Santiago is the only city in South America in which there is any noticeable “smoke nuisance”; the belching of this from many factory chimneys, from the trains of the government railroad, with its smudgy, soft Australian coal, adds greatly to what seems to be a natural haziness of the atmosphere. But one may forget this in a score of quiet shaded nooks of Santa Lucía. Among its several curiosities are a drinking fountain—the only public acknowledgment that water is required by the human system that I recall having run across in South America—and, along with the statue of Valdivia, who here fortified himself against the Indians, and of an odd bishop or two, the tiny Protestant cemetery over which Vicuña-Mackenna, Chile’s chief literary light and a member of one of her oldest and proudest families, caused to be erected the inscription, “To the memory of those exiled from both Heaven and Earth.” Chile has never taken its Catholicism in homeopathic doses. It is only recently that even Protestant missionaries could be married by anyone but a Catholic priest; up to a bare decade ago the wicked heretics might not be buried in cemeteries, but were stuck away in any hole in the darkest hours of the night, to be dug up next day by prowling dogs. Largely through the efforts of American missionaries there is now a civil cemetery and a civil marriage law. Only a few months before my arrival a case had come up under the law against having a saloon next door to a church, and the Supreme Court rendered the, to the clericals “sacrilegious and unprecedented,” decision that a Protestant church is a church, even in Chile.
Not far from Santa Lucía, nearer the edge of the town, is a much larger hill made of the loose shale common to the southern Andes and of much the same appearance as the one of the same name overlooking Lima. San Cristóbal belongs entirely to a group of priests. On top of it is a gigantic statue of the particular saint of their order, with an immense sheet-iron halo on which is squandered much electricity; but this is offset by the income from an enormous sign just below it advertising “Dulcinea Tea.” The Lick Observatory has a station on San Cristóbal, and as the priests have begun selling the mountain as a stone quarry, they wrung money for a long time out of the American scientists by threatening to dig the hill away from under them. Now the observatory is protected by an injunction, and there are other indications that Chile is gradually recovering from her medieval fanaticism.
Santiago has an imposing public library, one which was not only actually open but, strange indeed in Latin-America, one from which books could be taken—if one had several sponsors and could deposit the full price of the volume. One’s attention is usually first drawn to it by a statue of two famous Chileans, not so much because of the artistic merit of the monument as for the terror inspired by the situation of the two immortals. For they stand some thirty feet above the pavement on a pillar-like pedestal so slender that a single step backward or forward, the slightest jostling of each other, would infallibly plunge one or both of them to certain death, and the tender-hearted beholder, glancing at their constant peril, can only hurry by with averted face. Under the glass dome of the reading-room, beyond which most books never pass, readers wore their hats and smoked when they chose. There were, of course, no female readers. It is still considered unseemly in Chile for a lady to be seen reading anything but her prayer-book. Here I heard a lecture one evening under the auspices of the Geographical and Historical Society of Chile, graced by some two hundred of the intellectuales of Santiago. The lecturer, in solemn frock coat, lighting his cigarette after every other sentence and letting it go out after each puff, with an appalling consumption of matches, read a long and laborious dissertation on the burning question as to whether the great Chilean national hero had been entitled to change his name from Higgins to O’Higgins. The speaker contended that this was proper; any other conclusion would have made him an outcast among his fellow-intellectuales, for it would have been attacking one of their most cherished illusions. But the long hour and a half during which he argued that the hero in question came of noble stock in Ireland and was not the descendent of Irish peasants, as commonly claimed, left the unprejudiced hearer unconvinced and secretly giving the oblivious object of their solicitude the far greater credit of having climbed to eminence from the more humble origin.
There is a saying in Chile that the population is made up of futres, bomberos, and rotos. The first are well-dressed street-corner loafers; the bomberos are volunteer firemen, and the rotos form the ragged working class that makes up the bulk of the population. The latter, said never to be without the corvo, an ugly curved knife, with which they are quick to tripear, to bring to light the “tripe,” of an adversary by an upward slash at his abdomen, are not merely conspicuous, but omnipresent. Everywhere this class is struggling for its livelihood. Great streams of men and boys, kaleidoscopes of rags, come racing out of the Mercurio office with pink copies of “Ultimas Noticias” and scatter to the four corners of the flat city—but there seem to be more sellers than buyers. Poor, hopeless old tramps wander up and down the over-named Alameda de las Delicias with baskets of grapes covered with dust and almost turned to raisins, vainly trying to sell them. Slatterns and slouches are the rule among the female division of the roto class, and Indian blood is almost always present in greater or less degree. 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.
Santiago has been called the “City of a Hundred Families.” These, still noted for their Spanish exclusiveness and aristocratic pride, powerful owners of most of the country, form an oligarchy of government in which the ostensibly free-voting roto has little real hand. The “best families” oligarchy virtually tells the working class how to vote, and in the main it does as it is bidden, out of apathy, to be obliging, or from pure ignorance. Balloting is not really secret and there is frequent corruption, such as the recent notorious case of half the ballot-boxes in Santiago being carried down into the cellar of a public building and stuffed with a new set of votes. According to law, the voter must be able to read and write, and any roto whom the landlords do not wish to vote is denied the suffrage on this elastic ground. On the whole, however, the oligarchy seems to work better than the more common Latin-American rule of a dictator or a group of irresponsible politicians. Its great fault is the stone wall it builds against rising from the ranks, that and the opportunity it gives the powerful to cast upon weaker shoulders the burden of taxation. The unfair advantages given descendants of the favored “best families” is shown in the frequent recurrence of the same name in Chilean biographies and histories. The expression, “an education according to his rank,” is often heard, and sounds strangely out of place in an ostensibly democratic country. The dawn of industrialism is suggested, however, in the strikes which are more and more breaking in upon the aristocratic patriarchal life. One cannot imagine any other Indian of the Andes striking, but his Araucanian blood has made the roto not only free of speech, sometimes insolent, ever ready with his corvo, but ready to fight for himself in more modern ways.
“Some day,” said a Chilean man of letters, “our great land owners will be taxed as they should be; but that will probably require a revolution. The big absentee landlords exploit our natural resources and spend their incomes in Paris, leaving nothing for the advancement of the country. You have something of that problem in the United States, but the proportion of your idle rich who spend their money abroad is negligible compared with ours, and here there is no middle class as a depository of the real culture and sense and moral brawn of the nation.”
Some of the old families of Santiago have lost their wealth, yet still retain their pride and outward aristocracy. It is the custom of all the upper class to go away for the summer, not so much because Santiago grows a bit warm and rather dusty, as because it is the thing to do. One of the standing stories of the capital is of poor but aristocratic families who, unable to afford such an outing, shut themselves tight up in the back of their houses for two months or more, living on what their trusted servants can sneak in to them. Men who had every appearance of being trustworthy assured me that this tale was far from being a fable. One of them asserted that he had been invited the preceding February to the “home-coming party” of a family whom he knew had not been outside Santiago in a decade.
History is continually proving that unearned wealth takes away the energy and initiative of a nation as of an individual, and Chile is no exception to the rule. In the far north of the country, where it has not rained in thousands of years, are deposits which give Chile almost a world monopoly of nitrate, or salitre, as the Chilean calls it, the only large source of public wealth in the country. The high export duty on this gives the government four-fifths of its revenue, most of which is spent in Santiago or falls into the pockets of politicians. If some town in the far south needs a new school, or a pavement, or a tin hero to set up in its central plaza, it appeals to Santiago for some of the “saltpeter money”; and if its influence is strong enough, or the treasury is not for the moment empty and praying for a new war, the request is granted in much the same spirit with which our congressmen deliver “pork” to their constituents. Naturally this destroys civic pride of achievement and municipal team-work. Instead of spending the greater part of her revenue from nitrates to develop some industry to take their place when they are exhausted, “we are like a silly wanton, who squanders her easy winnings for gewgaws without recognizing that the time is close at hand when her only source of income will disappear,” insisted one far-sighted Chilean. “Once our saltpeter gives out and Europe stops lending us money, we’ll go to the devil.”
The fertile southern half of the ribbon-shaped country is excellent for agriculture; her population, smaller but far more dense than that of the Argentine, is already utilizing nearly all her resources above or under ground; in the past century Chile has had only one revolution serious enough to have echoed in the outside world, but that gives a misleading impression of her law-abiding qualities. Indeed, all such blanket statements give rather a false impression, for the country is assured no such prosperous future as they seem to suggest. Though he is superior to the Ecuadorian, and perhaps to the Peruvian, it would be easy to get an exaggerated notion of the Chilean. He is interested only in to-day; he, and especially his wife and children, are much given to show and artificial makeshifts: if he is not exactly lazy he is at least far less active and has less initiative than the more European argentino.
Chile is the home of fires and the dread of insurance companies. The latter are said to demand higher rates than anywhere else on earth, and the agent of an important foreign one assured me that all his clan live in fear and trembling toward the end of each month and particularly at the end of the year, when their clients are balancing their books, because of the epidemic of arson which results from attempts to recoup fortunes. This short-cut to solvency is constantly referred to in newspapers, plays, and conversation; nor, if we are to believe the older native novels, is it anything new. Chilean law requires the immediate arrest of the owner and the occupant of a burning building, it being the contention that either the one or the other is almost sure to be the instigator of the fire. Nor is it up to the government to prove that the suspect started the conflagration, but the task of the latter to show that he did not, which is a horse of quite a different color. The country is lined with blackened ruins, from mere ranchos to modern several-story buildings in which lives have frequently been lost. I saw more burned buildings in Chile than in all the rest of South America, and far too many to be accounted for merely by the somewhat greater prevalence of wooden structures.