Brazilian society seems to a passing observer to be in a state of transition, and may not for some time to come succeed in reconciling the contrasts between the old and the new, and between theory and practice, which it now displays. The old system was aristocratic not only because a number of respected families surrounding the imperial court enjoyed a pre-eminence of rank, but also because a newer class of rich men, chiefly landowners, had grown up. The aristocracy of rank is now almost gone, but the aristocracy of wealth remains and is in control of public affairs. In most parts of the country, it stands far above the labouring population, with little of a middle class between. Democratic principles have been proclaimed in the broadest terms, but thinking men see, and even unthinking men cannot but dimly feel, that no government, however good its intentions, can apply such principles in a country where seven-eighths of the people are ignorant, and half of them belong to backward races, unfit to exercise political rights. The conditions here noted may be thought to resemble those of the southern states in the North American Union. But there are two conspicuous differences. In Brazil no social "colour line" is sharply drawn, and the fusion of whites and blacks by intermarriage goes steadily on. In Brazil the pure white element, though it preponderates in the temperate districts of the south, is less than half of the whole nation, whereas in the United States it is eight-ninths. Yet in the southern United States nearly all the coloured population has been disfranchised and all declarations of democratic principles are understood to be subject to the now fundamental dogma that white supremacy must be absolutely assured.
Though the financial stability of Brazil is said to be hardly equal to that which Argentina was enjoying in 1910, and though the growth of national and individual wealth has been less rapid, there is a sense of abundance, and the upper classes live in an easy open-handed way. Slaveholding produces extravagant habits, especially among plantation owners, for what is the use of looking after the details of expenditure when one has thriftless labourers, whose carelessness infects all who are set over them? Like their Portuguese ancestors, the Brazilians are genial and hospitable, and they have the example and the excuse of a bounteous Nature around them. They seem less addicted to horse-racing and betting than are the Argentines and Chileans, but the gambling instinct finds plenty of opportunities in the fluctuations of exchange, as well as in the rapid changes of the produce markets.
The Brazilian is primarily a man of the country, not of the city. Rio, large as it is, is a less potent factor than Buenos Aires is in Argentina, or Santiago in Chile. The landowner loves his rural life, as did the Virginian planter in North America before the Civil War, and lives on the fazenda in a sort of semi-feudal patriarchal way, often with grown-up sons and daughters around him. Estates (except in the extreme south) are extensive; near neighbours are few; families are often large; the plantation is a sort of little principality, and its owner with his fellow-proprietors is allowed, despite all democratic theory, to direct the politics of the district just as in England, eighty years ago, the county families used to control local affairs and guide the choice of representatives in Parliament.
I have observed that the Brazilian, though modified in some parts of the country by Indian or negro blood, is primarily a Portuguese. Now the Portuguese, a people attractive to those who live among them, have also had a striking history. They are a spirited people, an adventurous people, a poetical people. For more than a century, when they were exploring the oceans and founding a dominion in India, they played a great part in the world, and though they have never quite recovered the position, wonderful for so small a country, which they then held, and have produced no later poet equal to Camoens, men of practical force and men of intellectual brilliance have not been wanting. Neither are they wanting in Brazil. A love of polite letters is common among the upper classes, and the power of writing good verse is not rare. The language has retained those qualities which it shewed in the Lusiads, and the possession of that great poem has helped to maintain the taste and talent of the nation. There are admirable speakers, subtle and ingenious lawyers, astute politicians, administrators whose gifts are approved by such feats as the extinction of yellow fever in Rio and Santos. The late Baron do Rio Branco was a statesman who would have been remarkable in any country. Yet it is strange to find that, both here and in other parts of South America, men of undoubted talent are often beguiled by phrases, and seem to prefer words to facts. Between the national vanities and self-glorifying habits of different nations, there is not much to choose, but in countries like England and the United States, the rhetoric of after-dinner speeches is known clearly and consciously by the more capable among the speakers, and almost as distinctly by the bulk of the audience, to be mere rhetoric. They are aware of their national faults and weaknesses and do not really suppose themselves more gifted or more virtuous than other peoples.
In Latin America, where eloquence comes by nature and seems to become a part of thought itself, the case is different. Exuberant imagination takes its hopes or predictions for realities, and finds in the gilded clouds of fancy a foundation on which to build practical policies. Proud of what they call their Democratic Idealism, they assume as already existing in their fellow-countrymen the virtues which the citizens of a free country ought to possess. To keep these unrealized ideals floating before one's eyes may be better than to have no ideals at all, but for the purposes of actual politics, the result is the same either way, for that which is secured for the principles embodied in the laws is what M. Clémenceau happily calls "an authority chiefly theoretic." Let us, nevertheless, remember that although the habit of mistaking words for facts and aspirations for achievements aggravates the difficulties of working constitutional government in South American countries, these difficulties would in any case exist. They inhere in the conditions of the countries. It is vain to expect a constitution closely modelled on that of the United States to work smoothly in Brazil, just as it is impossible to expect the British Cabinet and Parliamentary system to work smoothly in those small nations which have recently been copying it, without an incessant and often ludicrous contrast between doctrine and practice. A nation is the child of its own past, as Cervantes says that a man is the child of his own works.
The Brazilians, who never forget that they were for a time, during the French invasion of Portugal, their own mother country, and head of the whole Portuguese people, cherish their national literary traditions with more warmth than do the Spaniards of the New World, and produce quite as much, in the way of poetry and belles lettres, as do the writers of Portugal. They have a quick susceptibility to ideas, like that of Frenchmen or Russians, but have not so far made any great contributions to science, either in the fields of physical enquiry or in those of economics, philology, or history. One can hardly be surprised that learning and the abstract side of natural science are undervalued in a country which has no university, nothing more than faculties for teaching the practical subjects of law, medicine, engineering, and agriculture. This deficiency of a taste for and interest in branches of knowledge not directly practical is the more noticeable, because the Brazilians do not strike one as a new people. Less here than in Argentina or Uruguay, has one the feeling that the nation is still in the first freshness of youth, eagerly setting itself to explore and furnish its home and to develop resources the possession of which it has just begun to realize. Business and sport are not such absorbing topics of conversation here as they are in Argentina; there is neither such a display of wealth nor such a passion for spending it. Yet one doubts whether this freedom from the preoccupations of industry and commerce, the latter mainly left to foreigners, enures to the benefit of public life. Most of those who follow politics seem absorbed in personal intrigues. Comparatively few shew themselves sensible of the tremendous problems which the nation has to face, with its scattered centres of population to draw together, its means of communication to extend, its public credit to sustain, its revenues to be scrupulously husbanded and applied to useful purposes, above all, its mass of negro and Indian population to be educated and civilized. Nowhere in the world is there a more urgent need for a wise constructive statesmanship.
It is hard to convey the impression with which one sees the shores of Brazil sink below the horizon after coasting along them for three thousand miles from the Uruguayan border to Pernambuco, and coming to know something of the boundless wealth which Nature has lavished upon man in this vast land. Not even the great North American republic has a territory at once so large and so productive. What will be its future? Is the people worthy of such an inheritance?
The first thought that rises in the mind of those who are possessed, as in this age we all more or less are, by the passion for the development of natural resources, is a feeling of regret that a West European race, powerful by its numbers and its skill, say the North American or German or English, has not, to use the familiar phrase, "got the thing in hand." The white part of the Brazilian nation—and it is only that part that need be considered—seems altogether too small for the tasks which the possession of this country imposes. "How men from the Mississippi would make things hum along the Amazon and the Paraná!" says the traveller from the United States. In thirty years, Brazil would have fifty millions of inhabitants. Steamers would ply upon the rivers, railways would thread the recesses of the forests, and this already vast dominion would almost inevitably be enlarged at the expense of weaker neighbours till it reached the foot of the Andes. Second or third thoughts suggest a doubt whether such a consummation is really in the interests of the world. May not territories be developed too quickly? Might it not have been better for the United States if their growth had been slower, if their public lands had not been so hastily disposed of, if in their eagerness to obtain the labour they needed they had not drawn in a multitude of ignorant immigrants from central and southern Europe? With so long a life in prospect as men of science grant to our planet, why should we seek to open all the mines and cut down all the forests and leave nothing in the exploitation of natural resources to succeeding generations? In the long run doubtless the lands, like the tools, will go to those who can use them. But it may be well to wait and see what new conditions another century brings about for the world; and the Latin-American peoples may within that time grow into something different from what they now appear to the critical eyes of Europe and North America.