[45] Of the sixty-four manufactories and workshops, twenty-eight belong to foreigners; and there is not a single industrial establishment in which foreigners are not employed, either as managers, engineers, or labourers.
More explicitly and discerningly it was hardly possible for Government to speak, and to enumerate the glorious results which the country may expect from the introduction of foreign industry and foreign activity, although such an official avowal could not fail to wound the national pride of the Brazilians.
Notwithstanding this strong language of the Government, and all the enticements and zealous activity of the Brazilian agents in the various ports of Europe, the emigration to that country, in 1856, amounted to only 13,800 souls.[46] Among this number there were but 628 agriculturists, all the others coming merely with the view of obtaining a livelihood in the capital as artizans and labourers. There are probably in all the Brazilian agricultural colonies, at this moment, not more than 40,000 emigrants settled, that is to say, about as many as emigrate in the course of three months to the United States!
[46] Namely: 9159 Portuguese, 1822 Germans, and 2819 of other nations.
The number of Germans emigrating to Brazil is strikingly small, when compared with the total annual emigration from that country. Of 61,413 individuals, who, in 1856, embarked from Hamburg and Bremen, only 1822 went to Brazil. The cause of this may be that, simultaneously with the large promises held out by the agents, warning voices were heard depicting in the most gloomy colours the terrible trials that await the unfortunate immigrant on his touching Brazilian soil.[47] Of late such excellent works have been published concerning Brazil, that we may advise all who take a special interest in the condition of that empire to study these works, the more so as the views therein expressed exactly coincide with our own impressions.[48]
[47] Among these, the opposition of the late Consul-General for Brazil at Dresden, Mr. John Sturz, deserves special mention, as, despite the threats of losing his appointment, that gentleman was incessantly occupied in exposing the iniquities of the Parceria system (see post), and recommending the immigrant, so long as such a slavish system continued, to refrain from turning his steps towards Brazil. Mr. Sturz had recently the enviable misfortune of being sacrificed to his own strong sense of justice, and dismissed from all employment by the Brazilian administration, though not without carrying with him the respect and admiration of every friend of humanity. An excellent and circumstantial description of the present condition of the German colonies in southern Brazil will be found in Dr. Avé Lallemant's attractive "Travels through Southern Brazil in 1858." (Leipzig, 1859.)
[48] H. Handelmann's "History of Brazil" (Berlin, 1860), a remarkably profound and instructive work, devotes a special section (p. 933) to the subject of German emigration, and gives a very copious and complete insight into the various missions and works since 1819 to the present day, which treat of German emigration and colonization.
So long as the unoccupied lands are not surveyed, laid out in lots, and sold at a small rate to the settler, as, for instance, in the United States; so long as the immigrant is unable to improve for himself his own plot of ground, but must remain a mere field-labourer, working for some foreign master, according to the iniquitous Parceria, or half-profits system;[49] so long as the expense of transport of the emigrant is to be worked off by future payments out of his labour, so long must every friend of humanity strongly dissuade the emigrant from proceeding to the great South American Empire.
[49] The modern Brazilian system of Parceria may be shortly stated as that by which a planter engages in Europe such of the poorer classes as are desirous of emigrating, and has them transported at his own cost to Brazil, where they are engaged as farmers, with half profits, upon the coffee and sugar plantations, and contracting to reimburse him, by their personal services and labour, for the outlay he has been at for their transport, maintenance, instruction, &c. Until all these have been repaid by the improvement in the rent or productive powers of the land, they must remain, as working out their emancipation from the lord of the soil, veritable "adscripti glebæ." After that has been attained they are free people, and may leave if they please, or may sink into the rank of "unattached labourers," which implies their assigning half of the net produce of the land to the ground landlord, the remaining half being their remuneration for labour. Proprietorship in the soil is never attainable by these farmers on half profits, inasmuch as the Parceria system can only exist where the soil is already exclusively vested in a planting aristocracy. (See Handelmann, etc., p. 568).
For Brazil, beautiful, fertile, and abounding in undeveloped natural wealth, two alternatives are alone open at present—either ruin to the producing power of the population through deficiency of industrial power, or the throwing open the land to foreign emigration by means of the most extensive concessions. The longer this is deferred, the more oppressively will the want of manual labour manifest itself; and the more advantages will foreign emigration secure.