The motherland of Brazil is Portugal. Profound as were the changes incident to transplanting a people to a virgin continent; notwithstanding Spanish dominion and Dutch conquests; large as were the admixtures of negro, Indian, and alien blood; in spite of independence and Republicanism; the language, customs, religion, and laws of Brazil are to-day substantially like those of Portugal.

The parallel between the United States and Britain is not closer. Brazil has diverged even less than her model. Her population may have a larger admixture of non-Portuguese blood than the North Americans have of non-British, but politically there was less opportunity for divergence, for Brazil was kept under much closer subordination. The discovery of Brazil coincided with the destruction of popular liberties in the mother-country. Thereafter, the Portuguese government was a centralised despotism, and its hand lay heavy on the Brazilian provinces. They were forbidden intercourse with the rest of the world; functionaries of every kind were continually imported; the provinces never dreamed of asserting any right to self-government; from the beginning the system was centralising and stifling. The North American colonies of England were left to grow up by themselves; they were never under a colonial government properly so called; a revolt followed the first serious attempt to subject them to a real colonial rÉgime. But the independence of Brazil came because liberties were finally granted, not because they were threatened to be taken away. The country remained under a tutelage, growing continually more rigorous, and which ceased only after the Portuguese monarch had fled from Lisbon and the colony had become greater than the mother-country.

It is, therefore, in the little peninsular kingdom, during the centuries before Cabral caught sight of the South American coast, that we must look for the beginnings of Brazil. Rome gave to Portugal laws, language, religion, and architecture; the forests of Germany modified her political institutions; the Saracens gave her the arts, navigation, and material civilisation. Her happy geographical position near the Straits of Gibraltar made her the meeting-place for the Mohammedan and Christian religions—of Levantine civilisation with Teutonic barbarism and liberty. That position also enabled the qualities of daring and enterprise and the scientific knowledge acquired in centuries of long conflicts and intercourse with the Moors to be turned to immediate advantage when the Renaissance came. Portugal was the pioneer of Europe in discovery and colonisation, though Spain followed close after. Together they led in making Western European civilisation dominant beyond seas. The nations who followed in their track have long since passed them, but Portugal had once the opportunity of spreading her influence and institutions over half the planet. In Brazil she mixed success with the failure that was her fate elsewhere. Brazil is to-day the nation which has inherited Roman civilisation in the least modified form, and is the country where the genuine Latin spirit has the best opportunity for growth and survival.

The study of Portugal takes on a new dignity and importance when we reflect that she has given language, institutions, and laws to half of South America and to a population that already outnumbers her own four to one. She is entitled to the interest of the world if only because she has placed her indelible imprint on a region which is as large as Europe and as fertile as Java, and which is destined within the next two centuries to support the largest population of any of the great political divisions of the globe.

In the twelfth century, the coalescence of a fragment of the kingdom of Leon with the Moorish territory near the mouth of the Tagus originated Portugal as a separate country. The race was very mixed. Its principal elements were the Leonese and the Mosarabes—the latter being the Christians of Moorish Portugal left undisturbed from Visigothic times by their tolerant Mohammedan conquerors. Each of these elements was, in its turn, of mixed origin. To the original Iberian population, which had occupied the Peninsula two thousand years before the Christian era, had been successively added Phenicians, Greeks, Celts, Ligurians, Carthaginians, Latins,—and in Roman times,—officials, soldiers, and slaves from all over the empire, including many Jews. The long Roman dominion welded all these together into a homogeneous mass. Later, the Visigothic conquest added a large Teutonic contingent, which is especially evident in northern and Leonese Portugal. Still later, the Saracens intermarried in considerable numbers with the Mosarabes of southern Portugal. After the formation of the modern kingdom, another element was added in the French, ProvenÇals, Flemings, and English who came in large numbers to aid in the final expulsion of the Moors. By the end of the fourteenth century, the Portuguese had become a distinct nation. Racial and religious tolerance were more advanced than in the rest of Europe; self-governing municipalities covered the greatest part of the country, each privileged within a definite territory. The nobles, prelates, and monastic and military orders were still privileged, and their property was not subject to tribute, but their power was not predominant. The king was chief of the army and the proprietor of a very considerable proportion of the land, but he was under constant pressure to grant it to the religious orders and to the nobles. The people were everywhere heavily taxed—in the municipalities and Crown lands by the king, and on the estates of the privileged orders for the benefit of their great proprietors. The nobles were under no enforceable obligation to perform military service. A great general deliberative and representative assembly—the Cortes—had come into being when the monarchy was founded. It included representatives of the municipalities as well as nobles and clergy, and its importance and vitality are shown by the fact that from 1250 to 1376 it met twenty-five times. By the latter date, jurisprudence had become generalised and its administration had fallen into the hands of the Crown. The nation had developed out of local and class privilege a reasonably consistent and uniform administration. The municipalities were the basis of the governmental structure, and a rude but effective local self-government existed through their instrumentality. The norm for the centralisation and organisation had not been, as in nearly all the rest of Europe, the feudal system, but the surviving fragments of the Roman structure. To the municipalities was largely due the astonishing vigour shown by the Portuguese people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The norm even survived the destruction of liberty, and its influence can be seen in every step of the subsequent development of Portugal and also of Brazil.

Portugal's heroic era began near the close of the fourteenth century. The great King John I., founder of the dynasty of Aviz, secured Portugal for ever from absorption by Spain when he won the battle of Aljubarrota in 1385. This was the signal for a rapid transformation of the character and policies of the Portuguese people. The thirst for war and adventure grew. The old Portugal—laborious, agricultural, home-loving, conservative—was replaced by a new Portugal—adventurous, seafaring, eager, romantic, longing for conquest, glory, and wealth, its eyes straining over the sea, the embodiment of the spirit of the Renaissance on its material side. The meeting of the Levant and the Baltic, the East and the West, Mohammedans and Christianity, the arts and knowledge of the old races with the energy of the new, had at last produced its perfect work. In 1415 an army was sent into Africa, and Ceuta was conquered; and there began that marvellous series of voyages which not only transformed Portugal into an empire, but gave a new world to Europe and revolutionised the planet. Modern scientific navigation began with the sailors instructed in the school which was set up at Sagres by Prince Henry, King John's son. Until then, European nautical knowledge had been very meagre. The compass served only to indicate direction, not distance or position, and did not suffice for the systematic navigation of the open Atlantic. The Portuguese first made that possible by using astronomical observations and inventing the quadrant and the astrolabe.

This knowledge, once acquired, was promptly applied to the work of navigation. Madeira was discovered in 1418; the Canaries in 1427; the Azores in 1432. The first and last were colonised and rapidly became populous. To the West the explorers pushed no farther for the present, but to the south they reached Cape Blanco in 1441, Senegambia and Cape Verde in 1445, and the Cape Verde Islands in 1460. In 1469, they turned into the Gulf of Guinea, and in 1471 were the first Europeans to cross the Equator. Their search, at first random, now became definite. They believed it was only necessary to keep on and they would round the southern extremity of Africa and reach Abyssinia and India by sea, a hope which became a certainty in 1487, when Bartholomew Diaz finally reached the Cape of Good Hope.

Meanwhile, a political revolution had been going on. The strong kings of the line of Aviz had won for the Crown a moral preponderance over the nobility and clergy. The latter resisted the royal encroachments, but the municipalities joined the monarchs in the struggle against them. The king who established centralised despotism—the Richelieu of Portugal—was John II., the third of the Aviz dynasty, and who reigned from 1481 to 1495. Under his rule, the whole military power was concentrated in the Crown; the nobility became a class living at Court; the king was the fountain of all honour and advancement; local officers were replaced by officials appointed by and responsible to the central government; piece by piece the independent functions of the municipalities were taken away.

Concentration of power in the hands of monarch and bureaucracy produced its inevitable effect. A short period of marvellous brilliancy in arms, statecraft, literature, and the arts was followed by sudden decay. The self-governing municipalities had nurtured a multitude of men whom small power and responsibility fitted for great things. The nation turned eagerly to the work of exploration and conquest and prosecuted it efficiently.

Such a people would undertake conquest for their king, rather than colonisation on their own account; they would emigrate under military leadership and forms; their colonies would tolerate a close control by the mother country; they would seek to convert the aborigines and reduce them to slavery; private initiative would be stifled and overshadowed by that of the government; large proprietorship would be the rule; the colonies would be burdened with functionaries sent in successive swarms from home; taxation would be excessive; the best talent would go into the bureau and not concern itself with industrial matters; invention and originality would be discouraged; agriculture would not be diversified, nor manufactures thrive. To this day a few staple crops predominate in Brazil; small landownership is the exception, and the people show little aptitude for change when unfavourable circumstances make their crops unprofitable. Brazilian Creoles have little taste for manual pursuits, and not much more for commerce. Non-Portuguese immigration has supplied most of the labour; foreigners have always conducted most of the trade.