The owners of the large, irrigated and well-equipped haciendas constitute the wealthiest, most cultured and aristocratic class in Chile. Presidents, senators and congressmen are elected from this class, and ministers, judges, admirals and generals are selected from the landed gentry. Prominent and influential professional and business men rely upon their estates for both pleasure and profit. The owners live upon their haciendas a portion of the year, but their homes are in the cities, most of them in Santiago, where they live in mansions and spend with lavish hand the income from their estates. The majority of them spend more than their income and as a result the heavily capitalized mortgage bank of Santiago has its octopus-like hand upon ninety per cent. of the beautiful and valuable country estates in Chile. The extravagance of the wealthy class in the Republic is cause for comment, and a surprise to most foreigners. Their prodigality furnishes a ruinous example to the middle classes, who try to emulate them, producing thereby a cheap, imitative kind of aristocracy. Most of them belong to old and influential families who inherited their fortunes and names from pioneer colonists. Some, however, are parvenu aristocrats who have gained access to the exclusive social circles by means of money, a position which from lack of education and breeding they are not qualified to maintain. Large landowners give little time to the cultivation of their estates, and as a result the haciendas never produce to their full capacity. The chief occupation of the owners is a calculation of the probable income, with the application of as little capital and labor as possible on the property. Notwithstanding the fact that Chile owns the richest and most extensive nitrate fields and guano deposits in the world, and that thousands of tons of fertilizing material are exported annually to other countries, to enrich depleted soil, little or none of this valuable re-creative agency is utilized to rejuvenate the sterile soil of the worn hill farms of the Republic. They refuse to return to the soil by artificial means that which is annually drawn from it in the production of crops, and as a result much valuable land has lapsed into disuse, being considered sterile and valueless because its producing quality has been exhausted. Under existing circumstances the farmer’s expenses are heavy and certain and his income decreasing and uncertain. The result is that the handsome estates are fast falling under the bane of mortgages, the payment of the interest on which is sapping the life of the soil. Economy is not one of the ruling characteristics of the Chileno; social and political prestige must be maintained, even if the inevitable result is financial ruin.