When, in the year 1502, the early Portuguese navigators entered the Bay of Rio de Janeiro—it was the first of January, hence the name they gave to what they believed to be the estuary of a great river—they little dreamed of that superb city which, as the centuries rolled on, should arise on the edge of the sparkling waters, with their background of picturesque mountains, with a harbour perhaps the finest in the New World.

But such is the capital of Brazil to-day, and the traveller approaching Rio de Janeiro revels—if the weather be propitious—in the sunlit sea, the emerald islets that stud its bosom, the palm-fringed shores and colour of the vegetation upon the mountain slopes, fit setting for the handsome buildings, esplanades and avenues which unfold to the view. Here the beauty of the Tropics, shorn by modern science of much of its lurking dangers, combines with the handiwork of man to form a metropolis which South America may contemplate with pardonable pride as an instance of its civilization. In this vast oval bay, which stretches inland for twenty-five miles, the navies of the world might lie at anchor, and indeed the flags of all maritime nations unfurl their colours near the quays of this vast mercantile seaport below the Equator.

It is a vast land which we thus approach. Brazil spreads like a giant across its continent. Its arms are flung westwards over South America for over two thousand miles to the base of the Andes, and from above the Equator to beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, crowding its smaller neighbours—if crowding be possible here—into the extremities of the continent, an area in which the countries of Europe might be more than contained, and which is larger than the vast Anglo-American Republic, the United States.

Still almost unknown are great portions of this great territory, still inhabited by tribes as savage as when first the white man set foot upon it, or as when the faithless Orellana, Pizarro's lieutenant, abandoning his companions in the heart of the dreadful forests of the Amazon, floated down the mighty waters of that river from the source to the sea.

Brazil is, of course, not a Spanish American country, although it was at one period under the dominion of Spain; and it stands apart from the remainder of the great sisterhood of the Latin American Republics by reason of its Portuguese origin and language, although the common Iberian ancestry renders it similar thereto in other respects. It differs, furthermore, in the constitution of its people, in that the African negro race has been so considerably absorbed into the twenty-two million souls which form the population of the Republic: an admixture which is of considerable ethnological interest, and may have some important bearing on the future relation of the white and coloured races of the world.

The magnificent but somewhat incoherent land as is Brazil to-day, offered at the time of its discovery few attractions to the sovereigns of a Mother Country into whose coffers the wealth of Africa and of India flowed. Its poor and barbarous tribes had no stores of gold ready to the hand of the Conquistador; there was no civilized empire with a polity and architecture and organized social life, with armies to protect it, such as Mexico and Peru offered, and consequently neither glory nor riches urged the European discoverer or invader to tempt its hinterland and people its valleys and seaboard. For thirty years the Portuguese sovereigns paid little heed to this newly acquired dominion, except that they fought off the encroaching Spaniard and the adventurers of France, who would have entered or traded with it.

Twenty years before the Conquest of Mexico it was that the first explorer sailed the Brazilian coast—and only eight years after Columbus had sighted the American mainland—that the Spaniard, Vicente YaÑez Pinzon, a companion of Columbus, with whom sailed Amerigo Vespucci—who gave his name to America—sighted the shore of what is now Brazil, near Cape San Augustine, reconnoitring the mouth of the Amazon and coasting along to the Orinoco. He took away some gems from the Indians, some drugs and a load of dye-wood.

From this later commodity of the dye-wood, the great dominion of Brazil took its name. "Brazil" was originally a legendary island in the Atlantic, which long retained its imaginary position in the lore of the forecastle and upon the ancient charts, and from this circumstance the name came to be bestowed upon that enormous part of South America which produced the red dye-woods similar to those which bore the name of Brazil in the Middle Ages.

A few months after the keel of Pinzon had furrowed these unknown seas, another explorer, Cabral, close upon Easter in 1499 (O.S.), following the course of Vasco de Gama to the east, was drifted by an adverse gale so far from his proper track that he reached this same coast, and, anchoring in Porto Seguro, erected an altar there, celebrated Mass, set up a stone cross and took possession of the country for the King of Portugal. He, like Columbus, thought he had reached India, and sent a vessel to Lisbon with the news.

Let us turn for a space to examine the great land thus brought to knowledge by these early voyagers.

To-day, the traveller in Brazil will soon be impressed by the immensity of its spaces, will remark how broad are these wide tablelands, how interminable the serras and mountain ranges, how boundless the forests. The territory of this great land is fifteen times that of France. It is larger than the United States (without Alaska); it is over 2,600 miles long upon the Atlantic, and 2,700 miles wide from its coast to where, across the heart of the continent, it touches the frontier of Peru. Its boundaries touch those of every South American nation except Chile. Persistent trespassers were the Portuguese in the early Colonial period, and their land-hunger carried them beyond those boundaries which the Pope, as we have seen in a former chapter, fixed between Portugal and Spain.

What is the general nature of this great territory? Here is a coastline with many sandy beaches, mangrove swamps and lagoons, with inland channels following the coast for long distances, but giving place to rolling, fertile coastal plains terminating in headlands overlooking the Atlantic waves. The coast is indented with many land-locked bays, forming large and easily accessible harbours, with others smaller and difficult of approach.

Back from this characteristic littoral, from Cape San Roque—nearly the easternmost point of South America, whose tropic headland here juts out far towards Europe—and southward to Rio de la Plata extends a vast tableland, covering half Brazil, and beyond this we reach immense undulating plains of sandy soil, forming the great depression of South America from the basin of the Amazon in the north to the basin of the ParanÁ River in the south.

Thus do we remark a singular incoherence and lack of symmetry in the physiography of Brazil, largely due to geological conditions. Yet Brazil is a land which has been immune from violent geological disturbances from an early time. Such oscillations as there have been have not brought to being enormous mountain chains or intensive foldings of the rocks, such as are so marked elsewhere in South America. Flat bedding or low angles mark the geological horizons since the Devonian Age, and since that age it would seem that none of Brazil has been beneath the sea. There are eruptive rocks in the Devonian and carboniferous beds, but since the PalÆozoic epoch it does not appear that there has been any volcanic activity. These devastating forces of Nature seem to have had their vent on the western side of the continent. The PalÆozoic beds of the interior are of red sandstones, and these have their place in marked degree in the economics and appearance of the landscape.

The formation of the country has been interestingly described by a well-informed recent writer, whom we may quote here.

"The high plains of the interior, which shed their waters both north and south, have never been of economic importance; the valley of the Amazon has been developed only of late years, and its population is as yet small. It is therefore the tableland of the Atlantic seaboard, from Uruguay to CearÁ, that constitutes the soil of historic Brazil. Through its length of 1,800 to 2,200 miles this tableland presents the greatest variety of aspect, and has no hydrographic unity. Its height is greater to the south, where it reaches some 3,200 feet. This general slope from south to north is revealed by the course of the San Francisco. In Brazil the name of Borburema is employed to denote the northern portion of the plateau. This old geographical term deserves preservation, as it represents a region which has its own peculiar characteristics. The dry season there is a long one, and the Borburema does little to feed the small seaboard rivers which flow fan-wise into the Atlantic; for the plateau in that region slopes gently to the sea.

"It is otherwise in southern Brazil. From the State of San Paolo southwards the seaward face of the plateau is a huge bank, some 2,500 or 3,000 feet in height, which separates a narrow strip of coast from the basin of the great rivers inland. This long bank or watershed bears successively the titles of Serra do Mar and Serra Geral. From San Paolo to the Rio Grande no river pierces its barrier; but the streams which rise upon its landward side, almost within sight of the sea, cross the whole width of the plateau before they join the ParanÁ or the Uruguay. Thus the Serra do Mar is not really a mountain range; though it has, from the sea, all the appearance of one, owing to its denticulated ridge; but the traveller who reaches the crest by crossing the inland plateau arrives at the highest point by the ascent of imperceptible gradients, and only discovers the serra when he breaks suddenly upon the sight of the ocean thousands of feet below.

"Beyond the serra is the territory of Minas; a confused mass of mountainous groups, among which it is no easy matter to trace one's way, either on the map or on the trail itself. An enormous backbone of granite, the Mantiqueira, crosses the southern portion of Minas; and the railway painfully ascends its grassy slopes. The Mantiqueira, which receives on its southern flank the rains brought by the ocean winds, is the highest point of the plateau, and the hydrographic centre of Brazil. It gives birth to the Rio Grande, the principal arm of the ParanÁ.

"As soon as we cross the southern frontier of the State of San Paolo the plateau is transformed; there is no more granite, and the landscape grows tamer. The primitive measures of gneiss and granite, out of which the Serra do Mar is carved, are covered to the westward by a bed of sedimentary rocks, of which the strata, dipping toward the west, plunge one after the other under other more recent strata. They consist exclusively of red and grey sandstone, and the sandy soil which results from their decomposition covers the western portions of the four southern States. The topography of the country changes with the geologic structure. The outcrops of sandstone, which one crosses in travelling westward, cut the tableland into successive flats. Irregular ranges turn their abrupter slopes towards the east, as the banks of the Meuse and Moselle in the basin of the Seine; the rivers flow close underneath them, running through narrow gorges. Even the least experienced eye could never mistake these cliffs of sandstone for ridges of granite; these are not mountain chains, not serras, but, according to the local term, serrinhas.

"In Santa Catharina and Rio Grande enormous eruptions of basaltic rocks have covered a portion of the plateau. The basalt has even reached the seaboard, and southward of the island on which Desterro is built it overlies the granites of the Serra do Mar. The south flank of the plateau, which overlooks the prairies of Rio Grande, is also basaltic. The popular judgment has gone astray, having given the same name—the Serra Geral—to the granitic chain and to the edge of the basaltic overflow, as if one were a continuation of the other.

"If we except the prairies of Rio Grande, where the pampas of the Argentine and of Uruguay commence, there is nothing in front of the Serra do Mar but a narrow sandy waste. The rains which scar the face of the serra, wearing it into ravines, do not irrigate it sufficiently; and the rivers, of little volume, are spent in slowly filling the marshes that border the coast; they are lost finally among the granite islets, in the deep bays which the first explorers insisted were great estuaries. From the Rio Grande to Espirito Santo the Parahyba is the only river that has been able to deposit, at the foot of the serra, and around its outlets, a solid and fertile alluvial plain; it is there that the sugar-mills of Campos are established.

"It is the vegetation above all that gives the various regions of Brazil their peculiar character. It is a mistake to suppose that Brazil is entirely covered with forests. The forests are concentrated upon two regions: the basin of the Amazon and a long strip of seaboard along the Atlantic coast between Espiritu Santo and Rio Grande. The forests require abundant rains; and the Serra do Mar, receiving the humidity of the ocean winds upon its dripping flanks, incessantly hidden by mists, produces far to the south the conditions which have made the Amazonian basin the home of the equatorial forest. For a distance of 1,200 miles those who have landed at the various practicable inlets have found everywhere on the slopes of the serra the same splendid and impenetrable forest. Even to-day it is almost untouched. It encircles and embraces Rio; it seems to refuse it room for growth, as in the tale of Daudet's, in which the forest reconquered in a single springtide the land which the intrepid colonists had stolen from it in order to found their settlement.

"Beyond the belt of swamps which extends along the coast, where ill-nourished trees, overladen with parasites, struggle against imperfect drainage and poverty of soil, at the very foot of the serra, the true forest begins. The dome-like summits of the great trees, ranged in ascending ranks upon the slope, completely screen the soil they spring from, thus giving the peculiar illusion that this wonderful vegetation rises, from a common level, to the extreme height of the range. Here and there only emerges from the foliage the smooth water-worn side of a granite bluff. The railway track runs between walls of verdure; the underwoods, which elsewhere suffer from the lack of light, grow eagerly along the sides of the trench-like clearing. Lianas, ferns, bamboos, grow vigorously as high as the tree-tops. One seems actually to see the brutal struggle of the plants toward the sunlight and the air. Many travellers have spoken of the sense of conflict and of violence produced by the virgin forest. There is, indeed, along the clearings cut by man, and over the trees which he fells but does not remove, a fierce battle between species and species, individual and individual; a desperate struggle for space and air. As always, it is man who introduces disorder into the heart of Nature. Far from his track order reigns, established by the victory of the strongest; and the forest which has never been violated gives a profound impression of peace and calm.

"The serra is the true home of the equatorial forest. But it covers beyond the ridge the southern and western portions of the State of Minas and the basins of the Rio Doce and the Parahyba. The Martiqueira very nearly marks the limit of the forests; beyond commences a dense growth of bush. I remember a long journey along the northern slope of the range upon which is built the new capital of the State of Minas, the city of Bello Horizonte. Towards the north we could see vast stretches of uncovered land; the mountains were partly clothed with narrow belts of forest, which climbed upward through the valleys to the very sources of the streams; we passed alternately through thickets of thorn and prairies where the soil was studded with the nests of termites. The dense trees, deprived of their leaves by months of drought, were beginning to revive, and were decking themselves with flowers, of a startling wealth of colour unknown to the forests of the humid regions. There it was that the bush commenced. It stretched unbroken to the north—unbroken save for the streams, which were full or empty according to the rain they had received.

"In San Paolo also and ParanÁ the region of afforestation is not limited by the ridge of the serra. Forests and prairies alternate on the plateau. The fires which the Indians used to light in the savannahs have destroyed the forest in places; yet man has played but a little part in the present distribution of vegetation. The forest has persisted wherever the natural conditions were favourable, holding tenaciously to the humid slopes of the hills or to rich and fertile soils. Certain soils, either by reason of their richness or their moisture, particularly favour the forest, while on lighter soils the trees can ill resist the drought. The diabasic soils of San Paolo are always covered with a mantle of forest; so much so that a map of the forests would be equivalent to a geological map.

"The forest of the plateau, intersected as it is by stretches of prairie, is less dense and less exuberant than the forest the serra; and as we approach the south the difference is yet more evident. Towards the boundaries of San Paolo and ParanÁ the tropical trees are replaced by resinous varieties. The immense pines of the ParanÁ, with straight trunks and wide, flattened crests, whose shape is rather reminiscent of that of a candelabrum with seven branches, cover with their sombre grey the wooded portions of the plateau from the ParanÁpanema to beyond the Uruguay. With their open foliage, pervious to the light, these woods resemble the pinewoods of Europe.

"To find the tropical forest once more we must push as far as the Serra Geral, whose southern slopes run down towards the prairies of Rio Grande, as on the east they descend towards the sea. There, on the basaltic flanks of the serra, is a last fragment of the tropical woods. In magnificence it almost equals the forests of Rio or of Santos. It is the equatorial forest that makes the continuity of the serra, not its geological constitution. When the Brazilians speak of the serra they think of the forest rather than of the mountains. Incautious cartographers, who have worked from second-hand data, which they have not always interpreted correctly, have sown the map of Rio Grande with a large number of imaginary ranges. One seeks them in vain when traversing the country; but one finds, in their place, the forests which the inhabitants call serras; the term for mountain has become, by the latent logic of language, the term for forest. Nothing could better emphasize the importance of vegetation in the Brazilian landscape; it effaces all other characteristics.

"Forest, bush and prairie change their aspect with the cycle of the seasons. The whole interior of Brazil knows the alteration of two well-defined seasons. The temperature is equal all the year through; there is no hot season, no cold season, but a dry season and a rainy season; this latter corresponds with the southern summer. At the first rains, which fall in September or October, the wearied vegetation abruptly awakens. Then comes the time of plenty, when earth affords the herds of cattle an abundant pasturage. March brings back the drought to the scorching soil. The region of rainy summers includes all the State of San Paolo, extending sometimes as far as ParanÁ. Further south the rhythm of vegetable life is no longer swayed by the distribution of the rains, but by the variations of the temperature, which grow always greater as one travels south. From June to September frosts are frequent in Rio Grande. The cattle on its pastures suffer from cold as much as from hunger. Spring returns, and the grass grows as the sun regains its power. This is the only portion of Brazil in which the words winter and summer are understood as they are in Europe.

"But the ocean side of the serra knows no seasons; all the months of the year are alike; all bring with them an almost equal rainfall. There vegetation is truly evergreen, everlasting, unresting. The ridge of the serra divides two different countries. If it is true that the division of the year into well-marked seasons, that powerful aid to the agriculturist, is the privilege of the temperate regions, then tropical Brazil is found only at the foot of the serra and on its slopes; the interior is another Brazil.

"Its advent into Brazilian history dates very far back. The first colonists immediately climbed the serra, and so discovered the vast territories which offered them a climate more favourable to their efforts. The belt of seaboard was too narrow and too hot to be the cradle of a nation. Colonization was effected otherwise than in the United States. In North America the pioneers settled along the seaboard, in a bracing, healthy climate, and there dwelt for a long period without any thought of crossing to the west of the mountains which limited their outlook. They prospered and multiplied in their narrow domain, and, having formed a nation, only then began to extend their territories toward the west. In Brazil, although the administrative capital of the colony remained upon the coast, men quickly began to penetrate the interior. To-day even to the seaward of the plateau to which the immigrants made their way, and which they have everywhere opened up for exploitation by labour, the soil remains but sparsely populated. While the forests of the interior gradually recede before the agriculturist, Brazil has kept the forest of the littoral intact, and man has not disputed the claim of the woods. They form, between the seaboard cities and the agricultural regions of the plateau, an uninhabited frontier, a sumptuous but deceptive frontage. Many travellers know nothing of the country but the seaboard forest. It deceives them as to the nature of Brazil, and as to its economic progress. The living members of Brazil are hidden behind it as behind a screen.

"After the first astonishment has abated, and when one has travelled far and for long periods, the eyes at last become tired; they become inured to the opulent scenery, and even find the landscape monotonous. The sombre green of forest or prairie everywhere hides the rocks; the soil stripped bare by the roads, is of a dull, uniform red; even the dust is red. Bright colours and broken lines are equally rare. One travels continually among rounded hillocks of green; the humid climate hides or softens the contour of hill and valley alike. The memories of one's journey's blend and grow confused; reminiscences of forests, skirted or traversed; clumps of banana-palms near fordable streams; windings of the twisted trail in the midst of undulating prairies."[23]

From mountain slopes and forest glades let us turn to glance into the Brazilian home, at the Brazilian people.

In one sense, Brazil is an old country, as far as any American nation may be termed so, and in its three hundred years of life since the white man became established within its shores life has taken on a settled form and engrafted itself upon its environment. It is a land of marked social customs and distinctions. It has an aristocracy, a culture refined and stable. Education, music, poetry, the arts, are revered and enjoyed, and in this sense the traveller is transported to the Old World. Yet Brazil is democratic in its ideas, as far as democracy has been possible in the Latin American Republics—a matter which is of circumscribed limits at present.

The foreigner, unless he specially lay himself out to know the folk of the Latin American lands, cannot readily look into their homes. They are a people, as elsewhere remarked, full of reserve, almost mediaeval in their seclusion, sensitive, yet extremely hospitable and open-handed whenever these barriers of reserve are penetrated. This is naturally but the Iberian social character transplanted to America.

It is to be recollected, moreover, that Brazil was a slave-owning land, with all in social life that that condition brings. Brazil was always a viceregal or monarchical country too. The fall of slavery in 1888 in part brought about the fall of the empire. Thus we have here everywhere—except in the southern States where recent immigration has brought other thoughts and customs—a rigid ruling class and caste, the privileges of an old society, such as does not exist in its neighbour of Argentina, for example, and which is foreign to the United States. Essentially an agricultural country, the land, moreover, belongs almost in its entirety to this ruling class.

Yet this condition of land-owning seclusion and reserve is not necessarily accepted as a final and irrevocable circumstance. "In the cities, and especially Rio, where social life is more developed and the national character tempered by contact with foreigners of all nationalities, the country magnates, ignorant of the ephemeral passage of the fashions, are the subject of ready ridicule. The country magnate's name is never pronounced without exciting merriment."[24]

This is a curious circumstance, and shows how custom differs in varying lands. In England, for example, the "country magnate" is generally a personage upholding all that is best in the community.

In Brazil there is a marked taste for country life, such as is scarcely yet developed in the Spanish American Republics. The elegant suburb does not necessarily attract the newly rich Brazilian, who loves to return to the fazenda, or country estate. It has been said, however, that this is less the result of delight in rural amenities than in the lust of power, for in the fazenda he is absolute master, with a power over his dependants stronger perhaps than in any other land.

Says the writer before quoted: "One of the qualities of the fazendeiro, one which I ought particularly to mention, is his extreme hospitality. In cordiality, delicacy and unfailing tact the hospitality of the Brazilian surpasses the imagination of the most hospitable of Europeans. The fazendeiro will make every possible effort to render his house agreeable to you; if you wish to take the air the best horse is at your service; or the safest, according to your talents as a horseman; the eldest son of the house will be your companion. After dinner the family will search among the gramophone discs for the latest music, the latest French songs. In the morning, upon your departure, your host, cutting short your thanks, will assure you of the gratitude he owes you for your visit. I have witnessed this scene a score of times, and each time—whether or not I owed such fortune to my French nationality—I felt that I was received as an old family friend.

"Such hospitality introduces one to the heart of many families. These families, too, are large; ten children are considered in no way extraordinary. Paternal authority is respected; the son, upon his entrance, kisses his father's hand. The wife is occupied with household cares; the husband's duty is to do the honours of the house. A stranger rarely sees Brazilian women, except as the guest of a Brazilian family. The women do not receive male callers; for them, or so it seems to me, mundane life ceases upon marriage.[25] They marry, I believe, very young, and are absolutely under the marital thumb. Outside their family their independent life is extremely limited. Admirable mothers, one knows them rather by their children than personally; they seem to cherish their domestic obscurity. The traveller who lands in the United States is immediately surrounded, questioned, advised and chaperoned by the American woman; there is nothing of this sort in Brazil.

"In addition to its social authority, this Brazilian aristocracy enjoys political power as well. Brazil has, it is true, established universal suffrage; but the sovereign people, before delegating its sovereignty to its representatives, confides to the ruling class the duty of supervising its electoral functions. The large landed proprietors choose the candidates, and their instructions are usually obeyed. They form the structure, the framework, of all party politics; they are its strength, its very life; it is they who govern and administer Brazil. And the administration is a great power in Brazil. Its province is very wide, and much is expected from it; whether the explanation is to be found in Latin atavism, or in the material conditions of life in this limitless territory, or in the fact that the individual is so powerless, and association so difficult. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the administration plays the same part in Brazil as in a European colony like Algeria, or as in India.

"Between the members of the all-powerful administration who during my travels granted me facilities, and their friends and relations, whose hospitality I enjoyed in their fazendas, I was perhaps in danger of becoming exclusively acquainted with the superior social class of which a portion directs the agricultural exploitation of the country while the remaining portion governs it. It would be a great mistake to suppose that this class, by itself, is Brazil. I have done my best to see beyond it, and to keep in mind the populace, which is both more numerous and more diversified; a confused mass of people upon whom, before all else, the whole future of Brazil depends. It lives under a benign climate; or at least under a climate which makes impossible what we call poverty in Europe. It is also a rural class; all the agricultural labour of the country is performed by its hands.

"In Southern Brazil the population has been renewed, all through the second half of the nineteenth century, by a stream of European immigration. In San Paolo the Italians have provided the long-established Paulista population with the labour necessary to the extensive production of coffee. They live on the plantations, in villages which are veritable cities of labourers. Nothing ties them to the soil; they do not seem to feel the appetite for land; very few buy real estate. They bind themselves only by yearly contracts; they readily change their employers after each harvest. No more nomadic people could be imagined; they change incessantly from fazenda to fazenda. Neither is there anything to retain them in the State of San Paolo; and not the least danger of the coffee crisis is the exodus which it is producing among the Italian colonists.

"Farther south, from ParanÁ to Rio Grande, immigration has resulted in the settlement of a very different population: a small peasant democracy, composed of Poles, Germans and Venetians. Being proprietors, they are firmly rooted to the soil. Just as the influx of Italians to San Paolo was not a spontaneous movement, but the work of the Paulista administration, so the German and Polish colonization of the south was evoked and subsidized by the Government of Brazil and the interested provinces. The newcomers were sent into regions hitherto unpopulated, where commercial communications could not be established and economic vitality was unknown. There they lived abandoned to themselves, without neighbours, without customers. The political and artificial origin of these colonies condemned them to isolation; isolation kept them faithful to their national customs and languages, which they would soon have abandoned under other circumstances."[26]

It is seen that the Brazilian has a strong leaning towards the exercise of the intellectual gifts of mankind. They are philosophical. The love of scientific and learned titles is strong. The doctorate—of laws, literature, medicine, science—has been a coveted distinction, indeed has been carried out to become a weakness or failing, a passion, as among all Latin American communities. At one time the ambition of every family capable of affording a superior education to its sons was that the boy should be a priest. That passed, and then he was to be a doctor, in one of the professions, and, moreover, to marry the daughter of a neighbour who was also a member of the learned class. Nearly all professions, it is to be recollected, in the Latin communities carry the doctorate with them. Nearly all statesmen are doctors—when they are not military men, and then the sword is apt to oust the diploma!

Now Brazil—and the same has taken place in Chile—has abolished the doctorate as being "undemocratic," has abolished the universities and all their ceremonies and the cap and gown, regarding them as too aristocratic-seeming, and, in their place, a simple certificate of knowledge is given from the "professional school."

This may seem destructive, but perhaps there is a measure of wisdom in it, for apart from a measure of danger in too marked social distinctions, the system tended among the youth of the country towards too great an aspiration for academic honours, and not enough towards the more practical and productive walks of life.

The aristocratic society of Brazil naturally centred around the monarch, for, as we have not forgotten, Brazil was the only self-contained empire in the New World, except for Mexico's short-lived monarchical regime. We may not here trespass much upon the field of history, but we shall recollect that, in 1808, the fugitive Portuguese Court, under the regent, Dom JoÂo VI, sought Rio de Janeiro as his refuge. This advent gave a stimulus to the growth of the capital, which was opened to foreign commerce with the removal of industrial restrictions, printing was introduced and medicine and literature established. In 1822 Brazil declared its independence, with Dom Pedro I as its emperor. The expulsion of royalty in 1889, by a military revolt, was accomplished without bloodshed, but under subsequent presidents revolution reared its head.

Brazil is a land that has depended largely for its prosperity upon the system of what may be termed "monoculture," that is, the exploitation of one principal crop or product. In earlier times this was sugar; more recently it has been coffee. This policy, whilst it had advantages, and, indeed, may have been inevitable, has also serious disadvantages. Such products are bound for foreign markets and susceptible to the rise and fall of exchange. The producers may be enriched or impoverished by such fluctuations.

Moreover, "monoculture," as pointed out elsewhere, tends to the sacrifice or neglect of other interests, those of smaller and more varied industries, which go to make up the life of a nation, to increase its happiness, prosperity, knowledge—indeed, to feed it and supply it. There is a tendency to draw off labour under monocultural systems from smaller occupations, from local food supply and local industry, to herd labour into barracks or congested places, to discourage individual initiative and peasant proprietorship, concentrating industry into too few hands. This condition is of easy growth in such countries as Spanish America, where raw materials, rather than finished articles, are produced.

There are evidences, however, that Brazilian Governments are awakening to these matters and encouraging the implantation of a wider variety of industry. Along such paths undoubtedly lies greater national prosperity and stability.

The high protective tariffs of the Latin American countries at the same time tend to raise enormously the price of imported articles and to foster the industries of the countries themselves. In Brazil the national manufacturing industries have grown very considerable under this system of economic fostering. None is more striking than the cotton-weaving industry, and we are already in sight of the time when the country will cease to import English or other foreign cotton goods, except perhaps certain special kinds. This, of course, is sound economics (however unpleasing it may be for British manufacturers). Brewing and soap-making are other industries that have similarly prospered in the Republic. But, so far, factories are few, comparatively, though there is some useful decentralization of manufacture. One finds tiny factories in small struggling villages where their presence might have been unsuspected, industries brought about by the immensity of distance, the high cost of carriage, which soon exceeds the value of the finished product, and thus Nature has here provided a sort of natural protective zone; factories being established where customers exist, and for the purpose of serving them, rather than for the object of sale beyond their borders. Each small factory has its own circle of customers, under these circumstances, and can rely upon its market close at hand. It enjoys a monopoly of its peculiar region.

Apart from any defects to which such a system may give rise, this may be regarded as a valuable condition, and, if preserved, may avoid in Brazil the serious evils which in some European countries, such as England, over-centralization of manufacture has given rise—a philosophy to which, however, English people have not yet awakened.

Similar conditions exist as regards agriculture: the dispersal or decentralization of industry is necessarily accompanied by the dispersal or decentralization of agriculture. Food products are grown where they are to be consumed. Each hamlet, and indeed each family, has its own fields of maize, manioc and often sugar-cane. The village is enabled not only to provide itself with employment and with manufactured articles, but with foodstuffs, and, in the future, this circumstance might give rise to an intensive general settlement and contentment.

For trading conditions it may have its adverse side. But the question is how far trading should be encouraged as against economic settlement.

"As a result of the difficulty of communications, and also, perhaps, of the defective organization of trade, Brazil is far from forming a national market. Her territory may be decomposed into a host of little isolated markets, each independent of the other, each sufficing to itself. If the prices vary, neither rise nor fall affects the outer world. In Rio I find the sugar-planters in a state of joyful excitement: in a few months the price of sugar has risen by 100 per cent. Two days later I land in ParanÁ; there, in the narrow tropical belt of seaboard, are a few sugar-plantations, whose crop is sold on the plateau; not in the shape of sugar, but as 'brandy,' aguardiente, or, strictly speaking, rum. The local crop of cane is abundant, the owners of the sugar-mills at the foot of the serra are grumbling at having to sell their spirit at far below its usual price.[27] Similarly the price of coffee will fall in San Paolo and in Santos, until the Paulist coffee industry appears in actual danger, and the State undertakes the perilous business of running up the prices to save the planters. Yet in CearÁ there are only a few growers, who can barely supply the consumers of the State, who are selling an inferior coffee at double the usual prices, and know no other anxiety than the fear that the drought may threaten their crops. Such contrasts are frequent. If such is the case with luxuries like sugar and coffee, what of the heavier products, whose transport is still more costly?

"The limitation of the markets renders the economic life of the country unequal and ill-adjusted. It exposes it to continual partial crises which naturally check its development. When production exceeds consumption the local market cannot unload itself upon the neighbouring markets, in which the producers would perhaps receive better prices, since these, on account of the cost of transport, are shut off, as it were, by water-tight compartments. Prices accordingly fall, without any possible remedy; immediately production is limited and becomes insufficient; then prices rise, and there is no importations from without to limit their rise. Reawakened by better prices, production is once more stimulated; and its very improvement provokes a new crisis. I found the settlers of ParanÁ accustomed and even resigned to the sudden leaps of the market, which they had come to regard as a normal and inevitable state of affairs. They live, therefore, always in a state of uncertainty, never able to foresee what will be their resources for the coming year. The spirit of saving has decayed among them. In the same way wholesale trade used to suffer formerly from the extravagant variations of exchange. The Brazilians have at last come to understand the dangers of such conditions. There is only one remedy: to improve the means of communication. The great question of Brazil is above all a question of roads."[28]

In Brazil the question of means of transport is a serious one. The magnificent network of railways (largely built by British capital) serves only the more settled part of the country.

The great export trade of Brazil, with its staple products, furnishes a stream of gold, which, more or less, becomes dispersed throughout the country, and creates strong ties of union between the various States, which otherwise might not exist in unison.

As to sugar, however, Brazil is in large degree its own customer. The great export is coffee, as it was once sugar, and in part rubber. Meat also finds its principal market at home. Brazil will soon supply its own wants in flour, which now comes in part from Argentina.

The rise of the coffee-growing industry in Southern Brazil, in the rich State of San Paolo, has in it the element of an economic romance.

The condition was the result of Nature's geological work here. It was discovered about the year 1885 that Nature had disposed large areas of what came to be called "red earth"—a certain diabasic soil of rich decomposed lavas—in this part of Brazil, and that the coffee-shrub flourished wonderfully upon them. A coffee-planting "fever" was the result. Rich and poor flocked in to take up these lands and plant the berry; other forms of agriculture were despised; all hunted for the red-earth deposits, built their homes, set out rows of young shrubs. The forests receded, cut down by the axe of the new settlers. Towns sprang to being as if by magic, where people were drawn from the four quarters of the globe, from every nation. Fazendas rapidly spread, railways were multiplied, coffee occupied all minds. They thought it the one thing on earth. Coffee was their art, literature, religion.

Thus the great and to-day rich and handsome city of San Paolo grew up, into which coffee pours, to have its final outlet for the market beyond the sea, at Santos—once a dreadful and fever-stricken port, whose very name was anathema to the traveller, now a fine and fairly healthy seaport of vast importance.

The life and circumstances of the immigrants or "colonists," as they are termed, in these coffee-growing districts of Brazil is one of peculiar interest for the student of race matters and human geography, of great value in the science of colonization. Here is an account by a careful observer:

"Each fazenda constitutes a little isolated world, which is all but self-sufficient, and from which the colonists rarely issue; the life is laborious. The coffee is planted in long regular lines in the red soil, abundantly watered by the rains, on which a constant struggle must be maintained against the invasion of the noxious weeds. The weeding of the plantation is really the chief labour of the colonist. It is repeated six times a year. Directly after the harvest, if you ride on horseback along the lines of shrubs, which begin, as early as September, to show signs of their brilliant flowering season, you will find the colonists, men and women, leaning on their hoes, while the sun, already hot, is drying behind them the heaps of weeds they have uprooted.

"Each family is given as many trees as it can look after; the number varies with the size of the family. Large families will tend as many as eight or ten thousand trees; while a single worker cannot manage much more than two thousand.

"Like the vine, coffee requires a large number of labourers in proportion to the area under cultivation; it supports a relatively dense population. The two thousand trees which one colonist will receive will not cover, as a matter of fact, more than five to seven acres; yet the coffee supports other labourers who work on the fazenda, in addition to the labourers proper, or colonists. Pruning, for instance, which so far is not universally practised, is never done by the colonists, but by gangs of practised workmen, who travel about the State and hire themselves for the task. The colonist is only a labourer; if he were allowed to prune the shrubs he would kill them. Heaven knows, the pruners to whom the task is confided ill-treat the trees sufficiently already! They use pruning-hook and axe with a brutality that makes one shudder.

"When the coffee ripens, towards the end of June, the picking of the crop commences. Sometimes, in a good year, the crop is not all picked until November. The great advantage enjoyed by San Paolo, to which it owes its rank as a coffee-producing country, is that the whole crop arrives at maturity almost at the same moment. The crop may thus be harvested in its entirety at one picking; the harvester may pick all the berries upon each tree at once, instead of selecting the ripe berries, and making two or three harvests, as is necessary in Costa Rica or Guatemala. This entails a great reduction in the cost of production and of labour. San Paolo owes this advantage to the climate, which is not quite tropical, and to the sequence of well-defined seasons and their effect upon the vegetation.

"At the time of picking the colonists are gathered into gangs. They confine themselves to loading the berries on carts, which other labourers drive to the fazenda; there the coffee is soaked, husked, dried and selected, and then dispatched to Santos, the great export market. All these operations the colonists perform under the supervision of the manager of the fazenda. A bell announces the hour for going to work; another the hour of rest; another the end of the day; the labourers have no illusions of independence. In the morning the gangs scatter through the plantation; in the evening they gradually collect on the paths of the fazenda, and go home in family groups, tired after the day's work, saving of words, saluting one another by gestures. On Sunday work is interrupted; games are arranged; parties are made up to play mora, or Italian card games, with denari and bastoni. Women hold interminable palavers. Sometimes, on an indifferent nag, borrowed at second or third hand from a neighbour, the colonist will ride as far as the nearest town, to see his relations, exercise his tongue, and pit himself against such hazards of fortune as the world outside the fazenda may offer.

"What are the annual earnings of the agricultural worker? The conditions vary in different localities, but we may estimate that the colonist receives about 60 or 80 milreis—£4 to £5 7s. at the present rate of exchange—per 1,000 stems of coffee. This is a certain resource; a sort of fixed minimum wage. To this we must add the price of several days' labour at about 2 milreis, or 2s. 8d. A still more irregular element in the profits of a colonist's family is the amount it receives for the harvest. By consulting the books of several fazendas I was able to realize the extent of this irregularity. Sometimes the wage paid for the harvest is insignificant, while sometimes it is greater by itself than all the other sources of income put together. It is calculated at so much per measure of berries given in by the colonist. When the branches are heavily laden, not only is the total quantity greater, but the labour is performed more rapidly, and each day is more productive. Years of good harvest are for the colonist, as for the planter, years of plenty. With this important element essentially variable, how can we estimate the annual earnings of the colonist?

"His expenses, again, cannot be estimated with any exactitude. An economic family will reduce them to practically nothing, if it has the good fortune to escape all sickness, and so dispense with the doctor, the chemist and the priest.

"What really enables the colonists to make both ends meet is the crops they have the right to raise on their own account, sometimes on allotments reserved for the purpose set apart from the coffee, and sometimes between the rows of the coffee-trees. They often think more of the clauses in their contract which relate to these crops than to those which determine their wages in currency. A planter told me that he had learned that a party of colonists intended to leave him after the harvest. We met some of them on the road, and I questioned them. 'Is it true that you are engaged to work on Senhor B——'s fazenda for the coming year?'—'Yes.'—'What reason have you for changing your fazenda? Will you be better paid there? Don't you get over £6 a thousand trees here?'—'Yes.'—'How much do they offer you over there?'—'Only £4.'—'Then why do you go?'—'Because there we can plant our maize among the coffee.'

"The culture of coffee is thus combined with that of alimentary crops. Almost all the world over the important industrial crops have to make room in the neighbourhood for food crops. Every agricultural country is forced to produce, at any rate to some extent, its own food, and to live upon itself if it wishes to live at all. In Brazil the dispersion of food crops is extreme, on account of the difficulties of transport; it is hardly less in San Paolo, in spite of the development of the railway system. Each fazenda is a little food-producing centre, the chief crops being maize, manioc and black beans, of which the national dish, the feijoade, is made.

"It even happens at times that the colonists produce more maize than they consume. They can then sell a few sacks at the nearest market, and add the price to their other resources. In this way crops which are in theory destined solely for their nourishment take on a different aspect from their point of view, yielding them, a revenue which is not always to be despised.

"The colonists make their purchases in the nearest town, or, more often, if the fazenda is of any importance, there is a shop or store—what the Brazilians call a negocio—in the neighbourhood of the colonists' houses. Its inventory would defy enumeration; it sells at the same time cotton prints and cooking-salt, agricultural implements and petroleum. An examination of the stock will show one just what the little economic unit called a fazenda really is. Although the colonists are to-day almost always free to make their purchases where they please, the trade of shopkeeper on a fazenda is still extremely profitable. He enjoys a virtual monopoly; the fazendeiro sees that no competitor sets up shop in the neighbourhood. The shop is the planter's property; he lets it, and usually at a high rent, which represents not only the value of the premises, but also the commercial privilege which goes with it. It is a sort of indirect commercial tariff levied by the planter on the colonists; a sign of the ever so slightly feudal quality of the organization of property in San Paolo. The custom that used to obtain, of the planter himself keeping shop for the profit, or rather at the expense of his colonists, has generally disappeared.

"One of the most serious of the planter's anxieties is the maintenance of the internal discipline of the fazenda. This is a task demanding ability and energy. One must not be too ready to accuse the planters of governing as absolute sovereigns. I myself have never observed any abuse of power on their part, nor have I seen unjustifiable fines imposed. The fazendeiro has a double task to perform. He employs his authority not only to ensure regularity in the work accomplished, but also to maintain peace and order among the heterogeneous population over which he rules. He plays the part of a policeman. The public police service cannot ensure the respect of civil law, of the person or of property. How could the police intervene on the plantation, which is neither village nor commune, but a private estate? It falls to the planter to see that the rights of all are protected. Many colonists have a preference for plantations on which the discipline is severe; they are sure of finding justice then. The severity of the planter is not always to the detriment of the colonist.

"Individually the colonists are often turbulent and sometimes violent; collectively they have hitherto shown a remarkable docility. On some fazendas, however, there have been labour troubles, and actual strikes; but they have always been abortive. The strikes have not lasted, and have never spread. One of the means by which the planters maintain their authority and prevent the colonists from becoming conscious of their strength is the prohibition of all societies or associations. They have had little trouble in making this prohibition respected. Among an uneducated group of labourers, of various tongues and nationalities, the spirit of combination does not exist. We have seen the development of working-men's societies, of socialistic tendencies, in the cities of San Paolo, but nowhere in the country. An incoherent immigrant population, but lightly attached to the land, is not a favourable soil for the growth of a party with a socialistic platform. One must not look for agricultural trade unions in San Paolo. The contract between the planter and his labourers is never a collective but always an individual contract.

"Accounts are settled every two months. It often happens, even to-day, that the colonist is in the planter's debt. The planter has kept up the custom of making advances, and every family newly established in the country is, as a general rule, in debt. But the advances are always small, the colonist possessing so little in the way of securities; he has few animals and next to nothing in the way of furniture. His indebtedness towards the planter is not enough, as it used to be, to tie him down to the plantation; that many of them continue to leave by stealth is due to their desire to save their few personal possessions, which the planter might seize to cover his advances. At the last payment of the year all the colonists are free; their contract comes to an end after the harvest. Proletarians, whom nothing binds to the soil on which they have dwelt for a year, they do not resume their contracts if they have heard of more advantageous conditions elsewhere, or if their adventurous temperament urges them to try their luck farther on.

"The end of the harvest sees a general migration of the agricultural labourers. The colonists are true nomads. All the planters live in constant dread of seeing their hands leave them in September. Even the most generous fazendeiros experience the same difficulty. According to the Director of Colonization, 40 per cent. to 60 per cent. of the colonists leave their fazendas annually. It is difficult to confirm this statement; but at least it is no exaggeration to say that a third of the families employed on the plantations leave their places from year to year. Towards September one meets them on the roads, most often travelling afoot; the man carrying a few household goods and the woman a newly born child, like the city labourers at the end of the season. One can imagine what a serious annoyance this instability of labour must be to the coffee-planter. Long before the harvest the planter is planning to fill up the gaps that will appear in the colony directly after the harvest. He secretly sends out hired recruiting agents to the neighbouring fazendas or to the nearest town; he employs for this purpose some of the shrewder colonists, to whom he pays a commission for every family engaged. Finally, at the end of his resources, if he no longer has any hope of finding workmen in the neighbourhood who are experienced in plantation work, he decides to apply to the colonization agent in San Paolo, and resigns himself to the employment of an untrained staff, whom he will have to spend several months in training.

"The instability of agricultural labour is the most striking characteristic of rural life in the State of San Paolo. It is a result of the unusual and even artificial nature of the hasty development of coffee-planting."[29]

The colonists on the coffee-plantations are, in the main, Italians, of whom there may be perhaps three-quarters of a million in San Paolo.

The settlers or immigrants in Brazil, however, are not all of the San Paolo type, and in other parts of the Republic the condition of their life differs altogether from those of the coffee-plantation labourers. In ParanÁ, Rio Grande and elsewhere, very diverse pictures of colonial life may be painted, more independent in their colours, with less of the "rural proletariat." There are rural democracies of small holders in some instances, and a wide variety of products are cultivated, or small industries pursued.

In ParanÁ, the famous and valuable matÉ is largely grown, and the leaf of this small shrub—not unlike the ilex, or evergreen oak, is exported far and wide to Argentina, and other lands of the Plate, and to Chile, across the Cordillera. For ParanÁ, the matÉ is what coffee is for San Paolo.

Vol. II. To face p. 150.