made by the Spanish colonial officials in 1793 has little value as a basis of estimating the increase, because it was not limited to the present Peru. It is interesting only as showing that out of a total of 1,077,000 inhabitants there were 618,000 Indians, 241,000 mestizos, 136,000 Spaniards, and 82,000 negroes and mulattoes. Another estimate made at that period was of 1,250,000 persons.
It is difficult to figure out that the population of Peru at the end of 1905 exceeded 3,000,000 to 3,250,000, though an estimate of 4,000,000 was attributed to the Geographical Society of Lima a few years ago. The last census was taken in 1876. It gave a total of 2,673,000 persons. The enumeration admittedly was deficient, and an open question was whether the semi-civilized tribes in the trans-Andine region had been underestimated or overestimated. In subsequent years the Province of Tarapacá was ceded to Chile, and Peru suffered not only the losses caused by the war with that country, but also from the complete industrial prostration which supervened and from the intestine struggles of the revolutionary factions.
Only within the last decade a basis of normal growth of population may be said to exist, and, with reference to the natural increase, the high rate of infant mortality both in the cities and in the Sierra has to be kept in mind. A long period of comfortable existence and of hygienic education must elapse before this mortality will be sensibly diminished. In many communities the birth rate and the death rate are evenly balanced, while there are districts in which the grave claims more than the rude cradle.
By the national census of 1876 Lima had 101,000 inhabitants. In November, 1903, a municipal count fixed the population at 131,000. Lima has received the cream of the immigration in recent years, and has drawn to itself all the floating elements. The smaller coast cities have shown no such growth, while in the interior the towns appear almost stationary as to their inhabitants. If the rate of increase were 30 per cent for the whole country, as with Lima, and if the census of 1876 could be accepted as a safe basis of calculation, the total population to-day would be approximately 3,500,000. The notable increase of Peru’s foreign trade in recent years is evidence of improved consumptive capacity, due to industrial prosperity, rather than of an increased number of consumers. It came too swiftly to be accounted for by the growth in population, and therefore does not support the theory of upward of 3,500,000 inhabitants.