The long struggle against Spain accustoming Chileans to military service and uprooting the system under which the country had been ruled for centuries, necessarily placed the control of government in the hands of the generals. Like all other Spanish-American countries Chile had to pass through a period of irresponsible pretorian rule and the sterilising horrors of wars in which one ambitious chief tried to displace another. But anarchy lasted only a short time; the civil element was powerful even at the beginning; and Chileans never acquired the revolution habit. Her government has been stable longest and her political history the least checkered of any Spanish-American country. To this result, so happy for the internal prosperity and external power of the nation, several causes have co-operated. First of all has been the existence of a powerful landed aristocracy whose interests lay rather in cultivating their estates in the security of peace and order than in trying to make fortunes by taxes wrung from a poverty-stricken, reluctant proletariat. The people are by climate and inheritance industrious, naturally inclined toward industrial progress, agricultural rather than pastoral, prolific and colonising, and though pugnacious, they are not, like the inert Indians of the Andean and Central American countries, to be bullied into following the first revolutionary chief who comes along. Further the country is geographically compact--a narrow strip of plain with easy communication between its provinces, and, unlike the Argentine and Colombia, not divided into widely distant districts, each with its isolated capital, its local chiefs, its ambition for hegemony and autonomy.