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and in 1874, in return for the cancellation of a debt owed Chile, Bolivia agreed not to impose any export tax on nitrate for twenty-five years. Four years later, however, attempts were made to levy a tax of ten cents per 100 pounds on all nitrate exported. When the Chilean companies refused to pay the tax, the Bolivian authorities seized their property and declared that it would be sold. Chile was forced to step in to protect the interests of her citizens. Since Bolivia had entered some years earlier into a treaty with Peru against Chile, Peru also was dragged into the quarrel, the result of which was the beginning of war by Chile against both Peru and Bolivia in 1879.

It was an epoch-making conflict in which Chilean naval successes against Peru were largely responsible for the outcome. The treaty of peace, signed in 1883 found Bolivia driven out of her seacoast province, Peru deprived of her nitrate lands, and the Chilean boundary pushed more than four hundred miles northward. In some quarters the impression is common that the treaty provided for a return of the nitrate areas to Peru, if after ten years the people of the region should so vote. Such a provision was applied to the province of Tacna, and has been ignored by Chile, but Tarapacá, with its great nitrate resources, was handed over "forever and unconditionally" (perpetua é incondicionalmente). It was predicted then that possession of the nitrate lands would ruin Chile, as guano and nitrate were believed to have ruined Peru, but this gloomy forecast has not been verified.

Since the war, and especially in the last fifteen years, a number of things have led to great progress in the nitrate industry. Foreign capital, English, German, Belgian, French, Austrian, and some from this country', has been added to the large investments made by Chileans. Thus more than £20,000,000 of English capital alone is tied up in