Progressive Chile (ePub)

Excerpt: The Republic of Chile, beginning at latitude seventeen degrees, and extending to the farthest southern limits of South America, forms a narrow longitudinal strip of territory twenty-four hundred miles long, and not exceeding two hundred miles in width in the extreme. It has an area of 462,000 square miles, and a population of 3,500,000. Nature has been prodigal in the bestowal of her varied gifts upon Chile. Its geographical formation represents a huge serpent with its sinewy form stretched along the west coast of the continent, its head resting in the arid desert of Atacama, and its tail coiled about the wood-crowned hills and ice-bound islands of Tierra del Fuego. Upon one side loom the Andes Mountains, their snow-capped heads in the clouds and their feet in the ocean; upon the other stretches the vast expanse of the Pacific. Bordered as it is by the ocean on one side, and including within its limits a range of mountains reaching in some places an altitude of 24,000 feet, Chile presents a variety of geological, geographical and climatic conditions possessed by few countries in the world. Being isolated by great natural barriers it faces away from all the centers of population and ancient homes of civilization, and of all the countries of South America it occupies the most unfavorable position geographically, and is the most inaccessible from Europe, North America and the Ear East. 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.