Valparaiso bears many British characteristics. A walk along the principal business streets will show almost as many English signs as those in Spanish. The English language will be heard on every corner. The Anglo-Saxon face is a familiar sight. In the banking and shipping quarters nearly everything is British, with a sprinkling of the Teuton. At Iquique and Antofagasta it is still more marked, for the nitrate and copper interests are almost entirely in the hands of English capital. Each year scores of young men come out from the home land and accept positions with the banks, railroads and manufacturing interests. Some of them remain permanently, and others claim only a temporary domicile. Most of them do not assimilate very readily with the Spaniard. There is both a racial and religious antagonism. This wears away after a while with many, for they are shut off from home ties and the restraints of society. Homes in the proper sense are not open to these aliens, and their quarters are devoid of home comforts. Hence the young Englishmen seek companionship where they are sure to be welcome. Always criticising the loose morals of the Chileans, they generally do nothing to better conditions, and oftentimes end by taking a part in the dissipation. They frequent the bars and clubs and indulge in great quantities of strong liquors. Shut off by social customs from the better homes, they oftentimes unite themselves with the freer and easier strata of society. As an English writer expresses himself of his own countrymen: “We have done much to aid in developing the country along certain defined lines; but we have done little or nothing to ingratiate ourselves with the people, or to aid in raising the moral tone of those we affect to despise. The English in Chile commonly remain like a bed of cabbages in a Chilean flower-garden—self-satisfied and self-aggrandizing, usurping all the nourishment they can obtain, and neither specially ornamental nor specially interesting.” Chile has provided homes and, in many instances, fortunes for the English, and they should return more to such a hospitable mother than has been done heretofore. CHAPTER X AN UNCONQUERABLE RACE