Chile was still comparatively poor and backward. The rude population were engaged in a harsh struggle with fierce savages and in laying the foundations of material prosperity. Most of these people were the descendants of Indians accustomed for centuries to implicit obedience to a rustic, unlettered aristocracy. The genius of the race was rather practical than ideal, and the long, careless government by men invariably chosen for their military abilities rather than their qualities as civil administrators had not tended to make Chile a fertile soil for the development of revolutionary ideas. Chilean society was less favourably constituted for sudden changes than that of Buenos Aires--the boom town of the time, with its active commerce, its restless recently arrived population,--or that of the northern viceroyalties, controlled by professional and office-holding classes and parish priests. Two or three hundred families held most of the lands of Chile, and the power of this aristocracy was especially predominant in the provinces around Santiago. In the southern provinces long wars had thinned the native population and dispossessed the original grantees. Estates were more widely distributed and opinion more radical, but in the rest of the country the newer immigrants had been forced to accept the system, and the comparatively few families who owned the land and thereby controlled the means of subsistence of the whole people, enjoyed unquestioned ascendancy. But conservative as this aristocracy was, among its members there rankled a profound jealousy of the Spanish officials who wrung excessive taxes from their reluctant fingers; who enforced the Spanish regulations forbidding the culture of grapes, olives, and tobacco; who until recently had closed the ports, cutting off the profitable sale of crops, and compelling the payment of extravagant prices for manufactured goods; and most irritating of all, who still monopolised the lucrative offices. The news of Ferdinand's imprisonment and the invasion of Spain by Napoleon's armies reached Chile in the late summer of 1809, creating great excitement among the Spanish office-holders and the Creole aristocracy. Sentiment was universal against submission to the French usurpation and discussion at once began of how the government should be carried on during the King's captivity. Carrasco, the captain-general, hesitated and vacillated between the conflicting suggestions.