It is to be recollected, moreover, that Brazil was a slave-owning land, with all in social life that that condition brings. Brazil was always a viceregal or monarchical country too. The fall of slavery in 1888 in part brought about the fall of the empire. Thus we have here everywhere—except in the southern States where recent immigration has brought other thoughts and customs—a rigid ruling class and caste, the privileges of an old society, such as does not exist in its neighbour of Argentina, for example, and which is foreign to the United States. Essentially an agricultural country, the land, moreover, belongs almost in its entirety to this ruling class.
Yet this condition of land-owning seclusion and reserve is not necessarily accepted as a final and irrevocable circumstance. "In the cities, and especially Rio, where social life is more developed and the national character tempered by contact with foreigners of all nationalities, the country magnates, ignorant of the ephemeral passage of the fashions, are the subject of ready ridicule. The country magnate's name is never pronounced without exciting merriment."[24]
This is a curious circumstance, and shows how custom differs in varying lands. In England, for example, the "country magnate" is generally a personage upholding all that is best in the community.
In Brazil there is a marked taste for country life, such as is scarcely yet developed in the Spanish American Republics. The elegant suburb does not necessarily attract the newly rich Brazilian, who loves to return to the fazenda, or country estate. It has been said, however, that this is less the result of delight in rural amenities than in the lust of power, for in the fazenda he is absolute master, with a power over his dependants stronger perhaps than in any other land.
PALM AVENUE, RIO DE JANEIRO.
Vol. II. To face p. 128.
Says the writer before quoted: "One of the qualities of the fazendeiro, one which I ought particularly to mention, is his extreme hospitality. In cordiality, delicacy and unfailing tact the hospitality of the Brazilian surpasses the imagination of the most hospitable of Europeans. The fazendeiro will make every possible effort to render his house agreeable to you; if you wish to take the air the best horse is at your service; or the safest, according to your talents as a horseman; the eldest son of the house will be your companion. After dinner the family will search among the gramophone discs for the latest music, the latest French songs. In the morning, upon your departure, your host, cutting short your thanks, will assure you of the gratitude he owes you for your visit. I have witnessed this scene a score of times, and each time—whether or not I owed such fortune to my French nationality—I felt that I was received as an old family friend.
"Such hospitality introduces one to the heart of many families. These families, too, are large; ten children are considered in no way extraordinary. Paternal authority is respected; the son, upon his entrance, kisses his father's hand. The wife is occupied with household cares; the husband's duty is to do the honours of the house. A stranger rarely sees Brazilian women, except as the guest of a Brazilian family. The women do not receive male callers; for them, or so it seems to me, mundane life ceases upon marriage.[25] They marry, I believe, very young, and are absolutely under the marital thumb. Outside their family their independent life is extremely limited. Admirable mothers, one knows them rather by their children than personally; they seem to cherish their domestic obscurity. The traveller who lands in the United States is immediately surrounded, questioned, advised and chaperoned by the American woman; there is nothing of this sort in Brazil.
"In addition to its social authority, this Brazilian aristocracy enjoys political power as well. Brazil has, it is true, established universal suffrage; but the sovereign people, before delegating its sovereignty to its representatives, confides to the ruling class the duty of supervising its electoral functions. The large landed proprietors choose the candidates, and their instructions are usually obeyed. They form the structure, the framework, of all party politics; they are its strength, its very life; it is they who govern and administer Brazil. And the administration is a great power in Brazil. Its province is very wide, and much is expected from it; whether the explanation is to be found in Latin atavism, or in the material conditions of life in this limitless territory, or in the fact that the individual is so powerless, and association so difficult. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the administration plays the same part in Brazil as in a European colony like Algeria, or as in India.
"Between the members of the all-powerful administration who during my travels granted me facilities, and their friends and relations, whose hospitality I enjoyed in their fazendas, I was perhaps in danger of becoming exclusively acquainted with the superior social class of which a portion directs the agricultural exploitation of the country while the remaining portion governs it. It would be a great mistake to suppose that this class, by itself, is Brazil. I have done my best to see beyond it, and to keep in mind the populace, which is both more numerous and more diversified; a confused mass of people upon whom, before all else, the whole future of Brazil depends. It lives under a benign climate; or at least under a climate which makes impossible what we call poverty in Europe. It is also a rural class; all the agricultural labour of the country is performed by its hands.
"In Southern Brazil the population has been renewed, all through the second half of the nineteenth century, by a stream of European immigration. In San Paolo the Italians have provided the long-established Paulista population with the labour necessary to the extensive production of coffee. They live on the plantations, in villages which are veritable cities of labourers. Nothing ties them to the soil; they do not seem to feel the appetite for land; very few buy real estate. They bind themselves only by yearly contracts; they readily change their employers after each harvest. No more nomadic people could be imagined; they change incessantly from fazenda to fazenda. Neither is there anything to retain them in the State of San Paolo; and not the least danger of the coffee crisis is the exodus which it is producing among the Italian colonists.
"Farther south, from Paraná to Rio Grande, immigration has resulted in the settlement of a very different population: a small peasant democracy, composed of Poles, Germans and Venetians. Being proprietors, they are firmly rooted to the soil. Just as the influx of Italians to San Paolo was not a spontaneous movement, but the work of the Paulista administration, so the German and Polish colonization of the south was evoked and subsidized by the Government of Brazil and the interested provinces. The newcomers were sent into regions hitherto unpopulated, where commercial communications could not be established and economic vitality was unknown. There they lived abandoned to themselves, without neighbours, without customers. The political and artificial origin of these colonies condemned them to isolation; isolation kept them faithful to their national customs and languages, which they would soon have abandoned under other circumstances."[26]
It is seen that the Brazilian has a strong leaning towards the exercise of the intellectual gifts of mankind. They are philosophical. The love of scientific and learned titles is strong. The doctorate—of laws, literature, medicine, science—has been a coveted distinction, indeed has been carried out to become a weakness or failing, a passion, as among all Latin American communities. At one time the ambition of every family capable of affording a superior education to its sons was that the boy should be a priest. That passed, and then he was to be a doctor, in one of the professions, and, moreover, to marry the daughter of a neighbour who was also a member of the learned class. Nearly all professions, it is to be recollected, in the Latin communities carry the doctorate with them. Nearly all statesmen are doctors—when they are not military men, and then the sword is apt to oust the diploma!