The two southernmost states, Chile and the Argentine, are by far the most important of the entire continent but their prosperity is a direct result of their geographical situation. They lie in the temperate zone. Hence they have fewer Indians (the tropics make them breed faster) and they have attracted a better class of immigrants.
Chile is richer in natural wealth than the Argentine. Arica (from where you take the railroad for Bolivia), Antofagasta, Iquique and Valparaiso are the four most important harbours of the west coast of South America, just as Santiago, the capital, is the largest city of that entire region. The southern part of Chile is beginning to breed cattle, which is slaughtered and frozen and sent to Europe from Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan.
As for the Argentine, it is the great cow country of South America. The flat territory along the Parana river, almost as large as one-third of Europe, is the richest part of the entire continent. Meat and wool and hides and butter are exported in such quantities that they have been able to affect our own prices for those commodities in a most unpleasant fashion. The steady immigration of Italian labouring men and farmers during the last ten years will make the Argentine one of the greatest grain and flax producers of the western hemisphere, while the sheep culture makes Patagonia one of the most dangerous competitors of Australia.
The capital of the Argentine is Buenos Aires, also on the Rio de la Plata, just opposite the small state of Uruguay which has very much the same soil and climate as the Argentine and, having rid itself of the last of its Indian population, does in a small way, but very successfully, what the Argentinians are doing on such a very large scale that very often they run the risk of coming to grief through over-speculation and bad financial management.
Paraguay finally, the third of the Rio de la Plata States and in many ways the most favoured of them all, would now be prosperous if it had not been for the disastrous war of 1864~70 when the poor Indians, trained in military service by their former Jesuit masters (who however in 1769 had lost the country to the Spanish crown), had gone on the war-path in behalf of a crazy man who also happened to be-their President. This poor man, having quite needlessly declared war on all his three powerful neighbours, continued the fight until five-sixths of the male population of the entire country had been killed. At the end of this period of slaughter, conditions were so bad that the Paraguayans had to revert to polygamy to get their country repopulated. It will take another century however ere this rich little State shall have fully recovered from that catastrophe.
There remains one more country to be discussed – Brazil. As a colony it was badly neglected, first by the Dutch and afterwards by the Portuguese who forbade the natives and the settlers to deal with anyone except a few accredited merchants in Lisbon and who ke this entire region in a state of almost complete economic bondage until 1807, when the royal family of Portugal was forced to flee before Napoleon and moved over the Rio de Janeiro. Then the tables were turned and for almost a dozen years the despised colony ruled the mother country. And when his Portuguese Majesty sailed for Lisbon in 1821 he left his son, Dom Pedro, behind as his representative. A year later the son proclaimed himself Emperor of an independent Brazil. And since then the Portuguese language is the only tie that binds the colony to the erstwhile mother country, for the House of Braganza, which had probably given Brazil the best government any South American State had ever enjoyed, was forced to abdicate in 1889 as the result of a military upheaval, and the last of the American emperors left for Paris and the cemetery.
Brazil, with 3,285,000 square miles of territory and therefore as large as the United States and equal to half of the entire South American continent, is at the same time the richest of all the different countries south of the equator. It is divided into three parts, – the Amazon lowlands, or the valley of the Amazon; the coastlands of the Atlantic; and the highlands, where Santos is the town which provides half of the world with its daily coffee. Besides coffee Brazil grows rubber in the Pará or Belem district, just south of the mouth of the Amazon and in Manaos where the Rio Negro joins the Amazon. Then there are the tobacco and the cocoa of Bahia on the east coast and the grazing fields of the high plateau of Matto Grosso. And finally there are the diamonds and the other precious stones of the darkest interior, gems which are so difficult to reach that they have never been very thoroughly exploited. And the same holds true for the iron ore and the other metals which are all of them awaiting the building of more railroads.
And finally there are three little European colonies in South America, the only remnants of the old colonial possessions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They are British Guiana or Demerara; Dutch Guiana or Surinam, which the Dutch got in exchange for the New Netherlands and the city of Nieuw Amsterdam; and French Guiana or Cayenne, Of the French had not chosen Cayenne as one of their penal colonies and if we did not see an occasional scrap of unpleasant scandal coming from that lost and unhealthy swamp and attaching itself right to the center of our front pages, we would feel tempted to forget that the Guianas existed, which would probably be just as well for they contribute very little to either the prosperity or the sum total of happiness of the human race, and they are the living reminders of the day when the whole of South America meant but one thing to the visitor from over the seas – a rich store-house to be plundered at will.