In such matters as magnificent hotels, expensive restaurants, luxurious clubs, and showy automobiles, Santiago readily yields the palm to Buenos Aires. There has been no great boom in Chile at all comparable to that which Argentina has seen. Furthermore, earthquakes and fires have done their worst to impoverish a nation not too bountifully supplied with natural resources. To be sure, the enormous nitrate deposits of northern Chile have made the government able to distribute millions of dollars among its followers without overtaxing the population. Money has come in so easily from the export duties on nitrate that no Finance Minister has been greatly troubled by his budget.
Although Santiago cannot boast of as many evidences of wealth as Buenos Aires, she has other qualifications which give her the right to hold her head higher than any city in South America. The chief of these is her literary preëminence.
She has produced during the past generation more writers of ability than any other South American city. Easily first among these is José Toribio Medina, whose untiring industry and genius for bibliography have made him famous all over the world. Aided by a devoted wife, he has produced more scholarly works than any other man now living in South America, and more volumes of first-class bibliography than any in the western hemisphere. A born collector, he spent years in various parts of the world purchasing rare books in out-of-the-way places and making notes of unpurchasable volumes in the great libraries, until he had built up a magnificent collection of early Americana that is almost unparalleled.
His modest house is replete with interest. Three large rooms are lined from floor to ceiling with his treasures. One room is devoted almost entirely to early Mexican imprints. To see gathered together in one place ten thousand pamphlets printed before Mexico secured her independence, leads one to modify somewhat those conceptions of Spanish intolerance for learning which we have inherited from some of our older writers. To be sure, the pamphlets are mostly of a religious character. However much one may disagree with the dogmas they contain one cannot but admit that the intention of their publishers was to raise the religious and moral tone of the community. In the back part of Sr. Medina’s house are the rooms of the “Elzevir” Press. Here have been printed those sumptuous bibliographical quartos that are the envy of every librarian and the despair of the average scholar. As Sr. Medina was originally a printer, it is his recreation to assist in putting his volumes into type. It is not often in the modern world that one finds the whole process of making a book existing under one roof. Here are the sources; here lives the scholar who knows them; here he extracts their virtues; and from this same place he sends forth to the world the results of his investigations, printed and bound, ready for the use of the student.
Besides Sr. Medina, Santiago has produced a number of historians, men like Vicuña Mackenna and Diego Barros Arana who for careful statement and concise diction have not been surpassed in South America. Even the late Bartolome Mitre of Buenos Aires, one of Argentina’s greatest statesmen and her greatest historian, never succeeded in getting away from the Spanish trick of efflorescence in language which greatly marred his work from the literary point of view.
Santiago’s literary preëminence is further shown both by the fact that in no other city in South America are there so many people who are fond of books and reading—witness the large number of new and second-hand book stores—and the excellent list of works that are published here every year. While Buenos Aires, with a population three times as large, can boast of a few booksellers whose shops are devoted to showy imprints, and who cater to the needs of those who buy their libraries by the yard, there is little evidence in Argentina of a discriminating group of booklovers like those who patronize the score of old book stalls in one of Santiago’s streets near the university.
On the outskirts of Santiago is an excellent manual training school where several hundred boys are lodged, fed, and taught all manner of trades, from printing to forging, and carpentry to carving. Particular attention is paid to electricity, and a large number of the students become practical electricians. At the exhibition of the year’s work we were particularly impressed with the fact that the school is able to sell nearly all the articles made by the students. Churns, derricks, chairs, and bells, well made and cheap, gave evidence that the school was run on sound business principles.
Not far off is the Quinta Normal, a fine large reservation where normal and agricultural schools rub shoulders with museums of fine arts and natural history. The result is a charming place for study and a delightful public park.
During our visit, the annual fine arts exhibition was in progress and included a number of extremely meritorious paintings by Sotomayor, a Spanish painter who has recently been engaged by the Chilean government to teach in the Art School. Chile is certainly to be congratulated on the class of teachers that she brings from abroad for her schools, and her latest acquisition is well up to the standard.
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. The early Spanish immigrants were an unusually good lot. And there has been a striking admixture of Anglo-Saxon blood as is shown by the frequency of English family names in Santiago.