Chile, unlike the Indo-Spanish countries just south of the United States, is also a white man's country. The pure Indians are a vanishing minority. The Spanish and dominant element is largely made up of Basques, but there has been a substantial addition of British, whose influence is important in commerce and industry, and of Germans, who have dominated the army and education, and have been an important factor in agriculture. Chile, with four million population, is therefore the least Latin of any of the countries south of the United States. The progressiveness and prosperity of the region have long attracted the attention of every traveller.
Bolivia is another of the pre-dominantly Indian countries which have made little contribution to the world. The number of Whites here is negligible. Immigration has never been important and the Bolivian has developed a provincial arrogance and hostility to foreigners which is as prejudicial to his own interests as it is unwarranted. Scarcely one-fifth of the people even speak Spanish in their daily life, and two-thirds are primitive Indians, the others being hybrids of varying degrees.
Paraguay is an Indian republic which has not only avoided the Negro influence common elsewhere but has almost escaped the infusion of white blood. There are scarcely any pure Whites. The Guarani Indians of this region were not highly civilized like the Mayas and Incas, and therefore took on a Spanish culture instead of retaining one of their own. It would have been extremely interesting to see what an Indian republic could amount to in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Unfortunately the course of experiment was obstructed by one of the most sanguinary wars in history (1864-69) in which Paraguay carried on a contest with Brazil and Argentina until the greater part of its male population was destroyed. At the beginning of the war, the population of Paraguay was officially said to be 1,337,437. Even if this were extraordinarily inaccurate and exaggerated, the figures afterward were no less so, for the calculation after the close of hostilities credited the country with a loss of more than a million. More exactly, the population was returned as 221,709, of which 86,079 were children, 106,254 women, and only 28,746 men. Nothing like this situation has ever before been recorded in a large population. Whole regiments had been made up of boys under sixteen. In more than half a century since then, the country has not begun to recover. Even now its population is less than a million. Immigrants from Europe have always avoided it. Paraguay is in a class by itself.
Peru's four or five million inhabitants are mostly pure Indians, while the remainder are nearly all hybrids. Chinese and Japanese as well as Negroes have contributed to the mongrelization of the mass, and not one in ten even claims to be white, which here, as elsewhere in Latin America, by no means guarantees anything more than a homœopathic dose of European blood.
The aboriginal civilization is often described as remarkably high but seems to have been the work of peoples who antedated the Spanish by a long period; and the Conquerors themselves apparently considered the Peruvian Indians to be less intelligent than those they had encountered in Mexico. The number of Indians decreased during the early Spanish regime until some districts were almost depopulated and the loss of leaders especially was irreparable. Whether or not the present inhabitants are the descendants of the Incas, they have not been able to develop a strong and progressive state.
Ecuador is an isolated and unimportant region inhabited largely by backward Indian tribes. Probably not less than two-thirds of the 2,000,000 population are pure Indian. The handful of Whites and the few hundred thousand hybrids rule the country. The Negro element, never large, is gradually being absorbed and is leaving its stamp on the whole population.