It is surprising that, in a country so rich in mineral wealth, there should exist no special Mining School, and that everything connected with the working of the mines should be under the immediate supervision of the Minister of Public Works, without the assistance of a special office for the superintendence of mining operations. Nothing would more speedily increase the value of the mineral lands of the whole country than a regular geological survey, which has not yet been begun.[[107]]
The Imperial Library at Rio de Janeiro should not be omitted from an enumeration of its educational establishments. It is very fairly supplied with books in all departments of learning, and is conducted in a very liberal spirit, suffering no limitation from religious or political prejudice. In fact, tolerance and benevolence are common characteristics of the institutions of learning in Brazil. The Imperial Museum of Natural History in the Capital is antiquated; to any one acquainted with Museums which are living and progressive, it is evident that the collections it contains have been allowed to remain for years in their present condition, without additions or improvements. The mounted animals, mammalia and birds, are faded; and the fishes, with the exception of a few beautifully stuffed specimens from the Amazons, give no idea of the variety to be found in the Brazilian waters. A better collection might be made any morning in the fish-market. The Museum contains some very fine fossil remains from the valley of the San Francisco and from Ceará, but no attempt has as yet been made to arrange them.
The only learned society deserving a special mention is the Historical and Geographical Institute. Its Transactions are regularly published, and form already a series of many volumes, full of valuable documents, chiefly relative to the history of South America. The meetings are held in the Imperial Palace of Rio, and are habitually presided over by his Majesty the Emperor.
I cannot close what I have to say of instruction in Brazil without adding that, in a country where only half the nation is educated, there can be no complete intellectual progress. Where the difference of education makes an intelligent sympathy between men and women almost impossible, so that their relation is necessarily limited to that of the domestic affections, never raised except in some very exceptional cases to that of cultivated companionship, the development of the people as a whole must remain imperfect and partial. I believe, however, that, especially in this direction, a rapid reform may be expected. I have heard so many intelligent Brazilians lament the want of suitable instruction for women in their schools, that I think the standard of education for girls will steadily be raised. Remembering the antecedents of the Brazilians, their inherited notions as to what is becoming in the privacy and restraint of a woman’s life, we are not justified, however false these ideas may seem to us, in considering the present generation as responsible for them; they are also too deeply rooted to be changed in a day.
On several occasions I have alluded in terms of praise to the working of the institutions of Brazil. Nothing can be more liberal than the Constitution of the land; every guaranty is therein secured to the freest assertion of all the natural rights of man. And yet there are some features in the habits of the people, probably the results of an antiquated social condition, which impede the progress of the nation. It should not be forgotten that the white population of Brazil is chiefly descended from the Portuguese, and that of all Europe Portugal is the country which at the time of the discovery and settlement of Brazil, had least been affected by the growth of our modern civilization. Indeed, the great migrations which convulsed Europe in the Middle Ages, and the Reformation, upon which the new social order chiefly rests, have scarcely affected Portugal; so that Roman ways, Roman architecture, and a degenerate Latin were still flourishing when her Transatlantic colonies were founded; and, as in all colonies, the conditions of the mother country were but slowly modified. No wonder, therefore, that the older structures of Rio de Janeiro should recall, in the most surprising manner, the architecture of ancient Rome, as disclosed by the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and that the social condition of Brazil should remind us of the habits of a people among whom women played so subordinate a part. It seems to me that even now the administration of the provinces, as in the Roman civilization, is calculated to enforce the law, rather than to develop the material resources of the country. I have been surprised to find young lawyers almost invariably at the head of the administration of the provinces, where practical men, conversant with the interests of agriculture, commerce, and the mechanical arts, would, in my opinion, have been better adapted to the pressing duty of stimulating all pursuits connected with the active life of a young and aspiring nation.
The exaggerated appreciation of political employment prevailing everywhere is a misfortune. It throws into the shade all other occupations, and loads the government with a crowd of paid officials who uselessly encumber the public service and are a drain upon the public funds. Every man who has received an education seeks a political career, as at once the most aristocratic and the easiest way of gaining a livelihood. It is but recently that gentlemen have begun to engage in mercantile pursuits.
It seems to me, that, though the character and habits of the Brazilians are not those of an agricultural people, Brazil is an essentially agricultural country, and some occurrences in her recent history confirm this view. Brazil had formerly a great variety of agricultural products, but now the number of plants under culture is rather limited. Agricultural operations are at present centred upon coffee, cotton, sugar, tobacco, mandioca, some cereals, beans, and cocoa. Owing to her climate and her geographical position, the vegetable zones of Brazil are not so marked as those of other countries. It would not be difficult to divide the whole Empire, with reference to its productions, into three great regions. The first of these, stretching from the borders of Guiana to Bahia, along the great rivers, is more especially characterized by the wild products of the forest: Indian-rubber, cocoa, vanilla, sarsaparilla, and an infinite variety of gums, resins, barks, and textile fibres still unknown to commerce in Europe and the United States. To these Brazil might add spices, the monopoly of which belongs now to the Sunda Islands. The second region, extending from Bahia to Santa Catarina, is that of coffee. The third, from Santa Catarina to Rio Grande, and in the interior of the high plateaux, is that of the grains; and, in connection with their culture, the raising of cattle. Rice, which is easily grown throughout Brazil, and cotton, which yields magnificent crops in all the provinces, bind together these three zones, sugar and tobacco following in their train. An important step with reference to agriculture, which has scarcely been thought of as yet, is the cultivation of the heights of the Organ Mountains, as well as those of the Serra do Mar and the Serra do Mantiqueira. On these high lands might be raised all the products characteristic of the warmer portions of the temperate zones, and Rio de Janeiro would receive daily from the mountains in her immediate neighborhood all those vegetables and garden fruits which she now procures in small quantities and at high prices from the provinces bordering on the La Plata. The slopes of these Serras might also be covered with plantations of cascarilla, and, as the production of quinine must sooner or later be greatly diminished by the devastation of the Cinchora-trees on the upper Amazonian tributaries, it is the more important that their culture should be introduced upon the largest scale on the heights above Rio. The attempts of Mr. Glaziou in that direction deserve every encouragement.
The sugar-cane has long been the chief object of cultivation in Brazil, and the production of sugar is still considerable; but within several years the planting of sugar-cane has given way in many districts to that of coffee. I have taken pains to ascertain the facts respecting the culture of coffee during the last fifty years; the immense development of this branch of industry and the rapidity of the movement, especially in a country where labor is so scarce, is among the most striking economical phenomena of our century. Thanks to their perseverance and to the favorable conditions presented by the constitution of their soil, the Brazilians have obtained a sort of monopoly of coffee. More than half the coffee consumed in the world is of Brazilian growth. And yet the coffee of Brazil has little reputation, and is even greatly underrated. Why is this? Simply because a great deal of the best produce of Brazilian plantations is sold under the name of Java or Mocha, or as the coffee of Martinique or Bourbon. Martinique produces only six hundred sacks of coffee annually; Guadaloupe, whose coffee is sold under the name of the neighboring island, yields six thousand sacks, not enough to provide the market of Rio de Janeiro for twenty-four hours, and the island of Bourbon hardly more. A great part of the coffee which is bought under these names, or under that of Java coffee, is Brazilian, while the so-called Mocha coffee is often nothing but the small round beans of the Brazilian plant found at the summits of the branches and very carefully selected. If the fazendeiros, like the Java planters, sold their crops under a special mark, the great purchasers would learn with what merchandise they have to deal, and the agriculture of Brazil would be greatly benefited. But there intervenes between the fazendeiro and the exporter a class of merchants—half bankers, half brokers—known as commissarios, who, by mixing different harvests, lower the standard of the crop, thus relieving the producer of all responsibility and depriving the product of its true characteristics.
If the provinces adjacent to Rio de Janeiro offer naturally the most favorable soil for the culture of coffee, it must not be forgotten that coffee is planted with advantage in the shade of the Amazonian forest, and even yields two annual crops wherever pains are taken to plant it. In the province of Ceará, where the coffee is of a superior quality, it is not planted on the plains, or in the low grounds, or in the shadow of the forest, as in the valley of the Amazons, but on the slopes of the hills and on the mountain heights, to an elevation of from fifteen hundred to two thousand feet and more above the level of the sea, in the Serras of Aratanha and Baturité and in the Serra Grande. The channels opened to these products should augment their importance, and should give rise to numerous establishments in the valley of the Amazons.
The increased exportation of cotton from Brazil during the last few years is a still more marked feature in its industrial history than the large coffee crops. When, towards the close of the last century, cotton began to assume in England an importance which has ever since been increasing, Brazil naturally became one of the great providers of the English market. But it soon lost this advantage, because our Southern States acquired, with an extraordinary rapidity, an almost complete monopoly of this product. Favored by exceptional circumstances, North America succeeded, about the year 1846, in furnishing cotton at such low rates that all competition became impossible, and the culture of cotton was almost abandoned in other countries. Brazil, however, persisted. Her annual production showed a slow but steady progress; even the cessation of the slave-trade did not interrupt this advance. Indeed, it is a striking fact, which may well be mentioned in this connection, that the statistics of Brazilian agriculture have been steadily rising ever since the abolition of the slave-trade. When the Rebellion broke out in our Southern States, Brazil thus found herself prepared to give a considerable impulse to the cultivation of a product as much sought for as bread in time of famine. Spite of the want of population, which is an obstacle to all industrial enterprises in Brazil, she found labor, and, what was still more important, free labor, for this object. It seemed as if it were a point of national honor to show what could be done. Provinces like San Paolo, where a foot of ground had never before been planted with cotton; others, as for instance Alagoas, Parahyba do Norte, Ceará, where the cultivation of cotton had been abandoned, produced extraordinary quantities,—so large, indeed, that two lines of steamers were established, and have prospered, between Liverpool and the above-mentioned ports, chiefly for the transport of this crop. It will be remembered that during the whole of this time Brazil was in want of laborers, that she received no foreign capital for this undertaking, that she imported neither Coolies nor Chinese, that almost immediately after the movement began her war with Paraguay broke out, and yet her production of cotton has quadrupled and quintupled. This fact assumed such importance in the estimate of industrial interests at the late Paris Exposition, that an exceptional prize was awarded to Brazil, on the ground that, in supplying the European market so largely with this indispensable staple, she had rendered it independent of the former monopoly of the United States. It is true that the same prize was also granted to Algeria and to Egypt. But the Brazilian planter had not, like the colonists of Africa, the stimulus of a large subsidy from government; he could not, like the Viceroy of Egypt, seize 80,000 men in a single district and transport them to his plantations; neither did he, like the Egyptian fellah, abandon all other branches of agriculture in order to devote himself exclusively to that of cotton. In fact, the general interests of agriculture prospered in Brazil, in the midst of this new enterprise.