[THE following article is a selection from this well-known Chilean publicist's recent book, El nationalismo continental.]

MUTUAL hatred embitters the people of Chile and Peru as they contemplate a plebiscite to decide which nation shall own Tacna and Arica. All Latin America is agitated over that issue. Yet we never hear a whisper of protest whisper of protest against the alienation to foreign Powers of our nitrate deposits, of our tin and copper mines, of our electric power, or even against mortgaging to them our customs revenues. Some of us, however, who have learned to think racially and, if I may coin the word, continentally, refuse to lose our heads over whether Tacna and Arica shall belong to Peru or to Chile. We believe that our tin, our copper, our nitrates, and control of our water power are more important than those desert provinces. Yet Chile has spent millions of money and untold energy to win the plebiscite at the very time when she was surrendering her tin, her copper, and her nitrate deposits to foreigners.

What is it that makes our America a vassal country? First of all, her intense parochialism, which begets a certain pettiness of mind. North America, disciplined and united, assimilates and moulds into an instrument of victory all the talent that enters her gates. Many a man of Spanish, Italian, or Hebrew blood rechristened

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1 From Repertorio Americano (San José LatinAmerican weekly), April 17

chance in order to identify himself more fully with the nation whose lot he has chosen to share is to-day a typical champion of North American progress. Yet had Thomas Edison been born in our midst, he probably would never have risen above keeping a shop to sell electric bulbs. The person who becomes a superman in North America degenerates to impotence in South America, either through dissipation or through a self-centred individualism begotten of our political lassitude and lack of social fibre. What South America needs is morale and a sentiment of justice. Lincoln was great because he stood for patriotism, authority, and morale. Those are the qualities that have made the United States a sun, a central luminary, around which our Latin republics revolve like satellites.

Latin America includes eighteen republics separated from each other by frontier posts, customhouses, and Chinese walls of prejudice. Though endowed with greater natural wealth and a population approaching that of the United States, they are merely the peones of the international community. Though they have been independent for a century, and though they were neutral during the last war, they continue to live by begging loans abroad and waiting for civilization to overtake them. They contribute nothing but raw materials to the industries of the world- and nothing whatever to science.

As a result, the so-called liberty of

the Ibero-American natives is a fiction. Nicaragua, for example, is Brown Brothers' Republic. General Crowder is a Yankee Chief of Police for Cuba. The people of North America have studied our psychology shrewdly and coolly. They call our nations 'banana republics.' They speak of our country as 'mañana land.'

Rome bought Greece and assimilated the barbarians. The United States is buying Europe and assimilating barbarous America. Those of us IberoAmericans who kept our heads during the World War realized at once that it marked a European revolution, the beginning of the end of things as they were, and we foresaw then that we should speedily fall into the hands of

new masters.

Let us survey this problem in its Chilean aspects. Our Government plays the part of a broker, who brings together the nation's natural resources and foreign capital, and hastens to alienate our economic independence. Yankees have bought for a mere bagatelle the copper mines of Rancagua, which are among the richest in the world. They employed seven of our leading lawyers to defend their interests. They used these Chileans for one specific service to keep the Government from putting an export tax on copper. In this way the Yankees have made profits running up into the hundreds of millions of pesos a year. They now control our two chief copper deposits, El Teniente and Chuquicamata. If Chile had levied even a very small export tax on copper during the World War, she would have no foreign debt to-day. Thus the nation's welfare has been sacrificed to enrich a few attorneys.

That is what always happens. For example, the company supplying electricity to Santiago has been transferred from German to British ownership to

help pay Germany's war debt to England. Yet Chile, a free and sovereign State, had been neutral throughout the war. Our tramways, telephones, railways, and mines, though largely owned by foreigners, regularly retain Chilean attorneys to secure special privileges contrary to the interests of the Chilean people. Our tin mines, which were formerly owned by Chileans, have recently passed into the hands of New York capitalists. Nitrate is no longer a domestic product. Its very name is pronounced in the English mannernot nitrato, but 'natreit.' The attorney who transferred the latter industry to British hands, largely because its old owners feared a labor conflict, received a million for his services. To-day the chief sources of wealth in Chile are under the protection of foreign cannon, in order that the capitalists who own them may feel safe.

Not long ago the Government of the United States conveyed to England an intimation that it might feel compelled to take reprisals for the monopoly exercised by that country over certain raw materials, including Chilean nitrates, whose prices were fixed by their British owners. That intimation, addressed to the British Empire by Mr. Hoover last November, threw a lurid light upon Chile's loss of sovereignty over one of her basic resources.

The railway across the Andes, one of the most expensive pieces of engineering in the world, is English. When we take a tram, use a telephone, turn on an electric light, or buy an article in a shop, we pay tribute to some English capitalist who is drinking his afternoon tea or playing polo in the British Isles; or else we help to meet the cost of a Yankee tourist's trip around the world.

Harrod's, the biggest shop in Santiago, is English. The ranches of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego are

owned by Britishers, who pay practically no taxes, because they employ our best Chilean attorneys to handle things for them with our Government. Santiago, our capital, has many rich residents who have made their fortunes from such retainers. Naturally these men stand together, and their solidarity renders them practically immune from attack or criticism. If the press, the only instrument that has any influence with our public, did not constantly intervene - often at its own peril to prevent the most presumptuous of these usurpations, our vampire Judases would already have sold the very last remnants of our birthright to England and the United States. The existence of foreign banks in every Latin-American country, and the rapid absorption of our native banks by these institutions, is but the capstone of the system.

But let no one imagine that our vassalage is solely financial. To-day North America's diplomatic representatives exercise jurisdiction over our republics as actually as ever did the Roman consuls and prefects over Judea or Tripoli in the days of the Empire. Step by step, together with the millions of dollars that have been advanced to 'the lion's cubs,' has gone extension of political control. This has been shown during the last few years by several striking incidents. For example, when Chile conceived the silly idea of holding a skeleton mobilization and

general manoeuvres, with Peru as the assumed enemy, President Wilson, then on board a steamer bound for France, dispatched to our Executive Mansion a curt and peremptory note cautioning us against doing so. When the arbiters appointed by the Washington Government to decide a boundary dispute between Panama and Costa Rica had decided in favor of the latter country, and Panama exhibited a little too warmly her indignation and disappointment, the American Government coolly notified her that it would permit no disorders of any kind within her territories.

One of the latest instances of this kind occurred in Mexico toward the close of President Obregón's Administration, when his political enemies organized a revolution in the northern part of the Republic and started to march upon the capital. That imprudent adventure was promptly squelched with a strong hand, partly because General Obregón was an able officer, but largely because he was backed by the United States. When the rebellion started, the Washington State Department announced emphatically, 'We don't want any more revolutions in Latin America'- and promptly dispatched heavy consignments of modern war materials to the Mexican President.

Coming back to Chile's problems, I venture to prophesy that whatever President Coolidge finally makes up his mind to do in regard to Tacna and Arica will be promptly accepted because of the all-powerful sanction behind it.

The dollar is the precursor of political control. It is thus that the United States extends its power, while refusing to compromise itself in the League of Nations. This was admirably expressed by Señor Yáñez, the Chilean delegate at Geneva, when he said, 'The United States refuses to intervene in Europe in order that, when the occasion arises,

In the lives of us all certain days stand out with a distinctness that time cannot dim, and one such came to us not long ago when on a short hunting trip in a South China jungle. Tiger hunting might have been given as the reason for our being there, though as a matter of fact, unfortunately or fortunately as the case might be, the tiger element did not enter very deeply into the situation.

To get to this particular spot we had come by boat and on foot a distance of some thirty-five miles, but as the crow flies we could not have been more than twenty-five miles from Foochow, a city teeming with nearly a million souls. The boat trip of some fifteen miles had been made at night and, with the exception of our having been run down by a large junk and nearly upset in the inky blackness, had been without cial interest. The overland trip, on the contrary, was full of fascination and absorbing interest, as it was made in the daytime, and Nature had seemingly planned in every way to make it a perfect day.

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The first part of the journey lay over an irregular stone road that wound tortuously through low-lying fields of rich black soil, where things were growing luxuriantly in spite of the fact that it was the latter part of January. The winding canals were marked by low spreading orange trees, whose bases were heaped high with mud that had been brought with prodigious labor

1 From the China Journal of Arts and Sciences (Shanghai English-language scientific monthly), February

from the bottoms of the canals and ponds, while in the fields the rice plants had given way to trim rows of carefully tended vegetables or patches of golden rape in full bloom.

Birds common to the fields about Foochow were abundant here. The common magpie and his larger cousin, the white-necked crow, hopped about the fields, or flapped noisily from tree

tree; wagtails minced daintily through the lowland places, picking out insect larvæ from the wayside puddles; while the daurian redstart and grayheaded bunting, both winter visitors from North China, flitted nervously about in the low bushes at the roadside, adding a most interesting touch of color and life to a day already perfect in every respect.

Soon the trail left the valley and followed the bed of a rushing, roaring mountain stream, changing the scenery and life. The level fields gave way to hills covered with low shrubbery in which might be distinguished the Chinese 'gooseberry' and the wild teaoil plant. The sweet gum and candleberry trees, both decked in their bright red winter coats, stood along the hillsides, and at their feet were the wild azaleas, bare now, but only awaiting the touch of spring to open into a burst of crimson glory.

The bird life too was different. Along the edge of the stream the plumbeous water redstart darted from one wet rock to another, its ever-flitting rufous tail standing out in strong contrast to the dusky slate of the body. The tiny