In a paper read before the Congress of Missions at Chicago, Rev. Thomas B. Wood, D.D., of Peru, gives some interesting points concerning the physical and moral development of the southern continent, from which we take a few paragraphs:—
South America has 7,000,000 square miles of surface. Over 6,000,000 square miles are good for immigration—double the territory of the United States. It has no great tracts under perpetual snow like North America, Europe, and Asia, nor any great deserts like those of Arabia, Africa, and Australia. It has 35,000,000 inhabitants—only a little more than half the present population of the United States. Thus it is one-fourth as densely populated as this country—about what this country was two generations ago. No other tract of good land exists so large and so unoccupied as South America.
The coasts are all compassed by steam navigation already well developed, second only to that of the most populous parts of Europe and the United States. Its interior is nearly all accessible through rivers, the mightiest on earth, with navigation established for thousands of miles, the beginnings of the mightiest river traffic in the world.
The railway systems are well commenced to connect the waterways with every part of the territory. The Andes have been scaled at two points at heights of 14,500 and 15,500 feet, the highest railway passes in the world, and the highest points where steam is now at work. Railways will gradually pass the Andes at many points, opening up vast and rich territories lying near the sea, but hitherto shut off from the sea by a mountain wall. This barrier once vanquished by modern railway progress, South America will become the most accessible of all continents.
Ten young republics are absorbing the immigration as fast as it can come, and vying with each other to attract it. The United States never offered such inducements to foreign settlers as those countries are now offering. No other part of earth is bidding so high as South America for Europe's surplus millions. South America has the advantage of a climate that makes all parts of it available and all its coasts accessible. Its low latitudes are offset by its great altitudes, giving it a temperate zone character over the most of its250area, wholesome and inviting for Europeans.
The streams of emigration from Europe are now turning from the United States to South America. The first drift in that direction dates from forty or fifty years ago, soon after the independence of those countries from European rule. A steady flow dates from about thirty years ago, and for the last twenty years it has been an increasing tide, reaching every part of the continent in greater or less degree.
This movement will progress more rapidly there than has ever occurred here, and on a scale unknown in history. The European influx into the United States never reached two per cent of the population in any year, and never averaged above one per cent in any decade. In the Rio de la Plata countries the increase by immigration from Europe has averaged two per cent per annum for the last twenty years. Steam and electricity have shortened distance. Europe is more populous than ever. South America is twice as large as Europe, and invites the immigrants not only along its eastern shores, but everywhere.
There are two dominant languages, but they are so closely allied that they seem merely dialects of one. It has ten nations, but currents of thought and feeling, as well as the movements of immigration, flow across their frontiers as freely as the rivers or the winds. The uprising for independence swept the entire length of the continent in the space of a few weeks. Important movements anywhere agitate the whole.
It has everywhere dominant the Latin civilization and culture and the Roman Catholic religion, with North American republic government and free institutions. No other territory so vast has such uniformity of moral conditions. They have all the same historic traditions, the same political and social aspirations, the same peculiar tendencies, and, with all, a consciousness that they form a family of nations whose interests are common and whose destiny is one. No other portion of earth presents this peculiarity on so vast a scale.
It must stand in history as the youngest and the vastest and the densest of all the transplantings of European humanity to virgin soil. After the two Americas and Australia are developed, there will be no territory left in which to repeat the operation. The engrafting of European elements on other stocks may go on in many lands, but to develop them from their own roots on new ground will never be possible again unless a new continent should arise. To evangelize this new development of the highest types of mankind is the work of missions in South America.—Gospel in All Lands.*