Brazil won her political independence a century ago, but economically she is more dependent on the outside world to-day than in 1822. In colonial times wheat was grown in all the half dozen southernmost states; now the big flour-mills of Rio are fed entirely from the Argentine. Brazil is so dependent on her imports, so self-insufficient, importing even the food products she could so easily grow or the most insignificant manufactured articles which she could readily produce, even though she almost wholly lacks coal deposits, that any disturbance of shipping throws her into a panic. Natives refuse to develop the resources of the country, out of indolence, lack of confidence or initiative, or because they prefer to squander their capital in fast living; yet when the “gringo” comes in and starts an industry the native either steps up with a title to the property showing that he inherited it direct from Adam, or, if he cannot take it away from the newcomer in that way, he taxes all the profits into his own pockets. The war forced Brazil to develop some of her own resources, to produce for herself many of the things she had always bought from abroad on credit; it compelled a considerable agricultural development and reduced the number of shopkeepers. Yet the country has already slumped back again into the old rut, and to-day, as before the war, her imports are nearly three times her exports and she is keeping her nose above water only by such stop-gaps as “refunding loans.”
By no means all Brazilians are pleased with the change from a monarchy to a republic. There is still a large and influential monarchical party, composed partly of the wealthier class and those who have always remained monarchists, partly of citizens who have become disgusted with the squabbling and graft of mulatto democracy, or who, on economic and political grounds, have grown dissatisfied with the republican régime and are convinced that the salvation of Brazil lies in the restoration of the old form of government. It is rare and usually a mistake, however, to back water in life, and the imitative faculty of the Brazilian makes it all the more unlikely that the former régime will return, unless a failure of democracy the world over makes it à la mode to bring about such a change.
There was, of course, corruption under the monarchy, but one need not inquire long in Rio to find a man ready to admit that the pall of mulatto politicians and bureaucrats which hangs over republican Brazil is more burdensome than ever were the grasping Portuguese courtiers of a century ago. At least the latter were limited in number and had occasionally a cavalheiro pride that sometimes resembled decency, and old Pedro II in particular, whose habit it was to keep a little personal note-book in which to jot down any lapse from honesty by a public official and to startle the man and his sponsors by bringing up the matter when it came time to reappoint him, is generally admitted to have ruled honestly and generously. But though the revolution of 1889 was in reality only another detail of the world-wide movement of the last century or two for bringing the ruling power down from a select and wealthy class to the uncultured masses, the triumphant proletariat does not appear to have greatly gained by the change. It is natural that the masses, like the foreign firms struggling to keep their heads above water in the form of innumerable taxes and the constant hampering of meddlesome officials, should begin to wonder whether Brazil is not mainly suffering from too much government, whether after all there is not something, perhaps, in the contention of anarchists that the best thing to do with over-corpulent governments is to take them out into the woods and shoot them through the head, as something more burdensome than useful.
One brilliant November day, perorates a Brazilian editor, a few hundred soldiers, enthused by a lucid patriot, destroyed the last American throne amid rousing cries of “Long live the Republic!” And from city to city, from hamlet to hamlet, these words rang through all Brazil. But now, barely a generation later, our armed force is mainly used to suppress personal liberties, the tendency being constantly toward dictatorships; education of the people is given much less attention than is demanded in a democracy, and we are overrun with a devouring swarm of politicians who have lost all idealism and who scarcely occupy themselves with anything but their personal interests, unscrupulously exploiting the public coffers.
The tendency toward dictatorships and the use of autocratic power to cover corruption and aid partizanship was visible even to the naked eye of the casual visitor. At the time I reached Brazil it was ruled over, ostensibly at least, by a nephew of Deodoro, the first president. Never, perhaps, had an administration been so cordially hated. “Dudú,” as the populace called the president, that being his eighteen-year-old wife’s pet name for him, was hated not only for himself but as a tool of the “odious gaucho” senator from Rio Grande do Sul, chief of the “P. R. C.” or Republican Conservative Party, and for some years the national boss of Brazil. When “Dudú” became president, the popular idol and fiery orator, Ruy Barbosa, only survivor of those who overthrew the monarchy, senator also and leader of the “P. R. L.” or Republican Liberal Party, had been the opposing candidate and, according at least to the Liberal newspapers, had been elected by an overwhelming popular vote. To be elected, however, does not always mean to take office in Latin-America, and the combined machinations of the “odious gaucho” and the army, in which “Dudú” was a field marshal, had reversed the verdict.
To hold his own against the popular clamor the Marshal had used methods taken from his own military profession, terminating finally in the declaration of a “state of siege” in the federal capital and that of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Nictheroy across the bay, and in the state of Ceará in the far north. On the surface this did not mean any noted suppression in the freedom of life. But if one happened to be a political opponent of the party in power, or a newspaper publisher, the sense of oppression was distinct. Under the sheltering wings of martial law no articles could be published until they had been submitted to a government censor, whose strictness made impossible the slightest adverse criticism of the powers that were. The suspension of the right of habeas corpus made it possible for “Dudú” to have scores of men thrown into dungeons out on the islands in Guanabara Bay merely because he or some of his followers did not like their political complexions. If the friends or families of the victims happened to find out what had become of them and got a writ of habeas corpus from the Supreme Court—according to the constitution a mandatory order of release—the government answered, “We are in a state of siege and the constitution is not working.” It would be hard to compute the full advantage of this little ruse to the ruling politicians, and the grafting that went on under cover of such protection may easily be imagined. When the decree was finally revoked, on the eve of a new administration, the suppressed news that flooded the papers was little less astounding than the swarms of political prisoners whom government launches brought back to the capital after months of imprisonment without any charge ever having been preferred against them.
Outwardly, of course, the forms of republican government were regularly carried out during all this period. Several times I dropped into the Monroe Palace to watch the House of Deputies meet, report no quorum, and adjourn. Once I went to the Senate, looking down upon that august body from a miserable little stuffy gallery resembling that of a cheap theater, where “any person decently dressed and not armed” had the constitutional right of admittance—unless the state of siege was invoked against him. Brazil’s most famous orator, late unsuccessful candidate for the presidency and the idol of the povo, or collarless masses, was whining through some childish jokes and puns on the alleged bad grammar of a bill destined to establish a new public holiday—as if Brazil did not already have enough of them, with her sixty-five days a year on which “commercial obligations do not mature.” It was evident, too, that the speaker had by no means gotten over his peevishness at not becoming president, for his speech was turgid with personalities and full of innuendos against “Dudú” and his fellow scoundrels. To see the leisurely air with which the senate enjoyed this pastime one might have supposed that no more serious duties faced the wearers of the toga.
Brazil is the only republic in South America that has trial by jury, hence her courts much more nearly resemble our own than they do those of Spanish-America. I attended a trial for murder one afternoon. Whatever other faults they may have, the courts of Brazil cannot be charged with unduly drawing out a trial, once it is begun. The judge called names from a panel of jurors, and as each man stepped forward the promotor, or prosecuting attorney, and the lawyer for the defense looked him up and down much as a tailor might a client and said “Recuso” (I refuse) or “Aceito” (I accept) without so much as speaking to the man or giving any reasons for their action. Evidently they were expected to guess his acceptability as a juror from his outward appearance. Those accepted took their seats, and in less than ten minutes the jury of seven was chosen and the trial had begun. There are juries of three sizes in Brazil, always with an odd number of members, and these do not need to reach a unanimous decision. A simple majority is decisive, though the larger the majority for conviction the heavier the penalty for the crime. Brazilian jurors get no pay, but they are fined if they fail to answer to their names when called.
A paper was passed among the seven jurors, each of whom wrote his name on it; but they took no oath, except that a clerk handed rapidly around among them a glass frame inside which was the sentence in large letters, “I promise to do my duty well and faithfully,” and on this each laid his right hand in silence. There are so many Positivists, free thinkers, fetish worshippers, Mohammedans, and other non-Christian sects in Brazil that the Bible and “so-help-me-God” oath would be even more out of place than in our own metropolis. Then the clerk of the court, who had neither eyes, voice, nor physique, but was a mere living skeleton humped over a pair of trebly-thick glasses, moaned for nearly an hour through the entire proceedings in a lower court the year before. The prisoner was a youthful Carioca, of white race and of the small shopkeeper or hawker type. Throughout the trial everyone addressed him in a gentle, kindly manner. He stated that he was twenty-one, but had only been twenty when arrested, which the promotor whispered to me was merely a ruse to get the benefit of being a minor. More than a year before he had shot a man of his own age in a downtown street, with premeditation, he naïvely admitted. According to the degree of murder proved he might be sentenced to twelve, twenty, or thirty years. There is no death penalty in Brazil, nor will the Brazilian government extradite a refugee who may be punished with more than thirty years’ imprisonment in the land from which he fled, unless that country agrees not to execute him or exceed that limit of punishment.
At length the promotor, who might easily have passed for an American lawyer in any of our courtrooms—until he opened his mouth—began an address in the thinnest, weakest, most worn-out voice imaginable—a common weakness among Brazilians and especially Cariocas, thanks perhaps to the climate—mumbling something about a “villainous premeditated crime” several times before he took his seat. During the next few hours he and the attorney for the defense, the latter in a wire cage across the room, quarreled back and forth, rather good-naturedly as far as outward appearances went, the judge very rarely interfering. It was hotter in the courtroom than in any possible place of punishment to which the accused might be sent, in this life or the next, and the entire throng, from the judge to the last negro loafer in the far corner, was constantly mopping its face. Not a woman was included in the gathering. After the first formalities were over the trial moved forward in almost uncanny American fashion, but with what in our own land would have seemed dizzy speed, for it was finished, with the verdict given and a sentence of six years imposed, by one o’clock the next morning.