The proof of arbitration puddings is in the eating. If the contributed ingredients do not emerge from well-kept cupboards, they are apt to sour whatever the label upon the cooked product. North of Panama the five Central American Republics agreed upon the erection of the Court of Cartago some years ago where all disputes between these neighbours should be thrashed out. Approval smiled upon the project from the United States, deeply interested in the peace of Central America; Mr. Carnegie spent a large number of dollars upon the building of a beautiful palace, and the first meetings were held with mutual kindliness and the applause of the world. The writer saw the Peace Palace in May, 1910. A few days previously an earthquake had visited the lovely mountain-surrounded valley of Cartago and nothing remained of a charming city but a heap of broken bricks and stone. The Peace Palace was a dust-heap, with twisted iron girders thrusting up against the serene sky from a medley of disaster. The sight was symbolical of the spiritual fate of the Court. At the shake of an earthquake of opinions it is in ruins.
When Nicaragua signed a treaty which Costa Rica, Salvador and Honduras declare an encroachment upon their territorial rights, recourse was had to the Court, re-erected in San José. The Court found for the three appellants—and Nicaragua refuses to accept its decision.
Let us hope the A. B. C. treaty is made of better material.
CHAPTER IV
TRANSPORTATION
I. River and Road
All the great railway systems of Brazil are pioneers, lines of penetration, driving into new country like hopeful explorers, and starting from one of the old centres of population on the sea-border. Within the last few years links have been completed between some of the cities where the lines originate, so that there are now long strips of line running parallel to the coast, and thus Central and South Brazil are benefited by this junction so far as it exists: but for several neighbour states the only means of communication with each other is the sea.
The Brazilian, descendant of the seafaring Portuguese, is a good waterman by instinct; thousands of little sailboats navigate the sea margin of Brazil, homebuilt, doing an active petty traffic in raw materials and fruit and merchandise. This traffic figures in Brazilian statistics as cabotagem. Passengers of a humble class are carried in addition to freight and there is also a fishing fleet attached to every sea town, so that the total of Brazilian vessels of this useful little class is large.
When the first hardy Portuguese and their descendants the mamelucos began, very early after the acquisition of a few strips of coast by the first captains, to penetrate the interior of the Land of the True Cross they used the rivers as highways. The settlers of São Paulo sailed their canoes on the Tieté, the “sacred river of São Paulo,” and it was a facile system of exploration because this river flows inland from the heights of the mountain barrier where it takes its rise; running north-west for four hundred miles it joins the great Paraná and thence continues southward, finding its way to the sea as part of the Rio de la Plata. The water systems of the east coast of South America are so enormous and so closely linked that it is possible, with but a few miles of portage, to traverse a river path all the way from Buenos Aires in the Argentine to Pará in North Brazil, a journey of some four thousand miles.
What the Tieté was to the pioneer Paulistas, the slave-hunting indomitable bandeirantes, the São Francisco was to the early colonists of Bahia, no less energetic, fearless and predatory. This noble river rises in the mountains of Minas Geraes, flowing north and eventually turning east towards the sea and forming the renowned Paulo Affonso Falls. When the mineral riches of the “General Mines” were discovered this river became a busy highway of travel, the Bahianos flocking to the regions of gold and precious stones in such numbers that the coast settlement was almost deserted.
It was during this period of gold fever that two of the very few good roads in Brazil were constructed: one ran between Rio de Janeiro and the first capital of Minas, the mining town of Ouro Preto (“Black Gold”), and along it caravans travelled weekly, bringing out ore and hides and taking in slaves and merchandise. Villages which sprang up along the line of this old highway still exist although the road itself has long fallen out of repair, and one, Juiz da Fora, has grown into an important well-built town, the centre of a mining and agricultural section now served by a railroad.