part I could see none--are coniferous, but very many are evergreen,

changing their leaves not all at the same time, like the deciduous trees of temperate countries, but each tree at its own time, so that there are always some with fresh leaves coming as the others are beginning to go. The variety of tints is endless, from the dark glossy green of many a forest tree to the light green of the bamboos. Some leaves have white undersurfaces, which when turned up by the wind are bright enough to give the effect of flowers; and one tree, frequent in these mountains, has a group of what seem white bracts round the corymb at the end of its flower-shoots. Still more varied and still more brilliant are the flowers. These are seen best from above because it is the highest boughs touched by the sun that burst forth into the most abundant blossoms. Though we were too early in the hot season to see the blossom-bearing trees at their best, the wealth of colour was delightful even in November. Yellow and white were perhaps the most frequent, but there were also bright pinks and purples and violets. Palms rising here and there often high above the rest gave a variety of tint and form, while the space between the trunks was filled by tree-ferns rising to twenty feet and by a bewildering profusion of climbing and hanging and parasitic plants, many of them girdling the boughs with flowers. There were far more than anybody could give me names for, and as I had no means of ascertaining the scientific names, it would not serve the reader to give the popular Portuguese ones, especially as I found that the same name was sometimes applied to quite different plants because their colour was similar.

It is in a region like this that one begins to realize the amazing energy of nature. In the Andes we had seen the power of what are called the inanimate forces acting from beneath to shake the earth and break through its solid crust. There heat, acting upon water, has produced volcanic explosions and piled up gigantic cones like Misti and Tupungato, and has destroyed by earthquakes cities like Valparaiso or Mendoza. Here heat and water are again the force and the matter on which the force works; but here it is through life that they act. Every inch of ground is covered with some living and growing thing. While the tall stems push upward to overtop their fellows and let their highest shoots put forth flowers under the sunlight, climbing plants slender as a vine-shoot or stout as a liana embrace the trunk and mount along the branches and hang in swinging festoons from tree to tree. The fallen trunks are covered thick with ferns and mosses. Orchids and many another parasite root themselves in the living stem, and make it gay, to its ultimate undoing, with blossoms not its own. Even the bare faces of gneiss rock, too steep for any soil to rest upon, support a plant with a thick whorl of succulent leaves that is somehow able to find sustenance from air and moisture only, its roots anchored into some slight roughness of the rock. When a patch of wood has been cut down to the very ground, five years suffice to cover the soil again with a growth of trees and shrubs so rank that the spot can scarcely be distinguished from the uncut forest all round. But this swift activity of life is hardly more wonderful than is the variety of forms. Each of the great forests of Europe and North America consists of a few species of trees. In the New Forest in England, most beautiful of all, in one place chiefly beeches are found, in another chiefly oaks, mixed, perhaps, with some birches and white thorns. The woods of Maine and New Hampshire are composed of maples and birches, white pines and hemlocks and spruces, with now and then some less frequent tree. In the majestic forests of the Pacific coast there are seldom more than three or four of the larger species present in any quantity and this is generally true also of the Eucalyptus forests of Australia. But on this Brazilian coast the diversity is endless. Those who have traversed the Amazonian forests have made the same remark. There as here you may find within a radius of eighty yards, forty kinds of trees growing side by side, species belonging to different families with myriad shapes and hues of leaf and flower. Not content with the abundance of its production, this creative energy of nature insists on expressing itself also in an endless variety of forms. Do any principles which naturalists have yet discovered quite explain such a marvellous diversity where the conditions are the same?

After the doctrine of the Struggle for Life had been once propounded by two great naturalists who had seen, one of them South America, and the other, the tropical islands of the Further East, men soon learnt to recognize and observe the working of the principle in every part of the earth until in the arid desert or the freezing north a land was reached where life itself was extinct. But it is in Brazil that the principle is seen in the fulness of its potency. Here, where life is so profuse, so multiform, so incessantly surging around like the waves of a restless sea, this law of nature's action seems to speak from every rustling leaf, and the forest proclaims it with a thousand voices.

Rambling round Rio, and noting the physical characteristics of the ground it occupies, the rocky hills and the promontories and the islands, the traveller is reminded of the historic cities of Greece and Italy and naturally asks himself: Supposing Rio to have been one of those cities, where would the Acropolis have been, and where would the citizens have met in their assembly before they rushed to attack a tyrant, and to what sea-girt fortress would a ruler have sent his captives by water as the East Roman emperors seized their enemies and sent them into exile from the Bosphorus? Then, remembering that few streets or hills in Rio have any associations with the past, he wonders whether such associations will come into being in the future, and whether insurrections and civic conflicts may ever render some of these spots famous. In old cities like Florence and Paris and Edinburgh historic memories make a great part of the interest of the place. How much of English history connects itself with the Tower of London and with Westminster Hall! It so happened that during our stay in Rio there befell an incident which shewed that the smooth surface of things may, even in our own days, be troubled by explosive passions, an incident which revealed a new kind of danger to which in times of domestic strife modern engines of warfare may subject a maritime town.

On the day when we were to embark for Bahia and Europe, we started early in the morning from Petropolis to come down by train to Rio, and heard at the station rumours of a revolution, confused rumours, for no one could say from whom the revolution, if there was one, proceeded or against whom it was directed. When we reached Rio, things cleared up a little. It was not a political revolution nor a military pronunciamento, but a marine mutiny. The crews, almost entirely negroes, of the two great Dreadnought battleships which the Brazilian government had recently ordered and purchased from an English firm of shipbuilders, and which had shortly before arrived in the harbour, had revolted during the night. The captain of one of the vessels, the _Minas Geraes_, had been murdered by his crew as he stepped on board upon his return from dining on a French ship. The story ran that he had been first pierced by bayonets and then hewed in pieces with hatchets. Of the other officers some few had been killed, the rest put on shore. The only white men left on board were some English engineers forcibly detained in order to work the engines. The crews of a cruiser and two smaller war vessels had joined in the revolt. All the ships were in the hands of the crews, who, however, were believed to be obeying non-commissioned officers of their own colour, and who were led by a negro named João Candido,[96] a big man of energy and resolution, who had shewn his grasp of the situation by ordering all the liquor on the _Minas Geraes_ to be thrown overboard. The grievances alleged by the seamen were overwork, insufficient wages, and the frequency of corporal punishments. Rumours were busy connecting the names of prominent politicians with the outbreak, but so far as could be made out then or subsequently there was no foundation for these suspicions. The mutiny seems to have been the spontaneous act of the crews, who, it was remarked, had just arrived from Lisbon, lately the scene of a revolution, and might have there caught the infection of rebellion. In demanding the redress of their grievances, which was, of course, to be accompanied by an amnesty for themselves, they had threatened to lay the city in ashes, enforcing the threat by firing some shots into it (not, however, from the heavy guns). One shot killed two children, and several other persons were wounded.

The aspect of the city was rather less affected than might have been expected. Some troops were moving about, here cavalry, there infantry. Few carriages or motor cars and few women were to be seen. Business was slack, and groups of men stood talking at street corners, evidently imparting to one another those tales and suspicions and guesses at unseen causes with which the air was thick. All water traffic from the opposite side of the bay had been stopped by the mutineers, who had also compelled the submission of one of the forts at the entrance. Strolling along to the great Botafogo Esplanade under the palms, I found a battery of field artillery, their guns pointed at the two battleships, the _Minas_ and the _São Paulo_, against which they would, of course, have been as useless as paper pellets. There the majestic yellow grey monsters lay, fresh from Messrs. Armstrong's yard at Newcastle, flying the ensign of Brazil, but also flying at the fore the red flag of rebellion. So the day wore on, terror abating, but the sense of helplessness increasing. We were lunching at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs--it was a small party, for considerations of safety had kept away the ladies who had been invited--when suddenly the heavy boom of the guns was heard, and continued at intervals all through the repast. When again in the streets, I found that the two Dreadnoughts were shelling some torpedo-boats, manned by crews still loyal, which had approached them. The practice was bad, and none of the boats was hit, but they prudently scurried off up the bay into shallow water where the ironclads could not follow.

So the hours passed and everybody was still asking, "What is to be done?" "The mutineers," so men said, "can't be starved out, because they have threatened to destroy the city if food is refused them, and the city is at their mercy. By this threat they have forced us to give them water. We cannot blow up the ships with torpedoes, first because they have stretched torpedo nets round the hulls, and secondly because it would be a serious thing to destroy property for which we have paid no small part of our annual revenue. Doesn't it look as if we should have to submit to the mutineers? What else can we do?" Later on the firing recommenced and I mounted to the third story of the British Consulate to see what was happening. The ships were shelling the naval barracks on the Isla das Cobras in the harbour, and the island was replying, and we were near enough to see the red flash from the iron lips just before the roar was heard. Lying out in the bay was the British liner by which we were to sail for Liverpool. The lighters that were carrying coal to her had been commandeered by the mutineers, but she had just enough in her bunkers to get to Bahia. The immediate difficulty was for the passengers to reach her across the line of fire. At last, however, a boat was sent out from shore bearing a flag of truce, and the _São Paulo_ consented to cease firing and let the passengers get on board the British vessel. They were accordingly embarked in a launch which, flying the Consulate flag, crossed unharmed the danger zone. It was the only chance, but a sense of relief was visible in every face when we stepped on board, for if a negro gunner had been smitten by the desire to let fly once more at the Isla das Cobras, his ill-aimed shot might very well have sent the launch to the bottom. As we steamed slowly out to the ocean the magnificent _São Paulo_ ran close alongside us, and we could see her decks crowded with negroes and the red flag still flying. "A study in black and red," someone observed. Outside the entrance were lying the _Minas Geraes_ and the _Bahia_, partly to be out of harm's way from torpedoes, partly to guard the mouth of the bay. In the sober light of a grey sunset, the clouds hanging heavy on the Corcovado, but the lofty watch-tower of the Pan d'Azucar still visible through the gathering shades, we turned northward, and bade farewell to Rio. Two hours later, looking back through a moonless night, we could still see the flash, from beneath the horizon, of the searchlights which the _Minas Geraes_ was casting on the sea all round her to guard against the stealthy approach of a loyal torpedo-boat.

A few days later, at Pernambuco, we heard that peace had been restored. The Chambers had voted an amnesty with eloquent speeches about the beauty of forgiveness, and had promised to redress the grievances of the mutineers. Another mutiny broke out afterwards, which, after many lives had been lost, was severely suppressed, but these later events happened when we were far away, nearing the coast of Europe, and of them I have nothing to tell.

The coast for some way north from Rio continues high, but the steamers keep too far out to permit its beauties to be seen. Before one approaches Bahia, the mountains have receded, and at that city, though picturesque heights are still visible, they lie further back, and scarcely figure in the landscape. Still further north, towards Pernambuco, and most of the way northwestward to Pará, the coast is much lower. The bay of Bahia is singularly beautiful in its vast sweep, as well as in the verdure that fringes its inlets, and the glimpses of distant sunlit hills. Nor is the city, long the capital of Brazil, wanting in interest; for, though none of the buildings have much architectural merit, there is a quaint, old-fashioned look about the streets and squares, with many a house that has stood unchanged since the eighteenth century. The upper city runs along the edge of a steep bluff, sixty or eighty feet above the lower town, which is a single line of street, even more dirty than it is picturesque, occupying the narrow strip between the harbour and the cliff. Here, far more than in Parisianized Rio, one finds the familiar features of a Portuguese town reproduced, irregular and narrow streets, houses, often high, roofed with red tiles, and coloured with all sorts of washes, pink, green, blue, and yellow. Sometimes the whole front or side of a house is covered with blue or yellowish brown tiles, a characteristic of Portuguese cities--it is frequent in Oporto and Braga--which has come down from Moorish times. But a still greater contrast between this and southern Brazil is found in the population. In São Paulo there are few negroes, in Rio not very many, but here in Bahia all the town seems black. One might be in Africa or the West Indies. It is the same in Pernambuco and indeed all the way to the mouth of the Amazon.

Finding this to be a region filled with coloured people as São Paulo was with white people, and knowing that a thousand miles further west one would come into a region entirely Indian, one began to realize what a vast country Brazil is, big enough to be carved up into sixteen countries each as large as France. Were there natural boundaries, _i.e._ such physical features as mountain ranges or deserts, to divide this immense region into sections, the settled parts of Brazil might before now have split apart into different political communities. As it is, however, there are no such natural dividing lines, and if the Republic should ever break in pieces it will be differences in the character of the population or some conflict of material interests that will bring this about.

How has it happened that so huge a country has fallen to the lot of a people so much too small for it, since one can hardly reckon the true Brazilian white nation at more than seven millions?

What did happen was that the French, English, and Dutch, having their hands full in Europe, did not pursue their attempts to occupy the country with sufficient persistence and with adequate forces, and so lost their hold on the parts they had seized. Thus it became possible for a handful of Portuguese on the Atlantic coast to send out small colonizing parties into their unoccupied Hinterland, and as there were no civilized inhabitants to resist them, to go on acquiring a title to it without opposition until they met the outposts of the Spanish government who had advanced from the Pacific across the Andes just as the Portuguese had advanced from the Atlantic. Neither Portuguese nor Spaniards had been numerous enough to colonize this interior region of the continent, so it remains (save for a few trading posts on the rivers) an empty wilderness.

Nevertheless, though Brazil is physically all one country, it contains regions differing in climate, in economic resources, and in population. I will try in a few sentences to indicate the character of each.

The most northerly part along the frontiers of Guiana and also along a good deal of the coast between the mouth of the Amazon and Cape St. Roque is the least valuable, for large tracts are stony and protracted droughts are not uncommon. The extreme north has been hardly at all settled.

The east central part, consisting of the mountain ridges and table-lands referred to on page 368, together with slopes which descend on all sides from these highlands, is a region of great natural resources where all tropical crops and fruits can be produced. Most of it is healthy, much of it not too hot for white men to work and thrive, and the magnificent forests, no less than the mines, will make the mountains for many years to come no less a source of wealth than are the more level tracts. Its weak point is the want of white labour and the inefficiency of black labour.

This tropical region passes imperceptibly into the temperate country which occupies the states of São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catharina, and Rio Grande, a section of the country no less fertile than the last and better fitted for European constitutions. Here all sub-tropical products can be raised; here also are forests; and here, where the land has not yet been brought under tillage, there is abundant and excellent pasture for all sorts of live stock. As the east central region is the land of cotton and sugar, so this southern region is the land of coffee and cattle,--coffee in its northerly parts, cattle and the cereals in its southern.

There remain the vast spaces of the west and northwest, still so imperfectly explored that it is hard to estimate their economic value. To the Amazonian forests, the Selvas, I shall return in another chapter.[97] They are the land of another great Brazilian staple--rubber. Most parts of the region where Brazil adjoins Bolivia, a vast level or slightly undulating country, partly grassy, partly covered with wood or scrub, is believed to be available either for cultivation or for ranching. At present access is difficult, and markets are far away, but when the districts of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina that lie between this region and the coast have been more fully settled, its turn will come.

Taking Brazil as a whole, no great country in the world owned by a European race possesses so large a proportion of land available for the support of human life and productive industry. In the United States there are deserts, and of the gigantic Russian Empire much is desert, and much is frozen waste. But on the Portuguese of Brazil nature has bestowed nothing for which man cannot find a use. Such a possession as this was far more than enough to compensate the little kingdom for the loss of the empire which it began in the sixteenth century to build up in India, before the evil days came after the death of King Sebastian.

The material prosperity of a country, however, depends less on its natural resources than on the quality of the labour applied to its development and on the intelligence that directs the labour. In these respects Brazil has been less fortunate. When the Portuguese first settled the coast lands, they forced the Indian aborigines to work for them, and in many places destroyed by their severities the bulk of the native population. Negroes began to be imported about A.D. 1600, but not in great numbers until the discovery of diamond and other mines in the inland country created a sudden demand for labour. After that, there came a large importation of slaves, for agricultural as well as for mining purposes, from all the Portuguese dominions of Africa, and from the Congo regions; and this went on, though latterly much reduced, down to our own time. Between 1825 and 1850 it is said that 1,250,000 slaves were landed, and cargoes came in even later. Thus the working population of the tropical region, including the coast towns, became largely, and in the north, predominantly negro. Slavery was abolished by successive stages, the last of which was reached in 1888. For a time the plantation culture was disorganized, but most of the freedmen ultimately returned to work. It is by their labour that sugar and cotton are raised to-day, though they take life very easily, and often content themselves with just so much exertion on just so many days a week as is needed to provide them with food and the other scanty necessaries of their life. Here, as elsewhere, the race is lighthearted and thoughtless, caring little for the future, loving amusement in its most childish forms. It is kindly and submissive, but dangerously excitable, and quickly demoralized by drink. The planters find it hard to count on their work people, who stay away if they feel more than usually lazy, and will, if displeased, transfer themselves to another planter, who, in the general scarcity of labour, is glad to have them. Many children are born to them, but many die, especially in infancy, so that, taking the country as a whole, they do not seem to increase faster than the other sections of the population.

Such are the cotton and sugar regions: now let us turn to those southerly states of the republic, whose staples are coffee and cattle and cereals. In them, and especially in São Paulo and Rio Grande, the conditions are altogether different. The number of negroes was never large there, and it does not grow. Owing to the elevation of the ground and to the less powerful sun, the heat is not excessive in either state, and European immigrants can work and thrive and be happy. So Europeans have flocked hither. Between 1843 and 1859 about twenty thousand came from Germany to Rio Grande do Sul, and there are now, it is said, about two hundred thousand, forming a compact community which preserves its national habits and manages its own affairs with little interference by the central government. It is, in fact, disposed to resent any such interference and to "run things" in its own solid German way. Even larger is the number of Italians who in more recent years have entered these southern states. The labour on the great coffee estates of São Paulo is almost entirely Italian; and in Rio Grande they have become well-to-do peasant proprietors, living in less comfort than their German neighbours, but working just as steadily. This better quality of population has largely gone to making the southern states the most progressive part of Brazil. Should the Italians and the native Brazilians of the south, who have far less negro blood than those of the middle states, continue to spread themselves out as settlers over the still thinly peopled southwestern districts, they will probably give prosperity to that region also. Cattle ranching is in the south carried on by Gauchos much like those of Uruguay or Argentina. They are said to have communicated their love of horses to the Germans and Italians, so that on holidays even the women of those races appear on horseback in a way that would startle their peasant cousins left at home in Swabia or Lombardy.

The foreign element in Brazil is more important by its energy and industry than by its numbers, for it probably little exceeds a million all told, and the total population of the republic may approach nineteen or twenty millions. In 1910 about 88,000 immigrants entered, most of them Italians, and the rest Portuguese, Spaniards, and Syrians, these last mostly travelling peddlers, or small dealers who establish themselves in the towns. The afflux of Syrians that has found its way to South America and the West Indies during the last few years is a new and curious feature in the currents of ethnic movement that mark our time.

But what of the Brazilian people itself? The influences that tend to make it vary from its original type are counterworked by the steady immigration from Portugal, and from Spain also, for though any sort of Spaniard (except a Gallego) differs materially from a Portuguese, the two races differ much less from one another than either does from any other European stock. The Brazilian is primarily a Portuguese in the outlines of his mind and character. He has, however, been modified by intermixture with two other races. The first of these is the native Indian. The settlers both in São Paulo and along the northeastern coast, while they killed most of the Indian men either in fight or by working them to death as slaves, intermarried freely with Indian women. The offspring were called Mamelucos, an Eastern term which it is odd to find here, and which is now beginning to pass out of use. In the south this mixed race as well as the pure Indian race has been now absorbed into the rest of the population.[98] You would as soon expect to see a Pawnee in Philadelphia as an Indian in Santos. In the north the half-breed is generally called a _Caboclo_, a name originally given to the tame native Indian, as opposed to the wild _Indio bravo_; and in that region, a large part of the agricultural population is of this mixed stock.

The second modifying influence is that of the imported Africans. When the first slave ships disgorged their cargoes on the Atlantic coast, the aborigines of those districts had already been either killed off or merged in the Portuguese population, so that the mingling of Indian and negro blood which is supposed to produce an especially undesirable class of citizens was comparatively small. The intermarriage of blacks and whites has, however, gone on apace, and the negroes constitute a large, the mulattoes and quadroons a still larger, percentage of the population. Some observers hold that the coloured people, taken all together, equal or outnumber the whites. The intermixture continues, for here, as in Portuguese East Africa, no sentiment of race repulsion opposes it.[99] Any figures that might be given would be quite conjectural; for the line between the mixed black and white and the white cannot be drawn with any approach to accuracy. Even in the United States, where conditions permit more careful discrimination, no one can tell what is the percentage of mulattoes to the total coloured population, nor how many quadroons and octoroons there are to be found among those classed as whites, for many people who have some negro blood succeed in concealing its presence, while others are classed as coloured who in Europe would pass as white. Much more difficult is it to tell in Brazil who is to be deemed a person of colour.

How far the differences between the Brazilian and the Portuguese of to-day are due to racial admixture, and how far to the conditions of colonial life and a new physical environment, is a matter on which one might speculate for ever and come no nearer to a conclusion. The descendants of Englishmen who were living in Massachusetts and Virginia in 1840 before immigration from Continental Europe had begun to affect the English stock shewed already marked differences from the Englishmen of old England, and it is impossible to tell how far the changes that have passed on the people of the United States since then are due to the influx of new immigrants from Europe, how far to other causes. The Brazilian is still more of a Portuguese than he is of any other type. His ideas and tastes, his ways of life, his alternations of listlessness and activity, his kindly good nature, his susceptibility to emotions and to a rhetoric that can rouse emotion, belong to the country whence he came.

Brazil was the latest country in the American continent to become a republic. This befell in 1888. In 1807, when the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte entered Portugal, the then reigning king, John, of the house of Braganza, crossed the Atlantic and reigned at Rio till the expulsion of the French enabled him to resume his European throne. In 1822 the people had become discontented under Portuguese misgovernment. Republican ideas, stimulated by the destruction of Spanish power that was proceeding on the Pacific coasts, were in the air, and the Regent, Dom Pedro, son of King John, proclaimed the independence of Brazil which was, after some fighting, conceded by the mother country in 1825. His action probably saved monarchical institutions, and when he abdicated in 1831, disgusted with the difficulties that surrounded him, and with the unpopularity to which his own faults had exposed him, he was succeeded by his son, who ruled as the Emperor Pedro the Second. This amiable and enlightened prince, a lover of natural science as well as of art and letters, devoted himself chiefly to European travel and to the economic and educational improvement of his country, interfering very little with politics. A military conspiracy and the resentment of the planters at the sudden abolition of slavery brought about the revolution of 1888, in which a republic was proclaimed and the Emperor shipped off to Europe. In 1891 a congress met and enacted a federal constitution modelled on that of the United States. The immense size of the country and its want of homogeneity suggested a federal system, the basis for which already existed in the legislative assemblies of the provinces. Since then Brazil has had its full share of armed risings and civil wars.

At first the states were allowed the full exercise of the large functions which the Constitution allotted to them, including the raising of revenue by duties on exports and the maintenance of a police force which in some states was undistinguishable from an army. Presently attempts were made to draw the reins tighter, and these attempts have continued till now. The national government has at its disposal the important field of financial and tariff legislation, the control of army and navy, and the opportunities of helping needy or slothful states by grants of money or by the execution of public works. Through the use of these powers it has latterly endeavoured to exert over the states a greater control than some of them seem willing to accept. Nor is this the only difficulty. While some of the states, and especially the southern, have an intelligent and energetic population, others remain far behind, their citizens too ignorant and lazy, or too unstable and emotional, to be fit for self-government. Universal suffrage in districts where the majority of the voters are illiterate persons of colour suggests, if it does not justify, extra-legal methods of handling elections. One illegality breeds another, and there is perpetuated a distrust of authority and a resort to violence. As one of the most recent and brilliant of European travelers[100] observes, in a passage which conveys his admiration for the attractive qualities he finds in the Brazilians, "The Constitution enjoys a chiefly theoretic authority.... There is a lack of balance between the states which have already a highly perfected civilization and the districts which in theory are on a footing of equality, but whose black or Indian population can only permit of a nominal democracy stained by those irresponsible outbursts which characterize primitive humanity." That the authority of a constitution should be "theoretic rather than practical" must be expected where "a democracy is nominal"; for if institutions the working of which requires intelligence and public spirit are forced on Indians and negroes, their failure is inevitable.

In the Brazilian politics of to-day there are many factions, but no organized parties nor any definite principles or policies advocated by any group or groups of men. Federal issues are crossed and warped by state issues, state issues confused by federal issues, and both sets of issues turn rather on persons than on general doctrines or specific practical proposals. One source of dissension is, however, absent,--that struggle of the church and clericalism against the principles of religious equality which has distracted the Spanish-American republics. In Brazil the separation of church and state is complete, and though the diplomatic corps enjoys the presence of a papal Nuncio as one of its members, this adherence to tradition has no present political significance. Here, moreover, as in Argentina and Uruguay, the church and religion seem to have little influence upon the thought or the conduct of laymen. The absence or the fluidity of parties makes the executive stronger than the legislature both in national and state politics. There are many men of talent, especially oratorical talent, and many men of force, but not enough who shew constructive power and the grasp of mind needed to handle the enormous economic problems which a country so vast, so rich, and so various presents.

Among the economic issues of to-day may be reckoned that of protection, as against free trade. Brazilian policy is at present highly protectionist, and does not hesitate, when some powerful interest asks for further help, to double or more than double whatever protective duty it finds existing. The chief social questions are those relating to the extension of education and the enactment of better labour laws for the benefit of children and the security of workpeople. The chief constitutional question is the relations of the national and the state governments. European critics complain that upon none of these does any legislative group seem to put forward any definite and consistent policy. Yet such critics must be reminded that the country has been a republic only since 1891, and free from the taint of slavery only since 1888, and that her peace has been since those years frequently disturbed. It is too soon to be despondent.

Brazilian society seems to a passing observer to be in a state of transition, and may not for some time to come succeed in reconciling the contrasts between the old and the new, and between theory and practice, which it now displays. The old system was aristocratic not only because a number of respected families surrounding the imperial court enjoyed a pre-eminence of rank, but also because a newer class of rich men, chiefly landowners, had grown up. The aristocracy of rank is now almost gone, but the aristocracy of wealth remains and is in control of public affairs. In most parts of the country, it stands far above the labouring population, with little of a middle class between. Democratic principles have been proclaimed in the broadest terms, but thinking men see, and even unthinking men cannot but dimly feel, that no government, however good its intentions, can apply such principles in a country where seven-eighths of the people are ignorant, and half of them belong to backward races, unfit to exercise political rights. The conditions here noted may be thought to resemble those of the southern states in the North American Union. But there are two conspicuous differences. In Brazil no social "colour line" is sharply drawn, and the fusion of whites and blacks by intermarriage goes steadily on. In Brazil the pure white element, though it preponderates in the temperate districts of the south, is less than half of the whole nation, whereas in the United States it is eight-ninths. Yet in the southern United States nearly all the coloured population has been disfranchised and all declarations of democratic principles are understood to be subject to the now fundamental dogma that white supremacy must be absolutely assured.

Though the financial stability of Brazil is said to be hardly equal to that which Argentina was enjoying in 1910, and though the growth of national and individual wealth has been less rapid, there is a sense of abundance, and the upper classes live in an easy open-handed way. Slaveholding produces extravagant habits, especially among plantation owners, for what is the use of looking after the details of expenditure when one has thriftless labourers, whose carelessness infects all who are set over them? Like their Portuguese ancestors, the Brazilians are genial and hospitable, and they have the example and the excuse of a bounteous Nature around them. They seem less addicted to horse-racing and betting than are the Argentines and Chileans, but the gambling instinct finds plenty of opportunities in the fluctuations of exchange, as well as in the rapid changes of the produce markets.

The Brazilian is primarily a man of the country, not of the city. Rio, large as it is, is a less potent factor than Buenos Aires is in Argentina, or Santiago in Chile. The landowner loves his rural life, as did the Virginian planter in North America before the Civil War, and lives on the _fazenda_ in a sort of semi-feudal patriarchal way, often with grown-up sons and daughters around him. Estates (except in the extreme south) are extensive; near neighbours are few; families are often large; the plantation is a sort of little principality, and its owner with his fellow-proprietors is allowed, despite all democratic theory, to direct the politics of the district just as in England, eighty years ago, the county families used to control local affairs and guide the choice of representatives in Parliament.

I have observed that the Brazilian, though modified in some parts of the country by Indian or negro blood, is primarily a Portuguese. Now the Portuguese, a people attractive to those who live among them, have also had a striking history. They are a spirited people, an adventurous people, a poetical people. For more than a century, when they were exploring the oceans and founding a dominion in India, they played a great part in the world, and though they have never quite recovered the position, wonderful for so small a country, which they then held, and have produced no later poet equal to Camoens, men of practical force and men of intellectual brilliance have not been wanting. Neither are they wanting in Brazil. A love of polite letters is common among the upper classes, and the power of writing good verse is not rare. The language has retained those qualities which it shewed in the Lusiads, and the possession of that great poem has helped to maintain the taste and talent of the nation. There are admirable speakers, subtle and ingenious lawyers, astute politicians, administrators whose gifts are approved by such feats as the extinction of yellow fever in Rio and Santos. The late Baron do Rio Branco was a statesman who would have been remarkable in any country. Yet it is strange to find that, both here and in other parts of South America, men of undoubted talent are often beguiled by phrases, and seem to prefer words to facts. Between the national vanities and self-glorifying habits of different nations, there is not much to choose, but in countries like England and the United States, the rhetoric of after-dinner speeches is known clearly and consciously by the more capable among the speakers, and almost as distinctly by the bulk of the audience, to be mere rhetoric. They are aware of their national faults and weaknesses and do not really suppose themselves more gifted or more virtuous than other peoples.

In Latin America, where eloquence comes by nature and seems to become a part of thought itself, the case is different. Exuberant imagination takes its hopes or predictions for realities, and finds in the gilded clouds of fancy a foundation on which to build practical policies. Proud of what they call their Democratic Idealism, they assume as already existing in their fellow-countrymen the virtues which the citizens of a free country ought to possess. To keep these unrealized ideals floating before one's eyes may be better than to have no ideals at all, but for the purposes of actual politics, the result is the same either way, for that which is secured for the principles embodied in the laws is what M. Clémenceau happily calls "an authority chiefly theoretic." Let us, nevertheless, remember that although the habit of mistaking words for facts and aspirations for achievements aggravates the difficulties of working constitutional government in South American countries, these difficulties would in any case exist. They inhere in the conditions of the countries. It is vain to expect a constitution closely modelled on that of the United States to work smoothly in Brazil, just as it is impossible to expect the British Cabinet and Parliamentary system to work smoothly in those small nations which have recently been copying it, without an incessant and often ludicrous contrast between doctrine and practice. A nation is the child of its own past, as Cervantes says that a man is the child of his own works.

The Brazilians, who never forget that they were for a time, during the French invasion of Portugal, their own mother country, and head of the whole Portuguese people, cherish their national literary traditions with more warmth than do the Spaniards of the New World, and produce quite as much, in the way of poetry and _belles lettres_, as do the writers of Portugal. They have a quick susceptibility to ideas, like that of Frenchmen or Russians, but have not so far made any great contributions to science, either in the fields of physical enquiry or in those of economics, philology, or history. One can hardly be surprised that learning and the abstract side of natural science are undervalued in a country which has no university, nothing more than faculties for teaching the practical subjects of law, medicine, engineering, and agriculture. This deficiency of a taste for and interest in branches of knowledge not directly practical is the more noticeable, because the Brazilians do not strike one as a new people. Less here than in Argentina or Uruguay, has one the feeling that the nation is still in the first freshness of youth, eagerly setting itself to explore and furnish its home and to develop resources the possession of which it has just begun to realize. Business and sport are not such absorbing topics of conversation here as they are in Argentina; there is neither such a display of wealth nor such a passion for spending it. Yet one doubts whether this freedom from the preoccupations of industry and commerce, the latter mainly left to foreigners, enures to the benefit of public life. Most of those who follow politics seem absorbed in personal intrigues. Comparatively few shew themselves sensible of the tremendous problems which the nation has to face, with its scattered centres of population to draw together, its means of communication to extend, its public credit to sustain, its revenues to be scrupulously husbanded and applied to useful purposes, above all, its mass of negro and Indian population to be educated and civilized. Nowhere in the world is there a more urgent need for a wise constructive statesmanship.

It is hard to convey the impression with which one sees the shores of Brazil sink below the horizon after coasting along them for three thousand miles from the Uruguayan border to Pernambuco, and coming to know something of the boundless wealth which Nature has lavished upon man in this vast land. Not even the great North American republic has a territory at once so large and so productive. What will be its future? Is the people worthy of such an inheritance?

The first thought that rises in the mind of those who are possessed, as in this age we all more or less are, by the passion for the development of natural resources, is a feeling of regret that a West European race, powerful by its numbers and its skill, say the North American or German or English, has not, to use the familiar phrase, "got the thing in hand." The white part of the Brazilian nation--and it is only that part that need be considered--seems altogether too small for the tasks which the possession of this country imposes. "How men from the Mississippi would make things hum along the Amazon and the Paraná!" says the traveller from the United States. In thirty years, Brazil would have fifty millions of inhabitants. Steamers would ply upon the rivers, railways would thread the recesses of the forests, and this already vast dominion would almost inevitably be enlarged at the expense of weaker neighbours till it reached the foot of the Andes. Second or third thoughts suggest a doubt whether such a consummation is really in the interests of the world. May not territories be developed too quickly? Might it not have been better for the United States if their growth had been slower, if their public lands had not been so hastily disposed of, if in their eagerness to obtain the labour they needed they had not drawn in a multitude of ignorant immigrants from central and southern Europe? With so long a life in prospect as men of science grant to our planet, why should we seek to open all the mines and cut down all the forests and leave nothing in the exploitation of natural resources to succeeding generations? In the long run doubtless the lands, like the tools, will go to those who can use them. But it may be well to wait and see what new conditions another century brings about for the world; and the Latin-American peoples may within that time grow into something different from what they now appear to the critical eyes of Europe and North America.