MA.TEEIAL CONDITION OF CHILI. 471 



altogether a sura little short of £40,000,000 between the middle of the sixteenth 

 century and the year 1888. Towards 1880 the production had dwindled down to 

 a trifling amount, when the industry was again revived by fresh discoveries. 



Silver, which occurs in far greater abundance, esjoecially in the former Bolivian 

 district of Caracoles, north-west of Antofagasta, yields a yearly sum of about 

 £1,200,000, and this might be easily increased but for the present depreciation of 

 the metal. 



As a copper-producing region Chili held till lately the first place, yielding in 

 1879 as much as 50,000 tons, or one-third of the total output of the world. But 

 since then she has been surpassed both by the United States and by Spain. 

 Including iron and all other minerals, the yearly production of the mines properly 

 so called is estimated at over £4,000,000. 



The nitrates extracted from the soil and treated in the rainless northern zone 

 return a much larger revenue to the capitalists than the metals. Under the direc- 

 tion of foreign engineers, nearly all English, about 30,000 Chilians, Bolivians, 

 and Peruvians are engaged digging and delving on the elevated saline pampas, 

 from which they extract the caliche in prodigious quantities. This raw material 

 is treated on the spot in a chain of oficinas stretching along the cordillera, where 

 it is reduced by various processes to the condition of saleable nitrates destined for 

 the manufacture of gunpowder or for the much more important prej^aration of 

 artificial manures. 



The nitrate industry, which has covered apparently uninhabitable regions with 

 numerous villages, has been rapidly developed, and at present supplies the largest 

 item in the Chilian revenue. Thanks to this wealth of chemical substances, with 

 which must be included salt and borax, thanks also to the coalfields such as those 

 in the neighbourhood of Concepcion, the capitalists have found it profitable to 

 establish workshops on the spot, instead of forwarding the raw materials to Great 

 Britain, where they had hitherto been reduced and distributed in various forms 

 over the whole world. 



Manufactures — Trade — Shipping. 



Chili has thus already become a manufacturing country in virtue of her copper- 

 foundries, silver-refineries, chemical, smelting and other works, with their tall 

 furnaces like those of the Old World, on which they have been modelled. There 

 is scarcely a branch of human industry that is not represented by factories 

 furnished with modern plant, and employing numerous hands. The wheat of the 

 southern provinces supplies grist to several large flour-mills ; Yina del Mar near 

 Valparaiso, Penco and Tome near Talcahuano, have sugar-refineries ; textiles are 

 woven at Santiago ; the potter's wheel is kept going at Penco and Lota ; paper- 

 mills are at work in Liai- Liai ; and at Chilian have been set up the first nail- 

 works in South America. In these industrial centres the peasantry are already 

 being transformed to a proletariat class. 



Commerce, fed by the output of the mines and, to some extent, by the agri- 



