The Indian population was killed off or driven westward by the early settlers just as in the United States, so that it is now confined largely to the untracked and almost unpopulated forests of the Amazonian Basin, where perhaps a couple of a million aborigines may still exist.
To provide labor the Portuguese imported slaves from Africa, and then fused with them to produce the present-day pre-dominantly Negro population. The Portuguese here thus repeated the experience of the mother country. During the great years of Portuguese exploration and colonization in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, it has been estimated that a million Portuguese, mainly young men, went to the tropics, and for the most part never came back. Negroes were imported to take their places and to do the work of the country. Intermarriage of these Negroes with the old population left Portugal with a larger amount of Negro blood than any other European country, and greatly impaired its ability to contribute to the progress of civilization. Thus Portugal, which, when dominated by the Nordics, had set an extraordinary example of progress in many ways, now contributes relatively little to such progress and only the rebirth of a reasonable pride of race, and the application of a sound eugenics program will enable it to regain a position of leadership.
History has repeated itself in Brazil. The salvation of Brazil has been the arrival during the past century of European immigrants. Thousands of Germans poured into the Highlands of the Southern States where large regions have an almost Teutonic civilization at the present time. If a false interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine had not helped to interfere with this process, the results for South America might have been most beneficial.
But the main currents of immigration have been from Latin countries of the Old World. During the past century Brazil has received more than four million foreigners, of whom a million and a half were Italians, a million and a quarter Portuguese, and half a million Spanish. Thus more than three-fourths of the immigration has been from the Latin countries, and only about a quarter of a million from Germany and Austria. Since the World War this overwhelming migration from the Latin countries has slowed down. The German migration has, on the contrary, increased.
Brazil thus consists of two distinct areas: a relatively small, fertile, and healthful highland region in the south, where the main activities of the country are carried on largely under the influence of Mediterranean and Alpine immigrants; and a huge tropical area given over mainly to the Negro and Mulatto element and the Indians.
With a population of somewhere around 30,000,000 Brazil is not only the largest of the South American republics, but nearly as large as all the rest of them put together.
The future of Brazil depends largely on the nature of its immigration policy during the next generation or two and on the acceptance of a workable program of eugenics. Fortunately, no South American country has taken up such a policy with more interest than has this great republic. It still possesses an aristocracy which has maintained its racial purity, but this is probably too small a nucleus alone to regenerate the whole body politic.
Uruguay. Crossing the boundary from Brazil to Uruguay, one sees a new picture. Uruguay is almost entirely white. Indeed, this whole region of La Plata is one of the future dominant areas of the New World. It contains less Negro blood than does, relatively, the United States. Not only have Negroes been largely kept out, but the remnants of Indian tribes have become inconspicuous, as on the plains of the Mississippi Valley, where the Indians, mere nomads with a negligible culture, were driven back by the march of civilization. The striking parallel between the settlement of this region and that of the Western States of North America is often pointed out. Each was a sheep and cattle country, and then farmers took up land and developed it into a region of prosperity and great potentialities.
Uruguay has a cosmopolitan population almost wholly of European origin. Since the World War it has attracted not only a large part of the Spanish emigration but also large numbers of Italians, French, Germans, and others. The earlier immigration was largely of North Italians, mainly of Alpine blood with slight Nordic infusion. The total population of the country is now well over a million and a half.