Contemporary documents prove the horrible corruption. From ministers of State down to the humblest subordinate every official had his share in the pickings. The farmers of the revenues openly paid bribes and might exact what they pleased from the taxpayers. All trade except that with Portugal was forbidden, and this was hampered in a hundred ways. Salt, wine, soap, rum, tobacco, olive oil, and hides were monopolies. All legal transactions were burdened with heavy fees; slaves paid so much a head; every river on a road was the occasion for a new toll; the exercise of professions and trades was forbidden except on the payment of heavy fees; anything that could compete with Portugal was prohibited altogether. Taxation shut off industrial enterprise at its very sources, and many of the worst features of the system then put in vogue have never been discontinued.
The governors and military commanders interfered constantly with the administration of justice in favour of their friends and favourites; they accepted bribes for allowing contraband trade and permitting the immigration of foreigners; they misappropriated the funds of widows and orphans; they ignored the franchises of the municipalities; they imposed unauthorised taxes; they forced loans from suitors having claims before them; they obliged free men to work without pay; they forcibly took wives away from their husbands; they impressed the young men for the wars on the Spanish border, required every able bodied man to serve in the militia, and commonly practised arbitrary imprisonment. How even one of the best of them interfered to regulate private affairs can best be shown by his own words:
"I promoted the good of the people by forcibly compelling them to plant maize and pulse, and threatening to take away their lands altogether if they did not cultivate them diligently; I required the militia colonels to make exact reports about this matter and thus brought about a great increase in the production of food crops and sugar. I called the militia together for exercise on Sundays and holidays, days which otherwise the people would have spent in idleness and pleasure. Many have complained, but I have never given their complaints the slightest attention, having always followed the system of taking no notice whatever of the people's murmurs."
BOATS ON THE RIO GRANDE.
[From a steel print.]
He describes the Brazilians as vain, but indolent and easily subdued; robust and supporting labour well, but inclined to an inaction from which only extreme poverty or the command of their superiors could rouse them. They had no education, for the only schools were a few Jesuit seminaries, and no printing-press existed. They were licentious, had no aristocracy, were unaccustomed to social subordination, and would obey no authority except the military.
Underneath the surface fermented a deep disgust. Even in the seaports the very name of government was hated, and in the interior the people withdrew themselves as much as possible from contact or participation with it. A dull hatred of Portugal and Portuguese spread among all classes of natives. In much of the country the only law was the patriarchal influence of the heads of the landed families, who often exercised powers of life and death. Instances are on record where fathers ordered their sons to kill their own sisters when the latter had dishonoured the family name.
With the death of John V. in 1750 the great Marquis of Pombal became prime minister. The enormous energy and activity of this remarkable man revolutionised the administration of Portugal and Brazil. Official corruption was severely punished; order replaced confusion; agriculture, industry, and commerce were protected and encouraged. In spite of the threatened exhaustion of the placers mining flourished. Maranhão and Pará took a new start; the worst monopolies were abolished; the price of sugar rose with the great colonial wars and the adoption of reasonable regulations. Wealth and revenues increased apace and peace and security were self-guarded. When Pombal fell, after twenty-seven years in power, Brazil's population had risen to two millions; Rio was a city of fifty thousand and the capital had been transferred there; Bahia had forty thousand; Minas contained four hundred thousand people; the yield of gold was four hundred thousand carats yearly, and the diamond production one hundred and fifty thousand carats, and, finally, Santa Catharina and Rio Grande had been saved from the Spaniards and settled. Pombal had made short work of the Jesuits. In 1755 he took away their rights over their Indians, and four years later issued an order for their immediate and unconditional expulsion and the confiscation of their property.
Pombal had no favourites; he spared no individuals and no classes in his work of ruthlessly concentrating all power in the Crown. But he built a Frankenstein of which he himself was the helpless victim the moment his old master died. Unwittingly he prepared the way for the triumph of the ideas of the French Revolution both in Portugal and Brazil, and his most beneficent measures were the most fatal to the permanence of his despotic system. Commercial prosperity gave the Brazilian people resources; the impartial administration of law gave them some conceptions of civic pride and independence; the encouragement of education, small as it was, helped start an intellectual movement which spread over the wilds of Brazil the liberal principle then fermenting in Europe.
Immediately upon his fall in 1777 the Portuguese government reverted to most of the old abuses, but the economic impulse did not at once die out.