The college, or gymnasio, of S. Bento had already taken its recognised place among the best educational institutions of S. Paulo. The fathers were assisted in the work of teaching by a competent staff of lay masters, but retained the religious, moral, and disciplinary training of their pupils entirely in their own hands; and I was pleased to see how eminently suited the paternal and family spirit characteristic of Benedictine education was to Brazilian boys, and how well on the whole they responded to the efforts of their instructors to instil into them those habits of obedience, self-control, and moral responsibility, in which the home training of the children of Latin America is often so deplorably deficient. Naturally docile, pious, and intelligent, these little boys were brought under the salutary influence of S. Bento at an age when there seemed every hope that they would be tided safely over the difficult years of early adolescence, and moulded, under solid Christian guidance, into efficient and worthy citizens of their State and their country.[[7]] English was taught by an American priest, who was also an excellent musician, and trained our little choristers very successfully. Several of the fathers spoke English well; but I was the only British-born member of the community, and I was naturally glad of opportunities to meet the scattered English Catholics who were to be found among the not very numerous British resident colony. Our little old church, unattractive enough as to externals, was yet greatly frequented by those (and they were many) who appreciated the careful reverence of the ceremonial and grave beauty of the monastic chant. Sermons in Portuguese and German were already preached regularly at the Sunday masses; and to these was added soon after my arrival an English sermon, which was very well attended. One came sometimes in the hospitals of the city, which I visited regularly, on stray Englishmen of another class—an injured railwayman, perhaps, or a sick sailor from a British ship, who were glad enough, even if not Catholics, of a friendly visit from a countryman. I remember a young Englishman from Warrington in Lancashire (this was one of the consoling cases), who was dying of some obscure tropical disease in the Santa Casa, the chief hospital of the city. It was the hottest time of year, and he suffered much, but never once murmured or complained. He had been baptized by a Benedictine (but eighteen years before) in his native town in England, and he looked on it, as he said, as "a bit of real luck" to be tended by a Benedictine on his death-bed. "O santinho inglez" (the little English saint) his nurses called him; and his death—he was never free from pain to the last—was truly the death of the just, and made an ineffaceable impression on those who witnessed it. Fiant novissima mea hujus similia!
I soon fell into the routine of our Brazilian monastic day, which differed a good deal (especially as to the hours for meals) from our European time-tables. Coffee betimes; breakfast ("almoço") before noon; dinner at half-past five, after vespers, suited the school hours, and the busy life of the community. We anticipated matins at seven p.m.; hurried to the refectory for a dish of scalding tea (smothered in sugar, no milk), or a glass of lemonade, then hastened back to choir for night prayers and sundry pious exercises. This final collation (if it may be so called) was really alarming: the scorching tea was gulped down with a reckless rapidity which reminded one of Quilp tossing off the hissing rum in his riverside arbour! and I used to return to choir positively perspiring. But our commissariat was on the whole good, if simple; we had no such privations to face as in old days at Olinda, and as far as I was concerned the kind abbot was always on the alert to see that I wanted for nothing. Our chacara supplied us with farm produce of the best; and great platters of green and purple grapes, from the same source, were at this season served up at every meal.
The abbot, on his first free day, drove me round the interesting city. We visited a fine girls' school, conducted by Augustinian canonesses; the superior was sister to an Anglo-Irish Benedictine, and another nun was a Macpherson, with an accent of that ilk. We saw, also, two institutions founded by the Abbot, St. Adalbert's Parochial schools, under nuns of St. Catherine, and a hospital managed by sisters of the same Order. The hospital stood at the end of the Avenida Paulista, a noble boulevard lined with handsome houses of every imaginable style of architecture—Gothic, Renaissance, Moorish, Swiss, Venetian, classical, rococo, each one in its own glowing and luxuriant garden. This, naturally, was the rich man's quarter; the working people had of course their own dwellings, chiefly in the populous industrial district of Braz. But I saw no slums in S. Paulo, and nowhere the depressing contrast between ostentatious luxury and poverty-stricken squalor which is the blot on so many European cities. In S. Paulo there was, in fact, no poverty:[[8]] there was work and employment and food for all; and it is true to say there was no need for any man to be a pauper except through his own fault. To any one with preconceived ideas of South American cities as centres of lethargy, indolence, and want of enterprise, the industrial activity and abounding prosperity of S. Paulo could not but appear as astonishing. That prosperity, as most people know, was mainly due to the foresight and energy with which the Paulistas had realised and utilised the fact that their famous terra roxa was adaptable for coffee-culture on a scale truly gigantic. Two years before my arrival (in 1906-07) the production of coffee in Brazil (three-fourths of it grown in S. Paulo) had reached the amazing figure of twenty million sacks, five times what it had been a quarter of a century before. Then, when the supply was found to exceed the demand, when prices fell by leaps and bounds, and financial disaster seemed imminent, the shrewd Paulistas conceived and adopted the much-criticised expedient of "valorisation," the State itself purchasing an enormous quantity of the crop, and holding it up until prices became again normal. It was in this and in many other ways that the Paulistas showed the clearsightedness and acumen which justly gained for their State and their capital the reputation of being the most enterprising and progressive on the whole South American continent.
The abbot and I finished our afternoon's drive with a little expedition to Cantareira, a hollow among wooded hills, some twelve or fourteen miles distant (the access is by a steam tramway), where, set in charming gardens, are some of the spacious reservoirs feeding the city. We drank our coffee in a rustic arbour, with bright-hued hummingbirds glancing and circling round our heads; and returning in the luminous violet twilight (which struck me always as particularly beautiful in this clear, high smokeless atmosphere), called to pay our respects to the Archbishop of the province and diocese of S. Paulo. A zealous parish priest in the city, where he had built a fine church (St. Cecilia's), he had been made Bishop of Coritiba at only thirty, and translated to the metropolitan see two years later. He was not yet thirty-eight.
I assisted, before our school broke up for the three months' summer holidays, at some of the examinations, which were conducted in presence of a fiscal (Government official), our college being at that time considered "equiparado," i.e., equivalent to the State secondary schools, a condition of the privilege being some kind of more or less nominal Government inspection. The school work, it struck me, had all been very thoroughly done, though perhaps of a somewhat elementary kind. A distraction to us all during the last hour was the news of a great fire raging in the principal business street of the city. A big German warehouse, the Casa Allema, was in fact burned to the ground; and we surveyed the conflagration (said, but never proved, to be the work of incendiaries) from the belfry of our church tower.
The North American element in S. Paulo, though much smaller than it became later, was already fairly numerous. A great Canadian company was responsible for the supply of light and power to S. Paulo as well as Rio; some of the leading officials in both cities were Catholics, and became my kind friends. Another hospitable friend was a Scots banker married to an American wife, whom he habitually addressed as "Honey!"[[9]] There was, generally, a very friendly and hospitable spirit among the English-speaking residents; but (as usual in foreign cities) it was curiously confined to the circle of their own countrymen. Some of my Brazilian acquaintances used to express regret that the English colony, for which they had much respect, never evinced the least desire for any sort of intimacy with them; and it used to surprise me to find English families which had been settled in the country for a whole generation or more, of which not a single member knew sufficient Portuguese to carry on a quarter of an hour's conversation with an educated Brazilian of their own class. Personally, I found such Brazilians as I had the pleasure of meeting almost uniformly extremely agreeable people—kind, courteous, cultivated, and refined; and I thought, and still think, the insular aloofness of my countrymen from the people among whom it was their lot to live, a distinct disadvantage to themselves, and a mistake from every point of view.
It was a curious fact, and one worthy of attention from several points of view, that at the time of which I am writing the public and official interest of the Paulistas in educational matters, while undoubtedly exceeding that of any other community in the Republic, was in practice almost confined to primary schools. Nearly £400,000, a fifth of the whole annual budget of the State, was devoted to their support and extension; many of the school buildings were of almost palatial appearance; the code was carefully thought out, and the teaching as a whole efficient; and elementary education was, at least in principle, obligatory, though the provisions of the law of 1893, which had established a commission for bringing negligent parents to book and fining them for non-compliance with the law, were to a great extent a dead letter. For secondary education, on the other hand, the public provision was of the slenderest: there were in 1909 but three State secondary schools in the State of S. Paulo—at Campinas and Ribeirão Preto, and in the capital; and the Lyceu in the last-named city (with a population of over 400,000) numbered less than 150 pupils. The all-important work of the education of the middle and upper classes of children, both boys and girls, thus fell inevitably into the hands of private teachers, the best colleges for both sexes (mostly internatos or boarding-schools) being conducted by foreign religious orders. These institutions, receiving no State subvention of any kind, were regarded by the State with a tolerance due less to its appreciation of the principles on which their education was based, than to an obvious sense of the economic advantage of leaving private associations to undertake a work which it neglected itself. The net gain of this policy of laisser aller was that a large number of children, belonging to the classes on which depended the future prosperity of the country, were being carefully educated on solid Christian foundations, without, as far as I could observe at S. Bento and elsewhere, any sacrifice of the patriotic principles which Brazil quite rightly desired should be instilled into the rising generation of her sons and daughters.
[[1]] St. Trid's Well (as it was called before the Reformation) had the repute of miraculously curing diseases of the eye. A satirical sixteenth-century poet scoffs at the folk who flock to "Saint Trid's to mend their ene."
[[2]] The King (so his secretary wrote to me) was "much surprised and gratified" at hearing how the toast of his health had been received by the foreign passengers on an English ship. I sent on the letter from S. Paulo to the captain, who said it should be framed and hung up on board, but I never heard if this was done. Edward VII. died less than six months later, and on December 30, 1917, the Aragon, whilst on transport service in the Mediterranean, was torpedoed (together with her escort H.M.S. Attack), a few miles from Alexandria. The ship went down within half an hour of being struck, with a loss of more than six hundred lives.
[[3]] Their names are worthy of perpetuation—Lauro Muller, Paulo Frontin, Pareiro Passo (the Haussmann of Brazil), and Dr. Oswaldo Cruz, a pupil of Pasteur, and popularly known as the mata-mosquitos (mosquito-killer).