CHAPTER X

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE CARIOCAS

The mixture of races gives Rio a society very different from that of Buenos Aires; its elements are more distinct, more complex, more primitive, much less European. Probably it is the African blood in his veins even more than his Latin ancestry which gives the _Carioca_ the emotionalism and the unexpected violences that often carry the individual or the population to excesses. The Brazilian character may be said to consist of Latin sensibility tinged with the African traits of superstition, fatalism, slovenliness, indiscipline, a certain happy-go-lucky cheerfulness, and an almost total lack of initiative; and to these the country owes most of its social and economic afflictions. It would be unreasonable to expect high things of it. The Portuguese were the cheapest race in western Europe, who won their place in history simply because they happen to live on the sea, and in the New World they mixed indiscriminately and in a purely animal way with the lowest form of humanity. The negro gave the Portuguese more imagination and a better adaptability to the tropics, perhaps an increase of cheerfulness; but with these came other qualities that do not make for improvement. Though he is often quick of intelligence, the _Brazileiro_ seldom shows continuity of effort or any other sturdiness of character; he is exceedingly susceptible to flattery and highly incensed at any mention of the faults which he himself sometimes recognizes. Weather appears to make a difference in man’s disposition, and the climate of Rio does not seem to breed what we call “crankiness.” Outwardly the _Carioca_ is usually good-humored and obliging, with less gruffness than the _Porteño_. Yet it is evidently not best for a man to be too greatly favored by nature; not only does it make him more indolent, but he seems on the whole to be less happy than in countries where the struggle for livelihood demands continuous and gruelling labor. Though individually and superficially they may be cheerful, the general air of a group of Brazilians is melancholy; as a character in a native novel of standing puts it, “they always seem to be discussing a funeral”—“or pornographic secrets,” adds another. There are more suicides per capita in Rio than in almost any other city in the world, and the finer the weather the more there seem to be reported each morning.

That the Brazilian is superficially courteous and in his way kindly there is no doubt; yet few traces of these qualities are to be found far beneath the surface. Even if he protests, he does so in soft language; _palavras grossieras_ under any provocation are considered exceedingly bad form in any but the lowest classes. Yet there is a distinct suggestion of decadence in this very softness of speech, and one comes to long occasionally for the vigor and manliness of the doubled fist. As fathers the Brazilians have few equals, in all truth, for almost no other race on earth shows more indiscriminate diligence in peopling it. But it is an excellency of quantity rather than of quality. They are good husbands in the Brazilian sense, so long as the woman is content to remain at home and raise children while her lord and master is cultivating similar gardens elsewhere. Divorces are practically unknown because the general sentiment of the country is still Catholic, for all the prevalence of other theologies and philosophies, because the Brazilians have something of the French point of view that the family is primarily a business partnership not to be broken up for such light reasons as lack of love or illicit intercourse, and because the country has no divorce law. Married sons often live with their parents because they are too proud or too lazy to go out and work—though there is a strong family affection among all Latin-Americans, in the long run the principal result of this particular custom is bad for the race. That the rod is spared, often to the detriment of the child, especially of the boys, there is no doubt; one finds proofs of it every hour of the day in Brazil. The average Brazilian is an excellent illustration of the fact that mankind must be disciplined, that even children cannot always be ruled by love any more than they can be fed only on sweets, and the sparing of the rod has had a very large and by no means always beneficial effect on the male adults.

Indeed, there is far too much liberty, too much laissez faire—or _deixa fazer_, to use the native tongue—in Brazil, as in Spanish and Portuguese life everywhere. No one in the country seems to recognize that liberty may easily slop over into license, that the liberty of one may go so far as to interfere with and even wholly annul that of many others. No doubt democratic liberty should allow street-hawkers to howl the night as well as the day hideous, or let a merry soul pound a tuneless piano until three in the morning. To the newly republicanized Brazilians a law forbidding the interspersing of brothels through every residential district would no doubt be “a despotic interference with our sacred constitutional rights as citizens and equals,” as it would be to compel the hundreds of boys selling newspapers in the streets of Rio to learn some trade or calling, that later they may find some better way to earn a living than by hawking or thieving. But it is the Brazilian, as it is generally the South American, way never to correct anyone or anything unless it is absolutely unavoidable, until a confirmed democrat comes to wonder whether the human race must always have kings or dictators to rule over it rather than ever learning to rule itself. Then one recalls that Brazil has been a democracy, even nominally, only since 1889, and it is not so strange that she has not yet come to see that there may be a seamy side even to liberty.

Though they are constantly asking for credit abroad, either collectively or as individuals, Brazilians trust one another even more rarely than do the average of Latin-Americans. Everywhere are little hints of lack of confidence. The cash system is widely prevalent, which does not merely mean paying the moment the work is done, but often before it will be undertaken, lest the client change his mind or prove insolvent. Thus one pays a dentist before he fills a tooth, the doctor before he will remove an appendix, and a photographer before he will undertake to print one’s films. The mail boxes of Rio are automatic, for instance; the mailman must shove a locked bag under them before they will disgorge their contents, and both box and bag lock themselves as he pulls the latter out again, so that he never sees a letter, much less gets his sticky fingers on it. A judge of Rio stated publicly, when a jury let off a palpable offender, that ninety-five per cent. of the fires in Brazil were set by the owners or their hired agents in order to get the insurance, but that “there are so many artists at this crime who exercise their profession with such admirable perfection that few are ever convicted, however convinced the judge and the public may be of their guilt.” His Honor was, of course, incensed at a specific failure to convict, and perhaps exaggerated somewhat, but there are evidences that he had not greatly overstepped the truth.

There is no more futile occupation on earth than trying to save money in Rio de Janeiro. It melts away like ice under an equatorial sun; in fact, money is of such slight value in Brazil that it seems foolish to try to keep it. Do so and you are more likely than not to find that it has grown even more worthless next morning in exchange for those things of real value which man needs; that you have saved the cash only to lose the credit. Prices were decidedly higher in Rio than in Buenos Aires, or even in Montevideo. A small glass of not very good beer cost 800 reis; a green cocoanut, that finest of tropical thirst-quenchers, growing in superabundance along all the 5000-mile coast-line of Brazil, was considered a bargain at the equivalent of a quarter—and a tip to the man who opened it. The smallest bottle of native mineral water of unquestionable antecedents cost at least a milreis, and thirst lurks on every corner in sun-blazing Rio. Ordinary water? Certainly; if one cares to flirt with the undertaker. Everything else was in proportion to this most necessary source of expense. In the _Seccos e Molhados_, “Drys and Wets,” as Brazil calls her grocery or provision shops, potatoes sold at six hundred and more reis a kilogram; butter imported from Denmark into this enormous country of splendid grazing lands was a luxury far beyond the reach of any but the affluent. With the smallest coin in circulation worth more than three cents, it was not to be expected that prices would be cut fine. Moreover, there is the tendency of _fazendo fita_. A Brazilian is ashamed to admit that his money is limited. He has the reputation, and prides himself on it, of being a “good spender,” but this is not so much due to his scorn for money as compared with the better things that money will buy as it is to the fear of being thought less well-off than his fellows. Commerce is largely carried on in public, and the purchaser is thereby forced to pay more for dread of being seen making a fuss. He is afraid to ask the price of a thing before buying, or to protest against exorbitance, lest the by-standers think money matters to him—the ally of the tip-seeker the world over. À la carte restaurants in Rio almost invariably leave the price-space on their menus blank and bring a check bearing only the sum total, knowing that the average client will not have the hardihood to ask for a bill of particulars. Even a Brazilian workman never protests against commercial exploitation, never refuses to take a thing after he has asked for it, but pays whatever is demanded as if it were a pleasure to do so.

Even in the matter of prices a community gets about what it demands, and this national lack of protest has lifted the cost of living in Brazilian cities into the realm of the absurd. Prices of almost anything are out of all reason; the people seem to have formed the habit of paying high to cover the heavy import and other duties and the grafting of their officials, and to expect everything to be marked up in the same proportion. It seems to be more or less a matter of pride with them that they pay more than other people. Third-class fare from Portugal to Rio was 55$000; the return trip on the same ships cost 105$000. The attitude of the entire population seems to be graft and let graft pay through the nose because you can make someone else do likewise. The average Brazilian does not look as hard at a 32-cent milreis as most Americans do at a dime, or Europeans at a copper. Rio is one place where Americans can realize how the European, earning his money with more difficulty than we do, feels when he first comes into contact with our prices.

Numerous proofs may be found that the Brazilian is rather an imitator than an initiator. He seldom has a worthwhile idea of his own, but he is supernaturally quick to grasp those of anyone else. A year or more before my arrival a Portuguese opened a _caldo de canna_ shop in aristocratic Rua Ouvidor. He set up a small cane-press, stood a bundle of choice sugarcanes at the door, laid in a supply of ice, and waited for customers. They soon came, for nowhere does a novelty take more quickly than in Rio. Picking out their own cane as they entered, the clients caused it to be run through the press, the juice straining down through chopped ice, with the result that for a _tostão_ they had a pleasant and refreshing drink. Within a fortnight of the establishment of this entirely new industry fifteen other persons, all Brazilians, had opened _caldo de canna_ shops in the three short blocks of that narrow, vehicle-less shopping street, buying out the former occupants at any price—with the inevitable result that within a month the entire clan, including the originator, were bankrupt. To-day, when the stroller is thirsty yet has no desire to consume alcohol, he can get a glass of iced cane-juice only in a few shops which make this a side-line of their regular business. This is one of hundreds of similar incidents in the commercial life of Rio, and suggestive in general of Brazilian business ethics.

A Brazilian proverb has it that “A cauda do demonio e de rendas” (the devil’s tail is made of lace). Whatever the scientific exactness of that assertion, there is no doubt that the _Brazileiro_ is early, often, and usually successfully tempted by what are sometimes vulgarly called “skirts.” The same may be said of all Latin-America, but in Brazil the undisguised prevalence of irregular polygamy probably reaches its zenith. Rigid, yet provocative, seclusion of the women, thanks to Moorish influence, the former teaching of the Jesuits, to the instinct for self-preservation of the women themselves, is perhaps as much the cause of this condition as the natural polygamous tendency of the males. Being an accepted convention of society that freedom of social intercourse between men and women is certain to lead to more intimate relations at the first opportunity, the women of the better class are inclosed within an impregnable wall of Oriental seclusion, and their contact with men is almost wholly confined to those of their own family circle. Even the French find Brazilian family life unreasonably circumspect. Under such conditions there can, of course, be little social or intellectual activity, little real human intercourse, and it is not surprising that the eager and romantic young men who find it impossible to meet girls of their own class without a cynical chaperon hanging constantly at their heels should fall easy prey to the darker skinned and more accessible members of the sex, or to the imported demimondaines who flourish in all the larger cities.

Naturally fecund, and of strong maternal instincts, the Brazilian woman unquestioningly accepts the tenet that her place is strictly in the home. Marriage does not bring her any appreciable increase in freedom over her closely chaperoned days of virginity. But while she is expected to conduct herself so circumspectly that not a breath of scandal shall ever sully the honor of her fidalgo lord and master, the husband loses none of his bachelor liberty. The average _Carioca_ can, and, above the laboring class at least, usually does, keep a mistress, and not only loses nothing of public esteem, but little of that of his own women. In fact, the politician, the man of big business, of wealth, or of social pretensions, is somewhat looked down upon if he does not maintain an extra household or two; failure to do so is a fit subject for jesting among his friends and acquaintances. The subsidized companions of this class are almost always European, usually French, and preferably blond; rarely are they native born, for the white and better class Brazilians guard their daughters too closely to make possible any irregular approach, and to take a “woman of color” would seem to the wealthy Brazilian like buying poor native perfume when he can get, and all his friends use, the best French product.

But it is not so much the existence of this state of affairs as the perfect frankness with which it is admitted and carried on that astounds the Anglo-Saxon stranger in Brazil. Even the French have never attained the openness and lack of hypocrisy in the sex relationship which has been reached by the Brazilian. Not merely does unattached youth sow its wild oats with perfect indifference to public knowledge; heads of old and respected families cultivate the same crop with intensive, experienced care, quite as openly. The Brazilian who would be ready to challenge to a duel the stranger who spoke to one of the women of his family often brings them to social events, to the races, to a patriotic celebration, and, after installing them in a place of vantage, goes to sit with his overdressed French mistress, as like as not within plain sight of his family, apparently without incurring any censure or even protest from his wife and children and certainly none from society.

The means of acquiring a mistress of proper antecedents are varied. The wealthy and traveled Brazilian brings her home with him from Paris, or entrusts the commission to his friends. There is no difficulty whatever about it, no inquisitive federal authorities, no inquiring protective societies, “not even duty to pay, though that is our chief import,” as a cynical editor put it. If neither of these means are available, and the postal service is incapable of bringing him a prize, the seeker after companionship may advertise in the public prints. Even the staid old _Jornal do Commercio_, modeled on and in many ways resembling the _London Times_, does not hesitate to run dozens of such “want ads” every day of the year:

A WELL-CONDUCTED GENTLEMAN

Educated and serious, but with few social relations in the city, wishes to meet a pretty and like-minded girl, in order to protect her secretly. Letters to this newspaper under the name “Xip.”

PROTECTION

A serious youth, married, independent, in the flower of his years, without children, wishes to make an arrangement with a girl or widow of good appearance who will accept a monthly pe

ADVANTAGEOUS OPPORTUNITY

A distinguished youth who is not ugly, who dresses well and has a permanent income, wishes to meet a pretty girl of poor family who is in need of protection, demanding merely that she be not more than twenty years old, that she be white, or at least light-gray (_parda_), in color, elegant, of good education, and _sympathica_. He guarantees a good standard of living, and it might be that in the future he would even marry her, a thing which he cannot do now because the laws of the country forbid it. It will be better to send photographs. Letters to João da Silveira at Poste Restante.

Nearly all advertisers emphasize their seriousness and demand it in return, and the word “protection” appears in almost every notice. Nor is the weaker sex backward in appealing for protectors:

PROTECTION

A girl of fine manners and bringing-up, aged 18, elegant, serious, and well educated, will accept the protection of a _cavalheiro_ of the same qualities, with wealth.

GIRL OF DISTINGUISHED APPEARANCE

needs the urgent assistance of a gentleman of position, distinction, and good resources, who will furnish a house for her and give her a monthly pension of 500$000. Letters to “Velda” in care of this newspaper.

Naturally those of less individual lack of morals do not overlook the opportunity of bringing themselves to notice in these columns, often expressing themselves in French rather than Portuguese, not for the sake of secrecy but because those who read French are more apt to belong to the wealthier and better-conducted class to which the imported aristocrats of the easy life appeal:

JEUNE PARISIENNE

arrivant d’Europe, chez Madame Margot, Rua D. José de Barros, n. 31.

MLLES. AIDA and CARMEN

advise their friends and comrades that they have removed from 97 Ypiranga street to 42 Maio, where they have established themselves. Telephone 4,406.

YOUNG FRENCH GIRL

18 years, fresh and gay, arriving from Reims, wishes to make the acquaintance of several gentlemen curious to talk over news of the war and Prussian behaviour. Letters to Mlle. H—— B—— in care of this newspaper.

In addition to all these more or less individual appeals, there is, of course, a plethora of “_mulheres da vida_”—“women of the life,” as they are called in Brazil, “who,” complains a lone pulchritudinous editorial voice, “are gradually invading all the arteries of the city.” This class has almost completely usurped the first half mile or more of dwellings along the Beira Mar, facing the bay and one of the most gorgeous views in the western hemisphere; yet the citizens of Rio think no more of protesting against this invasion than of striving to hinder the usurpers from drumming up trade from dusk until daylight by repeated trips along the first section of the “Botanical Garden Line.” I am not of those who believe implicitly in our American custom of playing ostrich and concealing our heads in the sand of Mrs. Grundy’s garden, but there is such a thing as overdoing frankness, of making temptation too accessible, of chloroforming public opinion out of its legitimate consciousness; and the ways of Rio and the average Brazilian city do not indicate that perfect candor is any improvement over our own secretive and hypocritical treatment of the same subject.

There are other and more amusing things to be found among the “want ads” of Rio newspapers. Beggars frequently run appeals for assistance:

POOR BLIND WOMAN

Francisca de Barros of Ceará, blind in both eyes, crippled in one hand, ill, and without resources, begs an alms of all good charitable souls, whom the good God will recompense. It may be sent in care of this paper.

BY THE WOUNDS OF CHRIST!

A lady who is ill and unable to work, with a medical certificate to prove it, a tubercular daughter, and without resources to sustain herself, suffering from the greatest necessities, comes to beg of charitable persons, by the Sacred Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, an alms for her sustenance, which God will recompense to all. Rua Senhor de Mattosinhos 43.

If all such beggars were actually ailing or incapacitated, it would be less surprising to find respectable newspapers running their advertisements. But it has often been amply demonstrated that many of them are the most brazen frauds. The editors of the same sheets which run these alms-seeking petitions admit editorially that “Mendicants of the aristocratic variety, who live well, eat well, and except at work dress well, may be found in any street of the city going from door to door, imperiously clapping their hands to call the attention of the residents.” At a fixed stop of all “Botanical Garden” cars a young woman of slight African taint and rumpled garments, with several children quite evidently borrowed for the occasion and frequently changed, canvassed every car, always with profitable results; yet at her home in the outskirts of Ipanema she dressed and lived like an heiress. There are deserving cases, or at least unfortunate ones, among Rio’s indigent army, but the church and Iberian custom have trained the _Cariocas_ to accept begging as natural, inevitable, and in no way reprehensible, and the medieval conception of charity, that the bestowing of largess on able-bodied loafers is to lay up favor in heaven, causes the giver to lose little thought on the worthiness of the case so long as the heavenly bookkeepers duly record his action.

The announcements of “Spiritualist Somnambulists,” who can “diagnose the future in time to permit applicants to change theirs before it is too late,” are legion. One man ran permanently this long-winded assertion:

CURE BY GOD

The undersigned offers to cure anyone of any ailment, cases that are despaired of preferred, by the laying on of hands, from eight in the morning to eight at night, by a special power given him by the Almighty, and by prayer to the invisible divine beings, the only requirement being that those who present themselves shall not be under the care of nor taking any medicine prescribed by, a physician, and that they have faith in the brilliant future of the divinely gifted undersigned.

Apparently he had no connection with the disciples of a similar panacea in our own country.

The more customary “want ads” of our own land, of persons seeking or sought for work, are given a curious twist in Brazil for lack of the succinct word “wanted,” which is replaced by _aluga_, really meaning “rents.” Thus: “Aluga-se uma menina—there rents itself a girl to do housework.”

Not the least curious of the contents of Rio newspapers are the illicit gambling advertisements. The state and federal lotteries are legal and may advertise as freely as the _cambistas_ who sell the tickets on the streets may howl day and night hideous with spurious promises of easy fortune, but these official games reduce competition as much as possible by legal enactments. Some twenty years ago the director of the Rio Zoo began putting up daily on the gate a picture of one of the animals inside, in order to attract visitors to the establishment. A bright individual recognized this as a brilliant opportunity to start a new gambling scheme. He took the director into his confidence, gradually drew crowds to the gate, and the illicit lottery that resulted flourishes to this day. It is called “O Bicho,” a word meaning literally “worm,” but which in Brazilian slang applies to all animals, reptiles, birds, and even vermin. Twenty-five different “bichos” are used in the underground lottery of Rio, and every day the newspapers carry the notice: “O Bicho—For to-morrow ...,” followed merely by tiny pictures of, perhaps, a snake, a rabbit, and a bear. The game is against the law, yet even the chief of police plays it, and newspapers cannot be enjoined from publishing the announcements, because no jury has ever been officially convinced that they are not merely enigmas for amusing children.

Two points of superiority Brazilian newspapers have over our own—they are not besmeared with the alleged “funny pages” of paint-pot cartoonists, nor do they “feature” divorce cases or any other form of marital misdemeanor, possibly because domestic infidelity is too commonplace to be “news.” On the other hand, they pander to that ultra-morbid streak in the Brazilian temperament which African blood seems to give it. Large front-page photographs of the victims of suicide or revolting crimes are the joy of _Carioca_ editors and readers, the “action of the crime” being posed for in all its gruesome details by models if pictures of the real characters are not available.

Speaking of crimes, there is a good police system in Rio, with several excellent departments and a detective bureau that makes use of the latest European science in the detection and capture of criminals. The prevalence of warnings against “batadores de carteiras,” or pickpockets, is a thermometer of the criminal element. This class is so numerous as to have a thieves’ slang of its own, called “caló” by those who use it, or, in the pamphlet vocabulary published by the police department, “_Giria dos Gatunos Cariocas_.” Many of the expressions in this criminal dialect of Rio would be Greek even to the man whose native tongue is Portuguese, though a few of them are localisms in more general use. Not a few of the words in the pamphlet grew familiar to my ear before I left Brazil. I learned that “Noah’s Ark” is a pawnshop; to “perform an autopsy” is to go through the pockets of a person fallen in the street; “to strike thirty-one” is to die; a “bond” (in the legitimate language a street-car) is a group of persons; to travel “by Italian bond” is to go on foot; a policeman is a “button” or a “cloud”; a mounted policeman is “a four-footed cardinal,” and “convent” means the Penitentiary. To “give charity” is to kill a person while robbing him; to “disinfect the zone” is to disappear from a given haunt; a patrol-wagon is either a “merry widow” or a “chicken coop”; a “nose” is a person (“He came with three noses”), the real nose being a “smoke-box.” A “soft” is a mattress; a lawyer, a “talking-machine”; “synagogue” stands for head, and “Big Papa” means the President of Brazil. Naturally money has many pseudonyms among the class that is always seeking to lay illegal hands upon it, among them “wind,” “light,” and “arame” (literally, brass or wire). The expression “falta arame” (brass is lacking) is widespread. A ragged youth frequently sidles up to the passer-by, rubbing his stomach and asserting, “Falta arame pa’ matar o bicho” (literally, “money is lacking to kill the worm”); what he really means to say is that he needs money to stop the gnawings of hunger.

It is a common human trait for those somewhat loose in their morals to be doubly stern in outward manners. The Brazilian, even of the more haughty class, is inclined to be lax at home, though in public outward appearance is everything to him. One showy suit of clothes for street and social wear seems to leave the average _Carioca_ willing to spend the rest of his life in his underclothes. It is no unusual experience when calling upon a man to be asked on some pretext to wait until he has put on his outer garments; while among the women the wrapper habit extends from the highest to the lowest ranks of society. The tropical heat partly accounts for this sartorial laxity, but in many ways it typifies the national habit of mind. At home the Brazilian, particularly of the fair sex, can sit for hours in that utterly blank-minded idleness of the Oriental; only when they come out to stroll the Avenida or the Ouvidor late in the afternoon do most of the women put on real clothes and dress their hair. Among the humbler class, the negroes and poor whites of the _morros_ and the narrow valleys between them, or of the one-story tenement houses known as _cortiços_, there is but slight sense of privacy and much of the family dishabillé and domestic activities are freely exhibited to the public gaze.

Outside his home circle, however, the Brazilian is more than exacting in such matters. In public a man must not only be fully dressed, but is somewhat looked down upon if he indulges in any of those lighter garbs of the “Palm Beach” variety that seem so in keeping with the Brazilian climate. Especially if he is a politician, a business man, a member of high society, or has a desire to attain to any of these categories, must he wear a heavy dark suit and under no circumstances leave off his waistcoat. To be without a coat is a criminal offense in many cities; in the smallest village that has any personal pride, even among many people living in the wilderness of the _sertão_, it is atrociously bad form. The man riding with a negro functionary in the far interior of the country must cling to his coat if he would not make his companion an enemy for life. One of our recent presidents still has a low rating in certain parts of interior Brazil because he entered a mud village of unwashed, illiterate, largely illegitimate mulattoes in his shirt-sleeves. When several of his party landed in Bahia they were met by a courteous policeman and told either to go back to the ship and get their coats or buy new ones in the shops. Yet in that very city hundreds of men habitually wear no shirt or other garment under an often wide-open coat. More remarkable still, while a man in his shirt-sleeves is denied admittance to some of the most sorry establishments, it is entirely comme il faut for him to come down to the early morning meal in the best hotels in his pajamas. The negro captain of a little steamer far up in Matto Grosso sent word to an American prospector of my acquaintance, who appeared on deck in the latest model of soft shirt, with belt and cravat, that he must not leave his cabin without his coat, yet the majority of the native passengers were lounging about in carelessly buttoned pajamas and kimonos, sockless slippers, the women with their hair down their backs. During my first days in the country a Brazilian aviator made the first non-stop flight from São Paulo to Rio, breaking all South American records for speed and distance. The newspapers shouted with glee at this splendid feat by a “son of the country,” yet one and all commented in caustic editorials on his shocking bad taste in leaving his coat behind and landing at Rio in his shirt sleeves. The street-cars of Rio and every other city of size have at least two classes. The fares are not greatly different, but unless a man is wearing coat, collar, necktie, real shoes—not _tamancos_, or any other form of sandal—_and socks_, he must ride second-class. Nor may he carry with him in the higher form of public conveyance anything larger than a portfolio.

Rio gives the impression of being overcrowded. With emancipation the ex-slaves flocked into town in quest of an easier livelihood than that on the plantations, and immigration streams clog here. The swarms of beggars, criminals, prostitutes, hawkers, adult newsboys, two drivers for each automobile, the crowds frequently seen struggling for jobs, to say nothing of the plethora of government functionaries, suggest an oversupply of human beings. More than once in strolling along the wharves I came upon a hundred men fighting for work where twenty were needed to coal or stevedore a ship, often standing up to their knees in sea-water along the Caes Pharoux battling for a seat in the tender waiting to carry the score to their labors. Nor were they “bums” either, but muscular, honest workmen, nearly all of the Caucasian race; while just across the way indolent mulatto government employees lolled in the shade of the customhouse as if they had settled down for life and need never again exert themselves. A “pull” with the foreman who chooses the workmen for a given job is usually essential to being taken on, and he naturally expects his “rake-off.” One day a riot broke out among these wharf laborers; two “fiscals” of the stevedores’ union were killed by members who claimed they had been discriminated against; and the newspapers treated the matter as if it were a frequent occurrence.

Not the least picturesque of the many strange types of Rio are her street vendors, who pass all day long in almost constant procession. The Brazilian woman is not fond of shopping, or at least of going to market. She has the Moorish custom of keeping to the house; she feels most comfortable in négligé, and public appearance requires elaborate full dress; nor does the blazing sunshine invite to unnecessary exertion. This tendency to stay home, and the excess of men over jobs, has given rise to innumerable street-hawkers, who go from door to door, selling both the necessities and the luxuries of life. In the early morning, often before sunrise in the winter months of July or August, one is often awakened by a cry of “_Verdura! Verdureiro!_” and looks out to see the “vegetable-man” jogging along under a load of green-stuff that would break an ordinary man’s back. Then barely has one dropped off again before there comes a bellow of “_Vassoura! Vassoureiro! ’asooooreeeeiro!_” from the brush-and-broom man, who marches by all but lost under an arsenal of potential cleanliness, with a side-line of baskets and woven baby-chairs to complete his concealment. Meanwhile from down the street comes the increasing wail of “_’llinha! Gallinha Gorda!_ (Chicken! Fat Chicken!),” and past the iron grilled window shuffles a barefoot man with two large baskets at the ends of a pole over his shoulder, or on the back of a horse or mule, offering housewives their day’s roast or broiler. In Rio people always buy their chickens on the hoof and avoid the risks of cold storage. Then comes the “_Peixe! Camarão!_” man, whom we might call the fish-and-shrimp seller, pausing here and there to cut up a fish on one of the round board covers of his two flat baskets. He disappears earlier in the day than the others, however, for seafood exposed after nine or ten in the morning to the unshaded heat of Rio is likely to make a greater appeal to the purchaser’s olfactory than to his optic nerves.

Not all hawkers cry their wares. Some have, instead, their own special noise-makers. The cake-and-sweetmeat man, with his large glass-sided showcase on top of his head, strides along, blowing a whistle that looks like half a dozen cartridge shells of varying size stuck together, or like the conventional Pan’s Pipes, and the shrilly musical sound these emit causes every child within hearing to canvass its pockets, parents, or friends for a _tostão_. When a customer appears the cake-man squats from under his load, depositing it on the pair of crossed sicks in the shape of a saw-horse that he carries under one arm, and the bargaining begins. The tin-man goes by, carrying a great stack of pots and pans and calling attention to his existence by shaking a frying-pan fitted with a clapper. The scissors-grinder stops every few yards to bring every nerve to the top of the teeth by running an iron hoop over his emery-wheel, in the hope of attracting trade. The man who sells plants and flowers comes along, incessantly and regularly beating with a light stick the side of the blooming box on his head. The seller of _azucarillas_, the ephemeral sweets of Spain, is as familiar a figure as in the Iberian peninsula; the “ice cream” merchant marches about with what looks like an oxygen or gas cylinder on his back, playing a steel triangle to call attention to his little gambling wheel, guaranteed to teach children to gamble early in life by taking a chance on his effervescent delicacies. A few vendors have a limited district, with grouped customers, especially the bread-man who, with his great basket on his head and the stool to hold it under one arm, has only to station himself in the _pateo_, or courtyard, of a _cortiço_ to be surrounded by a clamoring throng, children snatching the long loaves faster than their parents can buy them and rushing excitedly into their one- or two-room homes with the bread hugged tightly against their soiled chests. But the majority tramp all day long, some treading the hot cobbles in bare feet, some wearing the noiseless _alpargatas_ of Spain and Portugal, many scraping along the cement pavements in wooden _tamancos_, invading every nook and corner of the city and punctuating the whole day long with their cries and signals. With rare exceptions they are Portuguese or Spanish—it would be beneath the dignity of a native Brazilian to carry things about in the hot sunshine; but the clothing trade is almost entirely in the hands of “Turks,” as South America calls the Syrian, who peddles his wares in every corner of the great republic in which the human race sprouts. In Rio this perambulating clothing-shop announces himself by slapping together two lath-like sticks, making a noise similar to, yet entirely distinct from, that of the plant-and-flowers man. From daylight until dark he plods, to wander back to his noisome little den when night settles down without a slap left in his arm. During his first year or two he carries his goods on his back, and looks at a distance like a walking department store. But by the second year he has usually scrimped enough to buy an elaborately decorated chest of drawers and to hire a youthful or newly-arrived fellow-countryman to carry it, while he wanders along with nothing to do but slap his sticks together and engage in the long-winded bargaining which is unavoidable in any financial dealing with the Brazilian housewives peeping out through their window gratings. But the “Turk” is a more clever bargainer than the best of them, and within three or four years he is almost certain to have advanced to the ownership of a little pushcart and by the end of five years it is a strange mishap if he has not set up a shop, become a local nabob, and driven native competitors entirely out of his district.

This does not by any means exhaust the list of vendors who add their noises to the general hubbub of Rio. No one who has spent a week there could forget the _cambistas_, the lottery-ticket sellers of all ages and both sexes who invade the inmost privacy with their raucous howls, or the never-ending cries of newsboys, some of whom spread their wares on the mosaic sidewalks of the Avenida Central, while others race in and out of the narrow streets on either side of it. Nor should one overlook, even if it were possible, the creaking of enormous carts, their two wheels twelve feet or more in diameter, with which an immense log or a granite boulder is transported through the streets to the accompaniment of hoarse-voiced cursing of the mule-driver in charge.

If one grows weary of wandering Rio’s sun-bathed and colorful avenues and _ruas_, there are indoor places worth seeing. The National Library, for instance, is a magnificent building, at least in its material and inanimate aspects. The human element is somewhat less perfect. The president himself could not take a book out of the library; everyone knows he would be sure to keep it or hock it. Being scribbled by hand, the card catalogue is by no means easily legible; it is set so near the floor that the reader of American height all but breaks his back in reaching it, and there are so many authors of the same name that to hunt up a given one is a serious task. Then there is a splendid Brazilian system, evidently imported from Portugal or some still less respectable region, under which directories, biographies, and the like are always arranged in alphabetical order according to the _first_ name.

Let us suppose that the only Brazilian opera of any importance, “O Guaraní,” is soon to be given in the Municipal Theater, and that you wish to know something about the man who wrote it. The announcement mentions that his name is Gomes. You enter the sumptuous hall of the library, hat in hand, wait for the negro attendant and his white bosom companion to stop gossiping and give you a hat check, then you climb to the next floor and, doubled up like a jackknife, claw through the catalogue until you get the serial number of a biographical dictionary in many volumes, containing the life story of the “Most Illustrious Brazilians”—of whom there seem to be millions. Having filled out a “bulletin” explaining which book you wish to consult, giving author, title, the date, the “number of the set,” the “indication of the catalogue,” your own name, address, and other detailed personal information back to the fourth generation, you enter the sumptuous reading-room. Or, more exactly, you wait patiently at the door thereof until you are handed a _senha_, a slip of paper which gives you the right to enter and—if you can still produce it—to exit. That in hand, you choose a seat and write the number of it on the “bulletin,” hand this to the gossiping tar-brushed attendant, and go and sit down. The attendant finishes his gossip, looks at the slip, and carefully puts it under a book on his desk. By and by he ends another gossip, picks up the book, is astonished to find a slip under it, reads it carefully, and puts it under another book on another part of the desk. Meanwhile you cannot go to look up the books you might want to read at some future date, because you cannot leave the reading-room without giving up your senha with the attendant’s “o.k.” on it. You cannot bring along a book of your own to read meantime, because any Brazilian knows that you would bring some worthless pamphlet and manage to exchange it for a valuable library volume. There is nothing to do but sleep, or study the scattering of fellow-sufferers in the reading-room, where you are sure to be struck by the absence of women. An old maid did enter the library one day while I was there, but she was stared at so steadily that neither she nor the men in the room did any reading.

Finally, if this happens to be your lucky day, it may occur to the attendant to put your book-slip into the automatic tube at his elbow and send it off to the stacks. When the employees at that end of the tube get through discussing politics or the lottery and send the book back by automatic carrier, along with the “bulletin” signed by the man who “executed the request,” a negro attendant wanders over to your seat with it. Then you quickly discover that though the huge volume is devoted to everything from “Gl” to “Gy” there is not a single Gomes in it. This rather surprises you, since Gomes is as widespread in Brazil as Smith in the United States or Cohen in New York, and at least one of that name must have been illustrious at least in the Brazilian sense. But by this time it is four-thirty, and the library takes a recess at five—that is, everyone is ejected and the doors locked by that hour—so you give it up.

Next day you discover quite by accident, your eyes having fallen upon a frieze at the “Theatro Phenix,” that the musician’s name was _Carlos_ Gomes. As soon as the library opens—at ten in theory and about ten-forty in fact—you hasten back and go through the same tape-wound misery again to get the fourth volume of illustrious Brazilians, and wallow for hours through pages upon pages of “Carlos” without finding a single one of them answering to the name of Gomes. Days afterward, when the opera has come and gone, a _Carioca_ acquaintance casually remarks that the man who wrote it was _Antonio_ Carlos Gomes, but that he never used the first name! Back to the library to flounder once more in the ubiquitous red tape, and late that evening you grasp the “A” volume of illustrious Brazilians and finally at nine-thirty—Eureka! “Antonio Carlos Gomes, Paulista, musician, born in Campinas, and ...” and just then you are “put into the eye of the street,” for the library closes at ten and no Brazilian official is so absurd as to let the closing hour catch him still in the act of closing. Wandering homeward or out along the Avenida you muse on how convenient it would be if strangers in our Congressional Library had to look up the 28th president of the United States under the name “Thomas.”

Though at least two-thirds of the people of Brazil do not read or write—more than half because they cannot and the rest because they have no occasion or no desire to do so—Brazilians of the small “upper” class are more cultured in the narrow, bookish sense of the word than the average American of similar rating. “Everyone” knows everyone else in this restricted little circle in Rio, and they retain many of the old-fashioned opinions and manners of the days when the capital was called “the court” and was overrun by the locust swarm of courtiers from the old world. Embracing is still the knightly form of greeting between males in this higher _Fluminense_ society, where it is the custom for a man to kiss a lady’s hand—or glove—upon being presented, and in which young men often give their fathers similar marks of recognition in returning from or departing on a journey of any length. Many of this caste are still monarchists, at least at heart, though they usually find it to their advantage outwardly to acquiesce in, or even to show enthusiasm for, the new form of government.

I attended several “social functions” in Rio—always from a discreet distance, “_a mocidade_,” which is the same foppish muster of youthful “intellectuals” that is known as “_la juventud_” in Spanish-America or “la jeunesse dorée” in France, was trying to establish a “Little Theater” for the exclusive use of the élite, “with a view to rehabilitating our histrionic art, so debilitated to-day.” Now and then they perpetrated amateur plays which fortunately were not exposed to the scorn of the general public. One afternoon they arranged a “literary program” for the purpose of raising a monument to Arthur Azevedo, Brazilian dramatist and writer of clever but salacious short stories. It began at four in the handsome new “Theatro Phenix,” usually sacred to the “movies,” and actually got started shortly before five. Being primarily a social event, there were only four of us up in the gallery. On the stage below, two young men in ultra-correct afternoon dress, creased to the minute, displayed themselves to a select female audience in recitations from Arthur’s stories (edited) and plays, with extravagant and unnatural gestures. A self-confident lady who was just recovering from being young, moaned through half a mile of something in French—what this had to do with the glory of Arthur I did not catch, high up under the eaves, unless it was meant to show how well the élite of Rio have copied Parisian manners—and finally there was given a one-act play by the same monumental author, which might have been very funny had the acoustics of the house permitted us gallery slaves to catch more than the reflected mirth of the audience. Through it all a dozen of “our greatest literary geniuses” pranced about the stage before the admiring audience on one excuse or another, while two photographers toiled assiduously taking flashlights from all possible angles of the correctly creased afternoon trousers.

Still another day found me at a soirée musicale in the old “Theatro Lyrico,” back of its newer and more aristocratic municipal successor. This rather breathless old barn was the principal theater of Brazil under the monarchy, and still retains unchanged the imperial loge, a whole furnished apartment in Louis Philippe style. There was only a slight negro strain in the audience, but the orchestra of fifty pieces ran the whole gamut of human complexions. The recital by a pianist still in her teens easily made up for all the tedium I had undergone in attending other “social functions” in the Brazilian capital. As Senhorita Guiomar Novaes has since won high praise in our own land and in Europe, I am pleased to find in my notes on that day’s performance the prophecy, “Here at least is one Brazilian who will prove of world caliber.”

One of the points that distinguish Brazil from Spanish-America is its divergencies of religion. Here, too, the church got in on the ground floor. As early as 1590 the Benedictine monks founded a monastery on the summit of the Morro São Bento; soon afterward the Capucines established themselves on top of the Morro do Castello, and in general the churchmen showed great predilection for the high places of Rio, perhaps to get that much farther away from the wicked world. For centuries Rome ruled Brazil with her customary profitable sternness. Scarcely two centuries ago Protestants attempting to spread their propaganda in the country were roughly treated, and priests publicly burned in the _praças_ of Bahia and other cities the Bibles and tracts offered by American and other colporteurs. To this day and in the cathedral of Rio itself one may find evidences of medieval fanaticism—women of the poorer class making the circuit of the church on their knees, or kissing everything in sight, including floor, walls, and all the wounds of a life-size plaster-of-Paris crucifix under a thin shroud. A few of the hilltops, too, are still sacred to the cloistered life, but the church has lost much of its monopoly and is much less militant and omnipresent than on the West Coast. It is the custom of Brazilian men, even in street-cars or trains going full speed, to raise their hats, often in unison, when they pass a funeral or a cemetery; but the same reverence in passing a church door is by no means so general, and is usually confined to the part-negro portion of the population. Indeed, it is almost unusual to meet a priest, monk, or nun in the streets of Rio, and politically the church is almost an outcast.

Yet the capital pulsates with many religions. The transplanted faiths of the many races that make up the modern _Carioca_ are so numerous that, if we may believe a native writer, “every street has a different temple and every man a different belief.” There are several sects of African fetish worshippers, Methodists, Maronites, Baptists, Physiolatras, Presbyterians, Satanists or worshippers of the devil, Congregationalists, “Drinkers of Blood,” “Brothers,” Adventists, Jews, followers of the “black mass,” Swedenborg disciples of the New Jerusalem, exorcists, literary pagans, _sacerdotistas_ of the future, descendants of the Queen of Sheba, worshipers of the sea, and defenders of many other exotic dogmas, not to mention a large building back of the Avenida Central occupied by the “A.C.M.” (_Associação Christão de Moços_), in other words, the Y.M.C.A. As far away as the Uruguayan border I had heard an unfrocked priest lecture on one of the newer faiths of Brazil and was astonished to hear the loud and general applause whenever he made a thrust at the fanaticism or immorality of South American priesthood. Up in the Andes he would have proceeded along that tack in public for about two minutes before having a pressing engagement with the undertaker. In Santa Maria my astonishment was as great when I passed an imposing Protestant stone church on one of the principal streets and heard the minister—speaking his Portuguese with a thick German accent—openly preaching his particular doctrine to a large Brazilian congregation. Freedom of worship reigned indeed; in that morning’s newspaper there was a complaint from a town not far away that it could get no mail from Friday until Monday, because its postmaster was an “_Adventista do 7º Dia_!”

The cult of the sea is found chiefly among the colonies of fishermen scattered about Guanabara Bay. Some of these will under no circumstances leave the sea or its beaches. Their children swim at two and go fishing with the adults at ten. The moon enters considerably into their fanaticism, and their veneration for and fear of the “Mother of Water” is inferior only to their dread of the police, before whom, or in the presence of non-conformists, they pretend to be strict Catholics. One-fifth of all the spiritualist propaganda in the world is published in Brazil, according to a native who made an investigation of the question. This superstition is so widespread that men high in government and business circles have been known to refuse to take a street car which the rabble has left empty because “it is full of bad spirits.” Synagogues are numerous in Rio, for there is a large Jewish colony, running through all the gamut of society as well as of commerce, and widely varying in orthodoxy and religious rites. There are rich Jews in business along the Avenida who spend their winters “playing the markets” and their summers up in Petropolis. In the less showy streets live swarms of poor Armenian, Moroccan, Russian, Austrian, Turkish, French, English, German, Arabian, and even African Jews, all engaged in their customary occupation of buying and selling something or other. About the Praça Tiradentes and in its radiating _ruas_ seethe Jewish women of the streets and their male companions and exploiters, the _caftenes_, from all the ghettoes of Europe.

There are said to be more than eighty thousand Syrians in Brazil, of whom by no means all wander through the streets slapping together a pair of sticks. Down about the Rua da Alfandega and the lower point of the city “Turks” own important business houses; in the colony are clever craftsmen and even a few doctors, politicians, and journalists. More than half the Brazilian Syrians are Maronite Christians from the Lebanon; the rest are orthodox Mohammedans of somewhat lower social strata, who earn their primitive livelihood as _carregadores_, carriers of mankind’s material burdens, as shop-servants, and as petty peddlers. Though many of these “Turks” find the difference in language a great barrier to their native loquacity as bargainers, their qualities are near enough those of the Brazilians to cause them to fit quickly into their environment.

Mohammedanism is not confined to the Syrians in the religious medley that characterizes the capital of Brazil. Thousands of former slaves are more or less followers of the Prophet of Medina, though barely aware of it themselves. The negroes shipped out to Brazil in the olden days were from many little nations scattered through the far interior of Africa; hence their religions were as varied as their tongues. But just as the general language of that continent, the _cubá_, suffices for simple conversation throughout Africa or among the blacks of Rio, so the negro religions practiced in the Brazilian capital may be roughly divided into two general classes. The _alufás_ are more or less Mohammedan, with a background of African superstitions; the _orixás_ are a still more primitive sect upon which the influence of the prophet was never brought. Outwardly, of course, nearly all the blacks are good Catholics, but their saints and gods have been crossed with those of the church until it is a wise negro who knows an African from a Catholic deity. Then, too, the unadulterated fetish worship imported with the slaves still persists, and Obeah and voodoo practices sometimes give evidence of their existence. According to a reputable native writer there are in the everyday crowd that surges through the Avenida, medicine men, magicians, voodoo chiefs, _feiticeiros_ who will agree to mix a love philter or to bring misfortune upon an enemy by mumbling an incantation over a concoction of rat tails, cat’s head, finger and toe nails, and the innocent passer-by would never dream what absurd African rites are taking place behind more than one commonplace façade. There are “holy men” living in the very heart of Rio surrounded by a swarm of servant-women with whom they live in polygamy as in the wilds of the black continent, yet many of whom dress for public appearance quite like their Christian fellow-countrymen, play “bicho,” and die leaving to their heirs many contos of reis. Negro Brazilians who know French and even English, who have been educated abroad and have in some cases become senators, or presidents of states, “men to whom I lift my hat and with whom I shake hands,” in the words of the native investigator, still cling secretly to the old African superstitions. There are rich Brazilians who send their sons to Africa to study the religions of their forefathers, and traffic between Rio, Bahia and Pernambuco and several West African ports is heavy.

Most conspicuous of the non-Catholic sects of Brazil, thanks less to their numbers than to their political power and high intelligence, are the Positivists. Auguste Comte, a Parisian mathematician who spent part of his life in an insane asylum and the rest in penning voluminous explanations of a “positive philosophy” which even the mathematical mind seems to find difficulty in comprehending, suffered the customary fate of the prophet in his own country. “Paris,” according to his Brazilian disciples, “was not prepared for so advanced a doctrine.” In most other countries he won only scattered followers—George Eliot and her lover were among them—but in Brazil his doctrine not only survives but seems likely to increase its standing before it goes the way of other ’isms. Positivist propaganda began in Brazil during our Civil War, but was some time in getting a footing. Finally the “Littréists” Miguel Lemos and Teixeira Mendes became converts, the former becoming the head of the sect in Brazil and the latter—now his successor—his chief lieutenant. But it was Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães who raised Positivism to a political force, first teaching it more or less secretly in the Military School and combining with it the demand for a republican form of government until, in 1889, the sect joined with the army in overthrowing the monarchy. The Brazilian Positivists credit themselves with establishing the republic, separating the church from the state, reforming the teaching and criminal codes, and many lesser accomplishments.

Strictly speaking Positivism does not pretend to be a religion but merely a “philosophy of life.” Yet it bears many reminders of the Puritanical and reforming sects so numerous in our own land. Positivists advocated the abolition of slaves; they are opposed to the lottery; they demanded an easier form of civil marriage in the hope of cutting down illegitimate unions—in other words, they combine religion and morals, which are so completely divorced in the ruling church of South America. They are popularly reputed to be opposed to the use of coffee or tobacco and to take that “blue law” view of life into which our Puritan virus shows frequent tendencies to degenerate, but this they claim to be mere ridicule or counter-propaganda of their enemies.

I arranged by a “want ad” to exchange English for Portuguese lessons with a well-educated native of Rio, who turned out to be a government functionary and a Positivist. Possibly the most striking thing about him was his almost Protestant moral code, contrasted with his genuinely Brazilian tolerance in practice. He saw nothing reprehensible in cheating the public out of more than half the time and effort which they paid him to deliver; he asserted that he and Brazilians in general believed their wives certain to betray them if given the opportunity, and refused to credit my statement that the average American husband does not consider eternal vigilance the price of his domestic honor. Yet often in the same breath he pronounced some Positivist precept that would fit snugly into the code of our sternest sects.

I accompanied my student-tutor one Sunday morning to the principal weekly service at the Positivist _Apostulado_, or “Temple of Humanity” in the Rua Benjamin Constant. It is an imposing building in the style of a Greek temple, said to be copied from the Panthéon of Paris. On the façade is the Positivist motto in large bronze letters:

O Amor por Principio E a Ordem por Baze O Progresso por Fim.

Inside, the almost luxurious edifice, “sea-green in color, as if one were bathed in hope, and with the high ceiling essential to lofty thoughts,” still somewhat resembles a Catholic church. Around the walls of the nave are fourteen “chapels” containing as many busts, each representing one of the “saints” of Positivism and an abstract idea. They are Moses—Initial Theocracy; Homer—Ancient Poetry; Aristotle—Ancient Philosophy; Archimedes—Science; Cæsar—Military Civilization; St. Paul—Catholicism; Charlemagne—Feudal Civilization; Guttenberg—Modern Invention; Dante—Modern Epic; Shakespeare—Drama; Descartes—Modern Philosophy; Frederick the Great—Modern Politics; Bichat—Modern Science, and lastly, Eloïse, or Feminine Sanctification. It would be easy, of course, to quarrel with the Positivists on several of their choices as world leaders, were they of a quarrelsome disposition. These personages also give their names to the fourteen months of the Positivist calendar, which begins with the French Revolution. Among the decorations are the “flags of the five nations”—Brazil, China, Turkey, Chile and Haiti! Only two South American countries are represented because “these are unfortunately the only ones in which the Positivist faith as yet counts fervid adepts.” China wins place as the “most vast nation of the Orient;” Turkey as the “most cultured people of the East” (!), and Haiti is admitted “in honor of the greatest of negroes, Toussaint L’Ouverture,” whose portrait is the only non-Caucasian face among the many about the walls. There are of men of all ages and nations, whom the Positivists consider of world importance,—Camões, Lavoisier, Cervantes, St. Gall, Cromwell, and many others, the only American among them being an atrocious chromo print of Washington. Higher still, in decorative letters and the simplified spelling of Positivist Portuguese, are scattered the words,—Space, Industry, Architecture, Painting, Earth, Music, Poetry, Politics, Proletariat, Priesthood, Monotheism, Astrology, Family, Humanity, Patriotism, Fetishism, Polytheism, Woman, Morality, Sociology, Biology, Soil, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Logic. Above what, for want of a better name, might be called the altar or the main chapel, runs the inscription:

“Vergine Madre Amen te plus quam me nec me nisi propter te.”

No Catholic church was ever more crowded with images than the “Temple of Humanity.” In fact, the more closely one looked the more did certain forms and beliefs of Catholicism peer through the outward modern mantle of Positivism, as if either the founder or his disciples had not been able to divest themselves entirely of their inherited faith. The most Catholic _beata_ in South America could scarcely have shown greater reverence for the sacred pictures, graven images, and “relics of the faith” with which the temple was crowded. Above the “pulpit” was a bust of Comte on a column, its upper portion covered with green cloth embroidered with white silk “by one of our young female proselytes.” Portraits of Comte and his mistress, Clothilde de Vaux—both painted in China and depicting them with almond eyes—hung in the main chapel, where there were also paintings of each of them on the death bed. Pictures of the Bastille, of Dante and Beatrice, of the Sistine Madonna surmounted by a cross, “because she was an ardent Catholic,” were among the many which a roving eye gradually discovered. Most astonishing of all was the likeness of “Humanity,” a virgin figure with the features of Clothilde de Vaux, dressed as a bride, with a green band at her waist and holding in her arms a pretty boy who grasped a handful of daisies and pansies, the Positivist flowers, and gazed up into the woman’s face, the whole patently inspired by the Catholic madonnas which it closely resembled. In the background were the Panthéon and Père Lachaise cemetery, where Comte is buried.

Like all religions, the new creed already tended to harden into set forms, the failure to carry out which was evidently a more grievous sin than the disobeying of the general principles of the order. Their veneration of pictures of the dead was almost medieval; the railing of the tomb of Clothilde had been brought from Paris and as much fuss was made over it as ever devout peasants did over the shin-bone of a saint; “first sacraments” were administered in the temple; “the faithful” were urged to visit the “sacred places of Positivism;” they had a substitute for crossing oneself, “a sacred formula of our faith in which it is customary for all believers to stand up out of respect for Our Master.” There was even a hint of Mohammedanism, a mark in the cement floor of the porch under the pillars indicating the direction of Paris—the thought of Paris as a sacred city was a trifle startling—“toward which all Positivistic Temples should have their principal axes.”

In the basement of the temple was a printing plant from which issues a constant stream of Positivist pamphlets, books, biographies of Benjamin Constant, and similar forms of propaganda. Here, too, is the original flag of republican Brazil, painted in crude colors on pasteboard by order of Teixeira Mendes. The story of its designing is not without interest. Having been assigned the task by the leaders of the revolution, the present head of the Positivists of Brazil determined to keep the general form of the existing national banner. João VI had given the kingdom a coat-of-arms set in a golden sphere on a blue background. Mendes changed the blue to green, basic color of the Positivist banner and meant also to symbolize the tropical vegetation of the land, as the yellow sphere does the gold in its soil. Then he called in an astronomer, and taking the twenty principal stars of the southern firmament at noon of November 15, 1889, to represent the twenty states of Brazil, he placed nineteen below the equator-like band across the golden sphere, and one above it to indicate that part of the country north of the equator, or of the Amazon. The sphere was inclined on the horizon according to the latitude of Rio, the tobacco and coffee on the old royal coat-of-arms were removed, as “mere commercial things not fit for a place on the national banner,” and along the equatorial band was run a line from the Positivist motto.

The women of the congregation sat on a platform in front of the “altar” rail, the men down in the body of the “church.” Women should love Positivism, according to its disciples, for it dignifies, venerates, and raises them to their due elevation. The “3rd of Guttenberg” on which the temple was dedicated is also the “Feast of Woman” day, on which Positivists celebrate the “transformation of the cult of the Catholic Virgin into the cult of Humanity.” Teixeira Mendes, long the head of the sect in Brazil, sat in the “pulpit” beneath the bust of Comte and “preached,” if his un-sermon-like remarks uttered in a weak, thin voice barely heard through an immense white mustache may be so called. His diminutive form was covered by a dark robe, with a green cord about the neck and embroidered with the Positivist flowers. The “sermon” emphasized the Positivist conception of the “virgin mother” as combining the two great qualities of the feminine type,—purity and tenderness. Like many other religions, this modern creed clings to the legend of a virgin mother. As the gathering marched out to the tune of the “Marseillaise,” I asked my cicerone to explain the frequent recurrence of the “virgin mother” motif in temple and sermon. He replied that it was the Positivist belief that humanity would gradually be educated up to the point where “woman will be able to reproduce alone, without the necessity of ‘sin’ with man!”