The presence of the Government hastened the industrial progress of Brazil. The Prince Regent (who in a few years became King) began his rule by opening the Brazilian ports to the commerce of all friendly nations.[58] 1815 A.D. Seven years later it was formally decreed that the colonial existence of Brazil should cease. She was now raised to the dignity of a kingdom united with Portugal under the same Crown. Her commerce and agriculture increased; she began to regard as her inferior the country of which she lately had been a dependency.
1820 A.D. The changed relations of the two States were displeasing to the people of Portugal. The Council by which the affairs of the kingdom were conducted became unpopular. The demand for constitutional government extended from Spain into Portugal. The Portuguese desired to see their King again in Lisbon, and called loudly for his return. The King consented to the wish of his people reluctantly; for besides other and graver reasons why he should not quit Brazil, his majesty greatly feared the discomforts of a sea-voyage. 1821 A.D. His son, the heir to his throne, became Regent in Brazil.
The Brazilians resented the departure of the King. The Portuguese meditated a yet deeper humiliation for the State whose recent acquisition of dignity was still an offence to them. There came an order from the Cortes that the Prince Regent also should return to Europe. The Brazilians were now eager that the tie which bound them to the mother country should be dissolved. The Prince Regent was urged to disregard the summons to return. After some hesitation he gave effect to the general wish, and intimated his purpose of remaining in Brazil. 1822 A.D. A few months later he was proclaimed Emperor, and the union of the two kingdoms ceased. Constitutional government was set up. But the administration of the Emperor was not sufficiently liberal to satisfy the wishes of his people. 1831 A.D. After nine years of deepening unpopularity, he resigned the crown in favour of his son, then a child five years of age, and now (1881), although still in middle life, the oldest monarch in the world.
Brazil covers almost one-half the South American Continent, and has therefore an area nearly equal to that of the eight States of Spanish origin by which she is bounded. She is as large as the British dominions in North America; she is larger than the United States, excluding the untrodden wastes of Alaska. One, and that not the largest, of her twenty provinces is ten times the size of England. Finally, her area is equal to five-sixths that of Europe.[59] She has a sea-coast line of four thousand miles. She has a marvellous system of river communication; the Amazon and its tributaries alone are navigable for twenty-five thousand miles within Brazilian territory. Her mineral wealth is so ample that the governor of one of her provinces was wont, in religious processions, to ride a horse whose shoes were of gold; and the diamonds of the Royal Family are estimated at a value of three million sterling. Her soil and climate conspire to bestow upon her agriculture an opulence which is unsurpassed and probably unequalled. An acre of cotton yields in Brazil four times as much as an acre yields in the United States. Wheat gives a return of thirty to seventy fold; maize, of two hundred to four hundred fold; rice, of a thousand fold. Brazil supplies nearly one-half the coffee which the human family consumes. An endless variety of plants thrive in her genial soil. Sugar and tobacco, as well as cotton, coffee, and tea, are staple productions. Nothing which the tropics yield is wanting, and in many portions of the empire the vegetation of the temperate zones is abundantly productive. The energy of vegetable life is everywhere excessive. The mangrove seeds send forth shoots before they fall from the parent tree; the drooping branches of trees strike roots when they touch the ground, and enter upon independent existence; wood which has been split for fences hastens to put forth leaves; grasses and other plants intertwine and form bridges on which the traveller walks in safety.
But the scanty population of Brazil is wholly insufficient to subdue the enormous territory on which they have settled and make its vast capabilities conduce to the welfare of man. The highest estimate gives to Brazil a population of from eleven to twelve million.[60] She has thus scarcely four inhabitants to every square mile of her surface, while England has upwards of four hundred. Vast forests still darken her soil, and the wild luxuriance of tropical undergrowth renders them well-nigh impervious to man. There are boundless expanses of wilderness imperfectly explored, still roamed over by untamed and often hostile Indians. Persistent but not eminently successful efforts have been made to induce European and now to induce Chinese immigration. The population continues, however, to increase at such a rate that it is larger by nearly two million than it was ten years ago. But these accessions are trivial when viewed in relation to the work which has still to be accomplished. It is said that no more than the one hundred and fiftieth part of the agricultural resources of Brazil has yet been developed or even revealed. The agricultural products of the country, in so far as the amount of these can be tested by the amount exported, do not exhibit any tendency to increase.[61]
Brazil is afflicted not merely by an insufficient population, but still more by the reluctance of her people to undergo the fatigues of agricultural labour in the exhausting heat of her sultry plains. The coloured population choose other occupations, and flock to the cities. Once they were held by compulsion to field-work. Slavery was maintained in Brazil after it had been abandoned by all other Christian States. Not till 1871 was Brazil shamed out of the iniquitous system. In that year it was enacted that the children of slave women should be free—subject, however, to an apprenticeship of twenty-one years, during which they must labour for the owners of their mothers. Since that law was passed, there has been voluntary emancipation to a considerable extent; and the slaves in Brazil, who numbered at one time two and a half million, are now about one million.[62] The freedmen shun field-work, and the places which they quit are scarcely filled by immigration or natural increase. Agricultural progress is thus frustrated—an evil which will probably be felt still more acutely as the emancipation of the negroes draws towards its completion. No sufficient remedy for this evil can be hoped for so long as any remnants of slavery linger on the soil.
The Brazilian Legislature is elected by the people, the qualification of a voter being an annual income of twenty pounds. Three candidates for the office of Senator are chosen by each constituency, and the Emperor determines which of the three shall gain the appointment. The members of the Lower House are chosen by indirect election. Every thirty voters choose an elector, and the electors thus chosen appoint the deputies. The exercise of the right of voting is compulsory; neglect to vote is punished by the infliction of penalties. Each of the twenty provinces into which the empire is divided has its own Legislature, with a President appointed by the general Government. The powers exercised by the provincial governments are necessarily large.
The constitution confers upon the Emperor a “moderating power,” which enables him, when he chooses, to frustrate the wishes of his Chambers. He may dismiss a minister who has large majorities in both Houses; he may withhold his sanction from measures which have been enacted by the Legislature. Brazil has no hereditary nobility; but there is a lavish distribution of distinctions which endure only for the lifetime of the recipient. It is held that the power of bestowing these coveted honours invests the Emperor with a measure of authority which is not unattended with danger to the public liberties.
But the career of the Brazilian Empire has been marked in large measure by tranquillity and progress, and the masses of the people manifest no desire for change. They have suffered from foreign war[63] and from domestic strife; but their sufferings have been trivial when compared with those of the Spanish States which adjoin them. Thus far their quiet and unadventurous Government has given them repose, and thus far they are satisfied. Three-fourths of the Brazilian people are of mixed race, the leading elements in which are Indian and Negro. They are profoundly ignorant; for although compulsory education has been enacted, its progress is yet inconsiderable.[64] What the awakened intellect of the Brazilian nation may in future years demand is beyond human forecast. It is not probable that the political combinations which an ignorant and indolent people have accepted at the hand of their rulers will continue to satisfy when the national mind casts aside its apathy. Brazil will be more fortunate than other States if she attain to a stable political condition otherwise than by the familiar path of civil contention and bloodshed.
It has been said by Mr. Bright that there is no event in history, ancient or modern, which for grandeur and for permanence can compare with the discovery of the American Continent by Christopher Columbus. This is a large claim, but indisputably a just one. The discovery of America ushered in an epoch wholly different from any which had preceded it. Nearly one-third of the area of our world was practically worthless to the human family—wandered over by savages who supported their unprofitable lives by the slaughter of animals scarcely more savage than themselves. Suddenly the lost continent is found, and its incalculable wealth is added to the sum of human possessions. Europe supported with difficulty, by her rude processes of agriculture, even the scanty population which she contained; here were homes and maintenance sufficient for all. Europe was governed by methods yet more barbarous than her agriculture; here was an arena worthy of the great experiment of human freedom on which the best of her people longed to enter. Europe was committed to many old and injurious institutions—the legacy of the darkest ages—no one of which could be overthrown save by wasteful strife; here, free from the embarrassments which time and error had created, there could be established the institutions which the wants of new generations called for, and Europe could inform herself of their quality before she proceeded to their adoption. The human family was very poor; its lower classes were crushed down by poverty into wretchedness and vice. At once the common heritage was enormously increased, and possibilities of well-being not dreamed of before were opened to all. The brave heart of Columbus beat high as he looked out from the deck of his little ship upon the shores of a new world, and felt with solemn thankfulness that God had chosen him to accomplish a great work. We recognize in this lonely, much-enduring man, the grandest human benefactor whom the race has ever known. Behind him lay centuries of oppression and suffering, and ignorance and debasement. Before him, unseen by the eye of man, there stretched out, as the result of his triumph, the slow but steadfast evolution of influences destined to transform the world.