VIII. AT LARGE IN RIO DE JANEIRO…

VIII. AT LARGE IN RIO DE JANEIRO

I awoke at dawn just as we were entering the harbor of Rio de Janeiro. On the extreme points of land on either side crouched two old-fashioned fortresses; back of one of them, scarcely a stone’s throw away, rose the sheer rock of the “Sugar Loaf,” like a gigantic upright thumb, and a moment later I saw the sun rise red over a great tumble of peaks along the shore, among which I recognized the “Hunchback” stooping broodingly over the almost invisible city. A haze hid all of this, except for a long line of little houses, like children’s blocks, along the foot of great cliffs. Then bit by bit, as the sun sponged up the mists, the scene spread and took on detail, until it became perhaps the sublimest spectacle of nature my eyes had yet fallen upon in all the circuit of the earth, a sight not only incomparable but one that obliterated the disappointment inherent in all long-imagined and often-heralded scenes.

The vast bay, of irregular shape and everywhere dotted with islands, was walled on every side by a tumultuous labyrinth of mountains, some sheer rounded masses of bare rock and precipitous cliffs on which nature had not been able to get the slightest foothold, the majority a chaotic maze of ridges, peaks, and fantastic headlands covered with the densest vegetation, terminating in lofty Tijuca and with a dim, dark-blue background of the range called “the Organs.” The city itself, of many striking colors reflected in the blue-green sea along which it stretched in endless public gardens and esplanades skirting the water front, was strewn in and among these hills as if it had been poured out in a fluid form and left to run into the crevices and crannies, the scum, in the form of makeshift shanties, rising to the tops of the morros which everywhere bulked above the general level, the more important of them crowned by picturesque old castles that stood out sharp-cut against the green background.

But if nature is peerless in Rio, one quickly discovers that man is still the same troublesome little shrimp he is everywhere. We crawled at a snail’s pace past a rocky islet covered with royal palms and a turreted castle, past seven large Brazilian battleships, among them the Minas Geraes that had recently mutinied and bombarded the capital, and finally came to anchor well out in the bay. When our baggage had been rummaged by a flock of negroid officials quite as if we had arrived from a foreign country, we were privileged to pay foul-tongued and clamoring boatmen several thousand reis each to row us the few hundred yards to the shore. Rio has ample wharves, but passing vessels avoid the use of them whenever possible, lest the European exploiters pocket whatever profit the ships pick up on the high seas.

I wandered the crowded and blazing streets for some time before I decided to try my luck at the “Pensão Americana” in the Rua Larga, or Wide Street. Here, for six thousand reis a day, I was permitted to occupy a breathless little inside den and to eat whatever I found edible among the native dishes set before us on a free-for-all table at noon and evening. I was back in rice-land again, that inexcusable substitute for food, the only thing on the menu of which there was anything like abundance, being served at every meal and on every possible pretext. This and the feijão, the small black bean of Rio Grande do Sul, with now and then a bit of xarque, dried or salted beef, added to give it distinction, makes up the bulk of any native Brazilian repast in such rendezvous of starvation as the “Pensão Americana.” The only drink furnished was water, and one soon learns to avoid that in tropical Brazil. One dining-room wall was decorated with large glaring advertisements of beer and shoes, on the other was an enormous and gaily colored chromo of the Last Supper, at which the fare was as scanty as our own. The general parlor in the front of the second story and opening upon the wide street might have been passable as a lounging-place had not noisy, undisciplined brats been constantly running about it and the snarly, quarrelsome air of cheap boarding-houses the world over everywhere pervaded it. The entire establishment was an unceasing bedlam. Women shrieking as only Latin-American women can gave no respite from dawn to midnight; most of them kept pet parrots—or toucans, which are several times worse—and occasionally an entire flock of parrakeets. My bed proved to be of solid boards with an imitation mattress two inches thick. The gas is turned off in Rio at ten in the evening, and we had no electricity. I could not read for lack of light, I could not sleep because of the sweltering heat inside my cubbyhole, stagnant as only an interior dungeon in the tropics can be, and the uproar beyond the half-inch partitions, which in no way deadened the nightly domestic activities of the families about me. When I did at length doze off toward dawn it was only to dream madly.

The evening’s determination to move, even if I must sleep in the streets, was strengthened by the rumpus that awoke me at daylight and by the thimbleful of black coffee that constituted the only breakfast served until eleven. I struck out none too hopefully to re-canvass the town. A white cardboard swinging at the end of a string from a balcony window, I soon discovered, meant that a room was for rent, but though these were numerous they were all unfurnished. Those who rented furnished quarters were expected to eat in the same house, and 6000 was evidently the rock-bottom price for board and room anywhere in Rio. For that sum I could get real food and a tolerable room in a hotel kept by a German in the Rua do Acre in the heart of the downtown section, and it mattered little that the pungent smell of raw coffee struck one full in the face in passing the open doors of the warehouses in the Rua São Bento and the adjoining streets leading to it.

The Rua do Acre opens out upon the wharves at the beginning of the broad Avenida Central, gashed from sea to sea straight through the heart of the business section of Rio. Both in history and appearance this new main downtown artery of the Brazilian capital is similar to the Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires, which, though it does not rival it in length, it outdoes in some respects, particularly in the picturesqueness of the types that pass along it. Old Rio was crowded together in medieval congestion on the principal point of land jutting into the harbor, and in time this portion became so densely populated with business and so inadequate under modern traffic conditions that nothing but surgery could save it. The major operation of cutting this broad avenue through the compact old town was intrusted to the Baron of Rio Branco, and it still officially bears his name. Early in the present century his plans were carried out at the expense of much cost and destruction, and in place of a labyrinth of narrow unsavory streets and aged unsanitary buildings there appeared in an incredibly short space of time a passageway a hundred meters wide and more than two thousand meters long running with geometrical precision from the inner harbor to the Monroe Palace on the edge of the Beira Mar, with the “Sugar Loaf” set exactly at the end of the vista.

There are many things of interest in downtown Rio, but of them all perhaps the Avenida Rio Branco is the most enticing. Stroll where one will on either side of it, to the Arsenal, the Ministries, the palace where the last emperor of the western hemisphere had his official residence up to little more than thirty years ago, to the heavy and not particularly striking cathedral, one is sure to drift unconsciously back and take again to wandering aimlessly along in the human stream that surges as incessantly through the Avenida as if the populace were still enjoying the novelty of moving freely where their ancestors could not pass. The only other street in old Rio that has anything like the same fascination is the narrow Rua Ouvidor, as it is still known in popular speech, though the city fathers long since decreed that it shall be called the Rua Moreira Cesar. This is to Rio what the Calle Florida is to Buenos Aires, not merely a populous street but a popular institution. Along it are the most brilliant shops, in it may be seen the most exclusive residents of Rio greeting one another with the elaborate and leisurely formality of their class. Level paved from wall to wall, it is in reality a broad sidewalk, for here wheeled vehicles may not enter at any hour whatever. Yet even the enticing windows and the now and then attractive shoppers of the Rua Ouvidor do not often keep the stroller long from wandering once more out into the Avenida.

For all its width it is not easy to walk along the Avenida. What might be called “sidewalk manners” are atrocious throughout South America; in Rio they are at their worst. This is not because the Fluminenses—for these, too, call themselves “rivereens,” though they are far from any real river—are especially inconsiderate, but because they are tropical idlers with no fixed habit of mind, and instead of picking a straightforward course down the broad avenue they wander back and forth across one’s path in all sorts of erratic diagonals. The pace of life slows down noticeably in twelve degrees of latitude, and street crowds are not only slower but much more stagnant in Rio than in Buenos Aires. In time the direct and hurrying northerner comes to realize that the Avenida is not designed to be merely a passageway from somewhere to somewhere else. It is somewhere itself, a lounging-place, a locality in which to show off at one’s best, a splendid site for café chairs and tables. By late afternoon it is often so blocked that passage along it is a constant struggle; in the evening clumps of seated coffee sippers and groups of gossiping men fill the broad sidewalks almost to impassability.

These sidewalks of the Avenida were evidently laid with the connivance of shoemakers. Most of them are mosaics of black and white broken stone in striking designs and fantastic patterns, here geometrical, there in the form of flowers, with horsey figures before the Jockey Club, nautical things before the Naval Club, all of striking effect when seen, for instance, from the upper windows of the Jornal do Commercio building, but particularly deadly on shoe leather. An architect might have much to say of the score of splendid structures that flank the avenue. Some are merely business houses; farther seaward, beyond two great hotels, are clustered the sumptuous Municipal Theater, the School of Fine Arts, and the National Library; set a little back from the street are the Supreme Tribunal and the Municipal Council until the Avenida breaks out at length into the Beira Mar beside the Palacio Monröe in its little park. This last marble and granite edifice was carried back from our St. Louis Exposition and set up chiefly as a show-place and an ultra-formal gathering-hall, but the Chamber of Deputies has been meeting there since their old firetrap on the Praça da República took to falling about their ears. Beyond it lie the blue waters of the oval bay, across which, always in full view from anywhere on the avenue, stands the Pão d’Assucar, like a rearing monolith, the thread-like cable that now and then carries a car to or from its summit plainly visible in the clear tropical sunshine.

However, it is not these more formal things but rather the continual interweaving of curious and motley types, the air of unworried tropical indolence that pervades the throng, the brilliance of the night lights that draw the idler again and again to the chief artery of downtown Rio. Particularly after the hour of siesta does the capital exchange the extreme négligée of the household for its most resplendent garb and sally forth to stroll the Avenida, the women with curiously expressionless faces, as if they would prove themselves deaf to the audibly flattering male groups that grow larger and larger until by sunset the sidewalks become a great salon rather than places of locomotion. Foreigners and those who have lost the spirit of Rio and must hurry may take a taxi. These pour so continually past, day and night, that to cross the Avenida is a perilous undertaking at any hour, for the personal politeness of the Fluminense does not extend to his automobiles, and the chances of being run down, particularly by empty machines cruising for fares, are excellent. Nor is it worth while for the lone pedestrian to protest, for the odds are against him. Both private automobiles and those for hire carry two chauffeurs, usually in white uniforms, less often unquestionably of that complexion, their faces studies in haughtiness as they gaze down upon the plebeian foot-going multitude. The extra man is known colloquially as the “secretary,” and the custom is said to have arisen from the fact that before the law required meters taxis charged all the traffic would bear and it often took two men to collect from recalcitrant customers. But its persistence suggests that there are other reasons, among them the Brazilian love of sinecures, the terror which solitary labor causes to the tropical temperament, the pleasure of having a congenial friend always hanging about, the excess of population over jobs, the real chauffeur’s need of someone to crank his car, light his cigarette, and keep an eye on the police, most of all, perhaps, the Brazilian love of fazendo fita. Literally fazendo fita means “making a film,” but by extension it has come to signify posing for the moving-picture camera, hence, in the slang of Rio, “showing off.” It is a rare Brazilian who is not given to acting for the movies in this sense. Watch a traffic policeman, in his resplendent uniform and white gloves, and you will find that he is much more seriously bent on displaying his manly form and graceful deportment to a supposedly admiring audience than on keeping his street corner clear. Go up to any man with a gold cable swung across his chest and ask gently, “O s’nhor tem a hora?” and he is almost as apt as not to reply with a mumbled, “Ah-er-I cannot tell you the time,” meanwhile grasping first one end of the chain, then the other, as if he were striving to convince even himself that he has a watch somewhere attached to it.

It was midwinter in Rio, yet plump, sun-browned youths rolled in the surf each morning below the wall of her chief driveway and lolled in the shade of the open-air cafés along it. Even in July the lower levels of the city can be unpleasantly hot, which makes it all the more remarkable that it gives such an impression of energy during its business hours. From the wharves to the edges of the mainly residential sections the place pulsates with perspiring activity, though on closer inspection one suspects that the Fluminense is more energetic at play than in productive labor. Whatever his exertions, however, he divides them into short sections separated by the partaking of coffee. All along the Avenida, in every downtown street of importance, there is not a block without its coffee-house, a cool room filled with marble-topped tables on a damp, sawdusted floor, into which one steps from the heated street, silently turns upright one of the score of tiny cups on the table before one, fills it half full of sugar, raps on the table with the head of one’s “stick” until a silent waiter comes and fills what is left of the cup with black coffee, which one slowly sips and, dropping a tostão, a nickel 100-reis piece, beside the empty tasa, wanders on down the street—to repeat the process within the next few blocks.

But with sunset, at least during what Rio likes to refer to as winter, the temperature grows delightful, and it is from then on until a new day warms again that one gets the full tropical fragrance, the un-northern dolce far niente that makes the Brazilian capital so enticing to the wandering stranger. The newcomer soon learns to stay up most of the night and enjoy the best part of the day. Not even Paris was ever more brilliantly lighted than downtown Rio—cynics whisper that the city fathers have a close personal interest in public lighting—not even Parisian boulevards are more scented than the Avenida and its adjacent streets with the pungent odor of mercenary love. Far into the night the Avenida pulsates; long after the theaters and countless cinemas, and the opera in its season, have ended, the surge of humanity continues, punctuated at all too frequent intervals by that most distinctive sound of the night life of Rio,—bass-voiced newsboys singsonging their papers—“A Rua!” “A Noite!”—in the distressingly German guttural peculiar to the native tongue as spoken in the Brazilian capital.

Larger in extent than Paris, broken everywhere by savage, rocky, wooded morros—virgin-jungled hills rising in the very heart of town and which, peeled of their thick scalp of vegetation, prove to be of solid granite—stretching away in great green mounds and ranges standing high into the peerless tropical sky, Rio was as entrancing as Buenos Aires is commonplace. The level parts of the city were flat indeed, flat as if the sea had washed in its débris until it had filled all the spaces between the rocky island hills, and then completely flooded those valleys with houses. Nor did the building stop there. Seeping everywhere into the interstices of its hills, the town was here and there chopped back into them, or, if the morros set sheer rock faces against the intrusion, it climbed upon and over them, until its many-colored houses lay heaped into the sky or spilled down great gorges and valleys beyond. Then always, from whatever point of vantage one saw it, the scene was backed by its peerless sky-line,—the Pico de Gavea with its square head, like a topsail or the conventional symbol for a workingman’s cap; the “Sleeping Giant,” showing nature’s most fantastic carving; hollow-chested Corcovado, the “Hunchback,” peering amusedly down upon puny man playing ant in and out among the tumbled rocks below; the admirable “Sugar Loaf,” keeping eternal watch over the entrance to the bay, the ridges and wooded summits of Tijuca backed far off by the “Organ” range, protruding like broken columns above the distant horizon. “Vedete Napoli e poi mori” might with many times more justice be said of Rio.

It was always a wonder to me how the citizens of the Brazilian capital succeeded in keeping within doors long enough to do their daily tasks. Day or night its peerless scenery and glorious climate were inviting one to come out and play, to forget the commonplace things of life. A local editor complained that the people of Rio do not read in the street-cars, “as our neighbors do in the United States, but spend their time gazing about them and thus lose much opportunity for culture.” Probably he had never been in New York or Chicago, or he would have realized that sometimes people read during their urban travels to keep their minds off the “scenery.” In Rio nature and all outdoors are so much more splendid than any printed page that reading seems a sacrilege. Though I rode along the Beira Mar a dozen times a day, I never succeeded in withholding my eyes from the scene about me; never was I able to miss a chance to gaze across the bay to Nictheroy, or up at the silhouettes of Corcovado and Tijuca; like a great painting it grew upon one with every view.

I passed frequently along this most marvelous boulevard in the western hemisphere, Beira Mar, the “Edge of the Sea,” stretching for miles along the harbor’s edge so close that the ocean spills over upon it on days when it is brava. Between the shady Passeio Publico behind the Monroe Palace and the heroic statue of Cabral on the green Largo da Gloria, the foothills crowd in so closely that there is room for only one street to pass, and right of way is naturally given to the chief pride of the city. Here converge the pleasure seeking traffic and the business bent, to split again presently on the rocky Morro da Gloria, crowned by its quaint little medieval church, the one stream to hurry away through the Rua do Cattete, the other to follow with more leisure the serpentine Beira Mar. This, lined by splendid trees and pretentious residences on the land side, outflanks another rocky hill that would cut it off by passing between walls of man-scarred granite behind it, skirts another arm of the turquoise-green harbor, with a closer view of the gigantic “Sugar Loaf,” and then bursts out through a long tunnel upon the ocean front where marvelous beaches and a succession of boulevards continue for miles through what is rapidly developing into the finest residential section of the Brazilian capital.

The Beira Mar is the show-place of Rio and of Brazil. It is sometimes as if one were asked to admire a costume without seeing more than the lace along the bottom, the eagerness of its people to impress the visitor with the undoubted splendor of this glorious seaside driveway. Yet there are many other strips and corners of the city that are well-nigh as sumptuous or as picturesque; the difficulty is to hunt them out among the morros and foothills that everywhere divide the capital into almost isolated districts. Walking is all very well, but perspiration flows quickly and copiously in Rio, and a perpetually drenched shirt is not entirely conducive to pleasure; and the city is so incredibly extensive that even tramway exploration becomes serious to the man with a weak financial constitution. There are two street-car systems and they operate what is perhaps the best surface system in the world; but it is also the most expensive. Take a street-car ride from one end of Rio to another and back and you have spent, thanks to the “zone system” imported from Europe, the equivalent of half a dollar; and as there are lines out through all the score or more of gaps between the hills and morros, I quickly made the discovery that if I attempted to explore all the city, even by street-car, I should probably have the privilege of swimming home.

What was my joy, therefore, to learn that the superintendent of the “Botanical Garden Line,” which covers all the more beautiful half of Rio, came from the town in which I had spent much of my boyhood. I had long wanted the experience of being a street-car conductor or motorman, and made application at once. My fellow-townsman hesitated to give me any such place of responsibility unless I would agree to stay for some time, but he was quite ready to appoint me a fiscal segreto of the system under his charge, at the most munificent salary I had ever drawn in my life—six thousand a day! That was exactly enough to pay for my room and board in the German hotel of the Rua do Acre; still it was decidedly better to be paid for riding about town than to have to pay for that privilege, and with my living and transportation assured until I sailed my chief problems were solved.

The “Botanical Garden Line” begins at the principal hotel on the Avenida Central, about which every car loops before setting forth again on its journey to some part of that section of Rio most worth seeing. I was furnished a book of free tickets and had only to take a back seat on any of these cars and, while reading a newspaper or seeing the scenery as inconspicuously as possible, casually notice whether the conductor showed an inclination to forget to ring up fares or to break any other of the strict rules of the company. My tickets were good only for the oceanside half of town, for though they were under the same North American ownership the two car systems did not connect, and anyone traveling all the way through town must walk a block from the hotel loop to the cars of the business section. This, however, was more compact and less interesting to the casual visitor than the region in which I had been given free transportation.

I was frequently seen thereafter boarding a “bonde da Light” at the Avenida hotel, or alighting from one after a long journey seaward. The company was officially known as the “Light and Power,” whence the abbreviation of ownership; and as the first electric street-cars introduced into Brazil were financed by bonds that were offered for sale to the Brazilians with much advertising, and there was no other term for them in the national vocabulary, the street-cars that finally came were dubbed “bonds,” and so they remain to this day, except that, as the Brazilian, like all Latins, cannot pronounce a word sharply cut off in a consonant, he usually calls them “bondes,” in two syllables.

The “bondes” of Rio are as excellent as those to be found anywhere on the globe, particularly on the more aristocratic “Botanical Garden Line.” Naturally, when a street-car company can get a quarter for a ride across town it can afford to maintain the best of service. The cars are all open, there are five persons, and five only, to a seat, smoking is allowed on all but the first three benches, and the law forbids those not properly dressed to ride in the first-class cars, there being second-class trailers for workmen and the collarless at certain hours of the day, on which those carrying bundles larger than a portfolio are also obliged to travel. Street-cars, like every other enterprise in Brazil, carry a heavy incubus of official “deadheads” and politicians. Soldiers, sailors, gasmen, mailmen, customhouse employees, street lighters, policemen, and a dozen other types in uniform ride free by crowding upon the back platform. They are not allowed seats, as are the swarms of politicians with elaborately engraved yearly passes—which they consider it beneath their dignity to be asked to show; but with those exceptions there are no “standees.” Law, custom, natural politeness and the lack of haste of the Brazilian are all against permitting a person to crowd into a filled car, no matter what the provocation. Laws are not always obeyed to the letter in the liberty-license atmosphere of South America’s most recent convert to republicanism, but during all my stay in Brazil I never saw a passenger attempt to board a full street-car.

I am compelled to admit that the street-car conductors of Rio are superior to our own in courtesy and their equal in attending strictly to business, and that the “Light” probably gets as large a percentage of its fares as does the average line in the United States. In spite of my duty as secret inspector I was utterly unable to find any serious fault with them, thanks perhaps to long and strict American discipline, for there was a great difference between their staid, careful manner and the annoying tomfoolery of the more youthful collectors on the native-owned motor-busses along the Avenida and out the Beira Mar. Part of this result, perhaps, was accomplished by a regular system of increase in wages and a gold star on the sleeve for each five years as inducements to longevity in the service. The Brazilian is noted for his inability to protest against exploitation, but he is very touchy as to the manner in which he is asked to pay, which is perhaps the reason the conductors of Rio never say “fares, please,” but only rattle suggestively the coins in their pockets as they swing from pillar to post along the car. Nor have we ever reached the level of masculine daintiness of the Brazilian capital, where young dandies carry little mesh purses worthy of a chorus-girl, from which they affectedly pick out their street-car fare, dropping the coins from well above the recipient palm in order to avoid personal contact with the vulgarly calloused hand of labor.

Most of the lines of the “Botanical Garden” system are so long that three or four round trips a day was all I could, or was expected to, make; moreover, I was instructed not to return by the same car that carried me out between Rio’s hills to the end of the line, lest I betray my calling. Thus I was forced to visit every nook and corner of half the capital in the natural discharge of my duties. The Botanical Gardens for which the system was named, lay far out on the edge of the salty Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, a marvelous collection of tropical and semi-tropical flora. Yet this was made almost inconspicuous by its setting, for all Rio is a marvelous botanical garden. Greater wealth of vegetation has been granted no other city of the world, so far as I know it. Date palms, cocoanut-palms, a multitude of other varieties, each more beautiful than the other, grew in profusion down to the very edge of the sea, all to be in turn outdone by the peerless royal palm. They call it the “imperial palm” in Brazil, because João VI of Portugal, first European emperor to cross the sea to reign in his American domain, to which he fled before the conquering Napoleon, caused this monarch of trees to be brought from the West Indies, and decreed that all seeds that could not be used by the royal family should be burned, lest they fall into the hands of the common people. Slaves stole the surplus turned over to them for destruction, however, and sold them to any who cared to buy, so that to-day the imperial palm is the crowning glory of nature along all the coast of Brazil. In Rio it is never absent from the picture. It grows in the courtyards of cortiços, those one-story tenement blocks of the Brazilian capital, and in the patios of decaying mansions of former Portuguese grandees; it stretches in long double rows up many a street and private driveway; it shades the humblest hovels and the most pompous villas of the newly rich with that perfection of impartiality which only nature attains; it thrusts itself forth from between the rocks along the seashore wherever waves or wind have carried a bit of sustaining soil; it clusters in deeply shaded valleys and climbs to the summits of the encircling mountains, there to stand out in regal isolation above the tangle of tropical creepers and impenetrable jungle that is constantly threatening to invade the tiny kingdom of puny man below. This great city-dwelling forest is one of the chief charms of the Brazilian capital. It seems to grasp the city in its powerful embrace, now affectionately, as if its only purpose were to beautify it, sometimes, as if bent on thrusting man back into the sea from whence he came, insinuating itself into every open space, spreading along every street like the files of a conquering army, invading the parks and the interior courts of houses, where marble pavements in mosaics of bright colors gleam amid great masses of jungle flowers, gigantic cool ferns, and fragrant orange-trees, overtopped by the majestically rustling imperial palm. It is illegal to cut down a tree within the limits of Rio, and the forest makes the most of its immunity by crowding the heels of the human creatures who soft-heartedly spare it; trees, shrubs, bushes, lianas, creepers, a veritable tidal wave of forest and jungle sweeps from the edge of the sea to the summits of the encircling hills, like multitudes gone to demand of the sun the renewal of their strength and energy.

My job took me out through older avenues lined with portentous dwellings dating back to colonial days; it dropped me with time to spare beside little praças, slumbering in the sunshine beneath rustling fronds, that carried the mind back to old Portugal, or at the foot of streets which ran up narrowing valleys until they encountered sheer impassable wooded hillsides; it left me at the beginning of rows of houses of every conceivable color, shape, and situation, which twisted their way up gullies or draped themselves over the lower flanks of the hills, some seeming ready to fall at the first gust of wind, some tucked immovably into evergreen tropical settings, the loftiest overtopped only by the imperial palms or by the mountains in the far background. So swift are many of these byways of Rio that a street-lamp in the next block is sometimes well above the moon; so closely are nature and man crowded together that there is absolute primeval wilderness within half an hour’s walk of the Avenida central, and one may come upon clusters of jungle cabins lost in the bucolic calm of the virgin matta almost in the heart of the city limits.

Some of our lines passed through long dark tunnels bored in the granite hills, to reach one or another of those pretty, seaside towns that make up the outskirts of Rio. One ran the full length of Copacabana with its mile upon mile of peerless beach directly facing the Atlantic a short square back of the main street; still others hurried on and on through suburbs that scarcely realized they were part of the city. There was Ipanema, for instance, where the track was lined more often than not with uninhabited cactus desert, the car breaking out every little while from behind a hill upon the welcome perpetual sea breeze, or passing scattered shanties bearing such pathetically amusing names as “Casa Paz e Amor,” or “A Felicidade da Viuvinha,” with a goat and a few hens scratching in the beach sand before them. The Ipanema line was particularly attractive, for it ran so far out that I could take a dip in the sea between inspecting trips without going to the expense of acquiring a bathing-suit.

Many a visitor to Brazil has returned home convinced that her capital has no slums. It is an error natural to those who do not stay long or climb high enough. The traveler who subsidizes the exertions of a pair of chauffeurs or who scuffs his soles along the mosaics of the Avenida Rio Branco, justly admiring the Theatro Municipal for all its imitation of the Paris Opéra, admitting that the Escola de Bellas Artes and the Bibliotheca Nacional are worthy of their setting, and that the Beira Mar and the seascape beyond are unrivaled, often leaves without so much as suspecting that there is a seamy side to this entrancing picture, that he who has seen Rio only on the level knows but half of it. Indeed, even the leisurely wanderer who covers the entire network of tram-lines within the city has by no means completed his sight-seeing; to do so he must frequently strike out afoot and climb.

For the slums of Rio are on the tops of her morros, those rock hills which, each bearing its own musically cadenced name, rise everywhere above the general level. The Carioca—the inhabitant of Rio is more apt to call himself by this name than by the more formal term Fluminense—hates physical exertion such as the climbing of hills, and the flat places of the city are in high demand for residential as well as business sites. A few sumptuous villas clamber a little way up them within automobile reach, but the upper flanks and summits of the morros are left to the discards of fortune. Here the poorer classes congregate, to build their shacks and huts of anything available,—fragments of dry goods boxes, flattened out oil cans, the leaf base of the royal palm—every shape and description of thrown-together hovels, inhabited by washerwomen, street hawkers, petty merchants, dock laborers, minor criminals, victims of misfortune, and habitual loafers. Barely two blocks back of the justly admired Municipal Theater there rises such a hill, so densely crowded with makeshift dwellings that only men of moderate girth can pass comfortably along the dirt paths between them; it would take a persistent walker weeks to investigate all the other congested hilltop towns within the city. There the stroller from below finds himself in quite another world than the Avenida at his feet, a world whose inhabitants stare half-surprised, half-resentfully at the man with even a near-white collar, yet many of whom have such a view from the doors of their decrepit shanties and such a sea breeze through the cracks in their patchwork walls as the most fortune-favored of other lands may well envy.

These scores of morros rising above Rio’s well-to-do level are of many shapes, some only a little less abrupt and striking than the “Sugar Loaf” at the harbor’s entrance, others great rounded knolls over which the town has spread like fantastic unbroken jungle, those in the older part of town terminating in feudal looking castles or former monasteries turned to modern republican use, some of them so high that the sounds of the traffic and the trafficking below are drowned out by the hilarity of negro boys rolling about the dusty shade in old frock coats and what were once spotless afternoon trousers, gleaned from the discard of the city beneath. There are white people living on the summits of the morros,—recent immigrants, ne’er-do-wells of the type known as “white trash” in our South—but easily four out of every five of the hilltop inhabitants are of the African race, and he who thinks the negro is the equal of the white man under equality of opportunity should climb these slum-ridden hills and see how persistently the blacks have risen to the top in Rio, though there is so slight a prejudice against the negro in Brazil that his failure to gain an eminence in society similar to his physical elevation must be just his own fault. It is chiefly from her hilltops, too, that come what Rio calls her gente de tamanco, wearers of the wooden-clog soles with canvas slipper tops which are the habitual footwear of the poorer sockless Cariocas. The falsetto scrape of tamancos on the cement pavements is the most characteristic sound of the Brazilian capital, as native to it as its perpetual sea breeze and its sky-piercing palmeiras imperiaes.

It was dusty on the morros at the time of my “slumming,” for Rio was suffering from what the authoritative “oldest inhabitant” called the worst drought in forty years, and long lines of the hilltop inhabitants were constantly laboring upward with former oil cans full of water on their heads. The shortage of water had grown so serious that even down on the level the supply was shut off from dark until daylight; the ponds in the Praça da República and similar parks were so low that the wild animals living there in a natural state of freedom were in danger of choking to death. But hardships are familiar to the people of the hilltops, and there was an air of cheerfulness, almost of hilarity, about the long row of public spigots on the Largo da Carioca behind the Avenida Hotel at the end of the old Portuguese aqueduct, to which the morro dwellers descended for their water, as slaves once carried from the same spot the supply for all the city.

The unavoidable excursion for all visitors to Rio is, of course, the ascent of the “Sugar Loaf.” For centuries after the discovery of Brazil and the founding by Mem da Sá of the village of São Sebastião at the mouth of the putative “River of January” this enormous granite thumb, its sides so sheer that they give no foothold even to aggressive tropical vegetation, was considered unscalable. But in time this, like so many of mankind’s impressions, was proved false and by the middle of the last century it had evidently become a favorite feat to salute the city from the summit of the Pão d’Assucar. At any rate, in running through an old file of the Jornal do Commercio at the National Library I found in a number dated “Corte e Nitherohy, December 8, 1877,” among many appeals to “His Gracious Majesty in the shadow of whose throne we all take refuge,” the following item:

This morning the American Senhores—here followed four American names—set out at 5 A.M. and climbed to the top of our Pão d’Assucar, arriving at 7:11. This climbing of the Sugar Loaf is getting so frequent that before long no doubt someone will be asking for a concession for a line of bonds to that locality.

The writer, of course, considered this the height of sarcasm, and a clever thought improved by its connection with the burning question of the hour, for in the same issue there was a notice that more street-car bonds were about to be offered for sale, and the sheet was strewn with complaints against the “Botanical Garden Rail Road, which is not living up to the concession which His Gracious Majesty was pleased to grant it in 1856, but is oppressing the people of this Court for the benefit of a heartless corporation.” Yet if that particular scribe were permitted to peer out for a moment from the after world of newspaper writers he would find that his bon mot has entirely lost its sting, for that is exactly what someone has done, and to-day there is a line of “bonds” to the top of the “Sugar Loaf.”

Traveling out to the end of the Beira Mar, continuing on around the harbor instead of dashing through one of the tunnels leading out upon the open Atlantic, one comes to a station beyond the Ministry of Agriculture—set on this rocky neck of land, no doubt, so that the ministers may have a constant sea breeze and catch no scent of the tilling of soil. On the way the massive Pão d’Assucar, here suggestive rather of a loaf of French bread stood on end, grows more and more gigantic, the long span of cable to the summit swinging across the sky like a cobweb, and the timid have often been known to turn back at this point rather than risk their lives in the aërial journey before them. There are many of these striking forms of granite monoliths along the coast of Brazil, though of them all Rio’s “Sugar Loaf” is probably the most dramatic. The cable tram had been in operation about a year, the company being Brazilian and the machinery German. At the station visitors are sold tickets at once—after which they are incessantly pestered by hangers-on of the company to buy beer and the like at the station café until a car is ready for the journey. The conveyance is similar to a small closed tramcar, with wire-grated windows, the end ones open, a locked door, and benches on two sides, except that instead of having wheels beneath there are rollers above, which run on two cables of about two inches in diameter. Sliding smoothly upward at nearly a 45-degree angle, the first car carried us to the top of a rock hill called the Penedo da Urca, 220 meters high, where we were let out to walk a few hundred yards—and given ample opportunity to quiet our nerves with beer and sandwiches. From this another car swung us across the bottomless wooded chasm between the two peaks on a cable that sagged considerably of its own weight and set us down on the bald rock top of the Pão d’Assucar, 1250 feet above the sea.

At this late afternoon hour the “Sugar Loaf” casts its own shadow far out across the entrance to the harbor. The city is apt to be a bit hazy, the sun, or the moon, often just red blotches in the dusty air in time of drought, but its hills and the countless islands of the bay seem solid rocks with woolly wigs of forest and jungle. The ferry crawling across the bay to Nictheroy, ocean-going steamers creeping in and out of the harbor, leave their paths sharp cut and clear behind them as the trail of a comet shooting across the sky. Almost directly below, the Morro Cara de Cão (“Dog’s Face”) stretches upward in a futile effort to rival the giant above. On its projecting nose the Fortaleza São João faces that of Santa Cruz, inaccessible on the Nictheroy side opposite, midway between them is a little island bearing the Fortaleza da Lage, and still farther in, completing the quartet of watchdogs that guard the entrance to Brazil’s chief harbor, lies the fortified island of Villegaignon, named for the Frenchman who once installed his forces here and disputed possession of the bay with Mem da Sá. One can look as directly down into every activity of São João Fortress as from an airplane, the roll of drums rising half-muffled to the ears as tiny ants of soldiers, drilling in squads, take minutes to march across the two-inch parade ground. As the sun goes down behind the bandage of clouds along the lower horizon, the scene clears somewhat of its bluish dust-and-heat haze and discloses the myriad details of the vast spreading city, strewn in and out among its morros until it resembles some fantastic and gigantic spider. Evening descends with indescribable softness, the world fading away out of sight through a gamut of all known shades of color, the wash of the sea on a score of sandy beaches and on the bases of rocky islands and hills coming up like hushed celestial music. Then a light springs out of the void, another and another, quickly yet so gradually as to seem part of nature’s processes, until at length all the city and its suburban beach towns, the very warships in the harbor, are outlined in twinkling lights—for each and all of them do distinctly twinkle—like sparkling gems of some fantastically shaped garment of dark-blue stuff, of which nothing else is seen but the dim jagged silhouette of the mountain background, whence blows the caressing air of evening.... But only the foolhardy would attempt to paint such scenes in words; like all the regal beauties of Rio they reveal themselves only to those who come to look upon them in person.

Yet there are many who regard the view from the Corcovado as still more striking. The “Hunchback,” rising a thousand feet higher than the “Sugar Loaf,” leaning over the city as if it were half-amused, half-disgusted by the activities of the tiny beings below, is more easily accessible. A little independent tram-line runs out along the top of the old Portuguese aqueduct bringing water to the Largo da Carioca, crossing high above a great gully filled with town and metropolitan bustle, winding away among wooded hills strewn with costly residences, to Aguas Ferreas; or one may walk there by any of several routes lined by old mansions and scattered shops and, if courage is equal to physical exertion in the tropics, climb in a leisurely three hours to the summit. But a rackrail train leaves Aguas Ferreas at two each afternoon, and he who can more easily endure the cackling of tourists may spare himself the ascent afoot. A powerful electric engine thrusts the car up the mountainside before it, by a route so steep that the city below seems tilted sharply away from the sea. Much of the way is through dense, jungled forest, that militant tropical Brazilian forest which comes down to the very gates of Rio and pursues the flabby-muscled urban population into the very downtown streets of the capital. Sometimes the road is cut through solid rock, at others it glides through long tunnels of vegetation, to emerge all at once in the clear blue sky a few steps from a sight that is not likely to be forgotten in one brief life-time.

From the cement platform that has been built out to the edge of the summit one might look down from daylight until dark without seeing all the details of the city at his feet, the tumult of jungled hills about him, the bay with its countless islands of every possible shape, all spread out as upon some huge relief map made with infinite care upon a flat, turquoise-blue surface from which everything protrudes in sharp-cut outline. Nictheroy, several miles away across the bay, seems close at hand, the “Sugar Loaf” is just one of many insignificant rocks bulking forth from the mirroring blue surface below, and the roar of the beaches comes faintly up from all sides.... But the funiculaire company is apparently jealous of their view, or of its competition with other things demanding attention, for the visitors are soon hurried down again—as far as a hotel and café built in the woods by the thoughtful corporation, where one may follow the old Portuguese aqueduct for miles through thick damp forest, if one has the energy and strategy necessary to escape the ubiquitous purveyors of beer and sandwiches.

Perhaps the finest experience of all—for there are so many vantage points about Rio that the visitor is constantly advancing his superlatives—is the ascent of Tijuca, highest of all the summits within the city limits, more than a thousand feet above the Corcovado and 3300 above the sea, its top not infrequently lost in the clouds. This may be reached from front or rear, as a single hurried trip of three or four hours or as the climax of one of those many all-day walks that may be taken within the bounds of Rio without once treading city pavements; and its charm is enhanced by its freedom from exploiting companies or too easy accessibility.

A prolongation of a principal boulevard lifts one quickly into the hills, or one may strike out from the end of the Gavea car-line upon an automobile road that winds and climbs for nearly fifteen miles along the cliffs above the sea, always within the city limits yet amid scenes as unlike the familiar Rio as the Amazon jungle. Here and there are tiny thatched cabins all but hidden beneath the giant leaves of the banana, pitched away up 45-degree hillsides, climbing as high as their energy endures, the huts inhabited by shade-lolling negroes as free from care for the morrow as the gently waving royal palm trees far above them. Now and then one passes a rambling old house of colonial days, perhaps a mere tapera now, one of those abandoned mansions fallen completely into ruin after the abolition of slavery, of which there are many in the fifty-mile periphery of Rio. Then for long spaces there is nothing but the tumultuous hills heavily clothed with dense, humid green forest piled up on every side, the square, laborer’s-cap summit of Gavea, the Roman nose of its lofty neighbor, and other fantastic headlands in ever bluer distance, with the ultra-blue sea breaking in white lines of foam far below and stretching to the limitless horizon. The ascent is often abrupt, sometimes passing a tropical lagoon with waving bamboo along its edges, perpendicular walls here and there rising to summits as smooth as an upturned kettle, sheer slopes of rock, so clear of vegetation as to be almost glassy in appearance, standing forth into the sky as far as the eye can follow, while everywhere the imperial palms wave their plumage, now high above, now on a level with the eye, their cement-like trunks stretching down to be lost in the jungle of some sharply V-shaped valley.

But the more ordinary way to Tijuca is to take the Alta Boa-Vista car out one of the many fingers of Rio, past the formerly independent town in which once lived José d’Alencar, Brazil’s most prolific novelist, to a sleepy suburban hamlet well up the mountainside and of the same name as the peak above. Most travelers call that the ascent of Tijuca, or at least are content with a climb, by automobile preferably, a few hundred feet higher to a charming little waterfall almost hidden in tropical verdure. But the real excursion begins where the automobile road and the average tourist leave off. For two hours one marches steadily upward through cool dense tropical forest, its trees ranging from tiny to immense giant ferns, bamboos, and palms lining all the way. The trail grows steeper and more zigzag, winding round and round the peak until it breaks forth at last frankly in steps cut in the living rock and climbs, between two immense chains that serve as handrails, straight up to the summit, a bare spot like a tonsure or an incipient baldness in the otherwise unbroken vegetation.

Here is a view in some ways superior even to that from the Corcovado, for one sees not only all Rio, no portion of it hidden by the range beneath, but the whole seven hundred square miles of the most extensive federal district on earth, and mile upon mile away up country, over chaotic masses of hills, through the villages along the “Central” and “Leopoldina” railways, to the haze-blue mountains of Petropolis and the “Organ” range. Every island in Guanabara Bay, from huge Gobernador in the center of the picture to the tiniest rock sustaining a palm-tree, all Nictheroy and its woolly and rumpled district beyond, stand out in plain sight; and on the other side of hills that seem high when seen from the city but which from here are mere lumps on the surface of the earth, are beaches without number, the soft, tropical Atlantic spreading away to where sea and sky melt imperceptibly together.

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IX. BRAZIL, PAST AND PRESENT

The Spaniard Pinzón had already sighted what is to-day Brazil when, in 1500, Pedro Alves Cabral, whom Portugal had sent out to get her share of this new world, accidentally discovered land at some point on the present Brazilian coast. He named it “Vera Cruz,” which not long afterward was changed to “Santa Cruz.” But neither name endured, for the only importance of the country during the first century and more after its discovery was its exportation of the fire-colored wood of a bright red tree which found favor in the old world for decorative purposes. This the Arabs called “bakkam,” or “burning wood,” a term which became in Latin bresilium, in French braise, and in Spanish and Portuguese brazil, and gradually the “land of the brazil tree” came to be known simply as Brazil.

The first white settler in Brazil of whom there is any authentic record was Diogo Alvarez Correa, a Portuguese sailor whose ship was wrecked near the present site of Bahia. His companions are said to have been killed by the aborigines, but Diogo won their interest or fear by means of a long implement he carried which belched fire at a magic word from its owner and brought death upon anyone at whom he pointed it. The Indians named this extraordinary being “Caramurú,” which in their language meant something like “producer of lightning” or “sudden death,” and welcomed him into their tribe. Diogo made the most of his opportunities and had already established a considerable colony of half-breed children when he passed on to new explorations in another world. His good work was continued by fitting successors, since, to put it in the simple words of a Brazilian historian, “the first arrivals found no difficulty in procuring companions among the Indian women, as the latter had a peculiar ambition to possess children by a race of men whom they at first deemed demigods.” Thus the landing-place of “Caramurú” came in time to be the capital of all Brazil.

Meanwhile João Ramalho had established the village of Piratinanga, destined afterward to move its site and become São Paulo, and de Souza began the present Santos by building the fort of São Vicente, while in the north Olinda and Recife were showing the rivalry which has culminated in the city now called Pernambuco. In 1516 Solis drifted into a harbor which he named “River of January,” evidently so incensed at its lack of length or at the heat of Brazil’s most torrid month as to refuse to give it one of the customary saints’ names. His mistake was not discovered until de Souza explored the bay sixteen years later and found it no river at all. The French soon began to make settlements along the coast and Durand de Villegaignon of the French navy, sent out by Coligny, took possession of the island in Rio harbor which still bears his name; but the Portuguese Mem da Sá at length drove him out and clinched the expulsion by founding a fortress and thatched village on the mainland, which he named, in honor of the day’s saint, “São Sebastião.” Soon this became a worthy rival of Bahia and Olinda and by the end of the sixteenth century it was recognized as the capital of the southern part of Portugal’s possessions in the new world.

For a time these promised to remain less extensive than they finally became. The French founded a settlement called St. Louis on the island of Maranhão off the north coast of Brazil and gave evidence of a desire to conquer more territory. In 1624 the Dutch formed a “West India Company” and took the capital, Bahia, which was recovered by the Spaniards two years later, both Portugal and Brazil being under Spanish dominion for sixty years at that period. In 1630 the Dutch took Pernambuco and all Brazil north of the River São Francisco, and had high hopes of annexing the entire country. By 1661 luck had turned, however, and a treaty gave the enormous tract now known as Brazil to Portugal for the payment of eight million florins to the Dutch and allowing them free commerce in everything except the principal export, the fiery brazil wood. At the end of the seventeenth century this valuable product was cast in the shade by the discovery of gold in the interior of the country.

When the Conde da Cunha was sent out by Pombal as viceroy in 1763 he was instructed to move his capital from Bahia to São Sebastião on the “River of January,” the latter having become more important because of its proximity to the mines of Minas Geraes and to the River Plata, where fighting with the Spaniards was frequent. About the same time the coffee berry was introduced into the hitherto unimportant state of São Paulo, noted until then chiefly for the energy and ferocity of the cattle-raising Paulistas in the stealing and enslaving of Indians from the adjacent Spanish colonies. Great numbers of negro slaves had been introduced into the country, particularly in that paunch-like portion of it jutting farthest out into the Atlantic toward Africa and where the planting of sugar-cane made a large supply of labor necessary. Soon after the coming of da Cunha the further introduction of negroes into Portuguese territory was forbidden, but the decree was never seriously enforced, and the natural increase of the bondsmen, abetted by such customs as freeing any female slave who produced six children, caused in time the preponderance of African blood.

When Rio de Janeiro was made the national capital of Brazil in 1763 it had some thirty thousand inhabitants. Nor did it increase greatly during the half century that followed. Its chief growth and development dates from the arrival of the court in 1808. João VI of Portugal, driven out of his own land by Napoleon, fled on a British ship “with all the valuables he could lay hands on,” after the way of kings, and landed in Bahia, soon afterward moving on to Rio and setting up his court under the title of “King of Portugal, Brazil, and Algarve.” He opened the country to foreign commerce, imported the royal palm, and carried out certain reforms in the formerly colonial government. The way having been cleared for him, he returned to Portugal in 1821, leaving his son behind as regent. On September 7th of the following year this son declared Brazil independent and proclaimed himself emperor under the title of Pedro I. He was soon succeeded, however, by his infant son, Pedro II, whose reign of half a century was punctuated by a three years’ war against Rosas, the tyrant of the Argentine, and by the war of 1864 in which Brazil joined the Argentine and Uruguay against the despot Lopez of Paraguay. This second conflict cost the country thousands of men and £63,000,000 in money—which, by the way, has not yet been paid—but it established the free navigation of the Paraguay River and put Rio de Janeiro into communication with the great wilderness province of Matto Grosso.

During the reign of Pedro II there had been much criticism of the country’s anachronistic custom of negro slavery. This culminated in 1888 in a decree of emancipation signed by the Princess Isabel, who was acting as regent during her father’s illness. By this time the Frenchman Comte had won many Brazilian disciples for his “positivist” philosophy, and certain other factions were showing a growing enmity to the monarchy. These elements and the leading planters, disgruntled at the loss of their slaves even though they were reimbursed for them from the public funds, formed a republican party. Finally the church, according to a native writer, “seeing which side was going to win, withdrew her weight from the crown and threw it into the other side of the balance,” and on November 15th, 1889, Brazil was declared a republic.

Like the abolition of slavery the year before, the change was entirely without bloodshed. The ostensible leader of the revolt was “Deodoro the tarimbeiro” (tarimba being the cot of a private soldier), a bluff old military commander who had the army behind him; but the real head of the movement was Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães, who owed his given name to his father’s admiration for a certain French writer. Constant was a Positivist, as were several others of the leading republicans, and many hints of Comte’s religion, if it may be so called, crept into the new government. To a Positivist was given the task of designing a new national flag, so that the banner of republican Brazil is not merely green, Comte’s chosen color, but bears the words, from the Positivist motto, “Ordem e Progresso”—to which the northern visitor feels frequently impelled to add, “e Paciencia.” Unnecessary violence, however, is contrary to the Positivist creed, and the former opponents of the new régime did not suffer the fate so frequent in South American revolutions. Harmless old Dom Pedro II was put aboard a ship in the harbor with his family, his retainers, and his personal possessions, and “the bird of the sea opened its white wings and flew away to the continent whence kings and emperors came.”

The Brazilian constitution of 1891 is an almost exact copy of that of the United States, and under it and the half dozen presidents who have succeeded Deodoro, Brazil has prospered as well as could perhaps be expected of a tropical and temperamental, young and gigantic country. Barely a year after the adoption of the constitution a revolution broke out in the southernmost state and the Republic of Brazil came near dying in its infancy. But with the ending of civil war and the beginning of reconstruction under Moraes, this setback was regained, and the frequent threats of secession of both the north and the south have thus far come to naught. During this same term a boundary dispute between the Argentine and Brazil was arbitrated by the United States, and in 1898 the present frontier between French Guiana and the state of Pará was established, leaving Brazil as nearly at peace with her neighbors as is reasonable in South America. Her credit abroad was helped by the burning of her old paper money; under an energetic Paulista president railroad construction was greatly increased at the beginning of the present century; Rio was largely torn down and rebuilt, and the vast country was knitted more closely together. To-day an “unofficial compilation” credits Brazil with 30,553,509 inhabitants, and though the skeptical may be inclined to question that final 9, there is no doubt that it is second only to the United States in population in the western hemisphere, with Mexico a lagging third and the Argentine a badly outdistanced fourth. The population of the Federal District, which includes little more than the capital, is estimated at 1,130,080, “based on a count of houses and crediting each residence with ten inhabitants”; which is perhaps a fair enough guess, for Brazilian families are seldom small—and it would of course be hot and uncomfortable work, as well as an intrusion upon “personal liberty,” really to take a census in Brazil or its capital.

As late as 1850, according to an old chronicle, “the habits of the rich of Rio de Janeiro were distressing and those of the lower orders abominably filthy. Monks swarmed in every street and were at once sluggards and libertines. The ladies of that time usually lolled about the house barefoot and bare-legged, listening to the gossip and scandal gathered by their favorite body-women.” Even at the beginning of the present century Rio was far from being what it is to-day. The narrow cobbled streets were worse than unclean, dawdling mule-cars constituted the only urban transportation, and yellow fever victims were often so numerous that there were not coffins enough to go round. Those obliged to come to Rio made their wills and got absolution for their sins before undertaking the journey. In 1889, when the monarchy was overthrown, it was seriously contemplated moving the capital away from Rio because of the constant scourge of “Yellow Jack.” In fact, the constitution fixes the capital of the republic in its geographical center at a selected spot in the wilderness of the state of Goyaz, and a syndicate offered to build everything from a new presidential palace to the necessary railroads, if given a ninety-year concession and monopoly; but like so many well-reasoned schemes this one ran foul of many unreasonable but immovable facts and has never advanced beyond the theory stage.

Once a hotbed of the most deadly tropical diseases, Rio was sanitated by a native doctor at the cost of years of incessant labor that would have disheartened any ordinary man, until to-day it is as free from yellow fever and its kindred forms of sudden death as New York and has as low a death rate as any large city in the tropics. The doctor began his struggle in 1903, by act of congress, organizing a sanitary police charged with clearing away all stagnant water within the city limits, whether in streets, parks, gardens, rain-pipes, gutters, sewers, or—most astonishing of all in a Latin-American country—even inside private houses. This policy, together with the building of new docks and avenues in the congested lower city, and the tearing down of many infected old houses, virtually did away with the breeding-places of the deadly stegomyia mosquito. Deaths from yellow fever dropped from thousands to hundreds in one year, to tens in the next, and to none long before the end of the decade. To this day the sanitary police strictly enforce their regulations, though the man who framed them has gone to repeat his work in the states bordering on the Amazon, and no dwelling can be rented or reoccupied, be it a negro hovel or a palace, until the owner has an official certificate of disinfection.

Among the thirty million people imputed to the country, even in the fraction thereof credited to Rio, there is every possible combination of African and Caucasian blood, with but slight trace of the aboriginal Indian and only a sprinkling of other races. Brazil is indeed a true melting-pot, far more so than the United States, for it mixes not merely all the European nationalities entrusted to it, but crosses with perfect nonchalance the most diametrically opposite races. In theory at least, in most outward manifestations, the Brazilians are one great family, with virtual equality of opportunity, quite irrespective of color or previous condition of servitude. The haziness of the color-line in Brazil is little short of astounding to an American; one cannot but wonder at the lack of color prejudice. Negroes were held as slaves throughout the republic up to little more than thirty years ago; thousands if not millions of former slaves are still alive, and the tendency of humanity to look down upon those forced to do manual labor is certainly as strong in Brazil as anywhere on earth. In England, France, or Germany there is little color prejudice because the stigma of forced manual labor was never attached to any particular color of skin, and because the population has not come frequently enough in contact with the African race to feel the disrespect for it which is the basis of our own color-line. But neither of these motives are lacking in Brazil. Is color prejudice so slight there because the Spaniard and the Portuguese, mixed with the Moors, often by force, during their conquest of the Iberian peninsula, have lost the color feeling, at least for centuries? One has only to see a young Portuguese immigrant to Brazil openly fondling a black girl amid the ribald laughter of his companions quite as our own young rowdies dally with girls of their own class at summer picnics or ward-healers’ dances to understand the widespread mixture of races in South America. Though the actual importation of African slaves into Brazil ceased some eighty years ago, and immigration since then has been almost entirely from Europe, it has been chiefly from the more ignorant and backward countries of southern Europe, where the color-line is at most embryonic. The Portuguese man and the negro woman get along very well domestically in Brazil; even the Portuguese woman joins forces with a black man without feeling that she has in any way lowered herself or her race. The number of young half-breeds sprawling about the poorer houses of the immigrant sections or standing in the doorways of Portuguese shops in the serene nudity of bronze figures shows how general is this point of view.

There are other causes for this lack of racial friction in Brazil. Slavery seems to have been less harsh and cruel than in the United States. With but slight color prejudice or feeling even among the Portuguese who formed the great majority of the owning class, the relation of the Brazilian slave to his master was more in the nature of a hired servant. The slaves belonged to the same church, they observed the same feast days, there were cases where they even married into the master’s family. There was a species of local autonomy in the matter of slavery, slaves being held in any province where it was locally legal and profitable; nor must we lose sight of the fact that there was no statehood problem to agitate and increase the differences of opinion on the subject, no fear that each new territory admitted to the union would disturb the political balance of power in the federal capital. Thus when the question of abolition arose it did not divide the country into two sharply defined camps, with the resultant generations of enmity that it bred in our own land.

Not long after our Civil War the agitation for the freeing of the slaves began in Brazil. There, strangely enough, it came from the north, the more tropical section of the country, partly no doubt because the Amazonian regions, settled long after the sugar-growing lands of Pernambuco and Bahia where intensive labor was needed, found white immigration and their part-Indian population sufficient for their immediate needs. At length a bill was passed by congress and signed by the Princess Isabel making free any child thenceforth born of a slave, and paving the way to the law of 1888 abolishing slavery entirely. The latter was “premature” according to some Brazilians even of to-day, who point to the many ruined plantations within fifty miles of Rio as proof of their contention; it was undoubtedly one of the motives of the revolution which drove monarchy from the western hemisphere in the following year. But the fact that what cost us four years of savage warfare was accomplished in Brazil almost by common consent, without the shedding of a drop of blood, left the “color question” far less acute than in the United States. There is a saying in Brazil that slavery was buried under flowers, and as a result there is no hatred either between sections of the country or between the races that inhabit it; with no deep national or sectional wounds to heal a fraternal relationship quickly grew up, so that to-day blacks and whites celebrate Emancipation Day together in much the same spirit which we do our Fourth of July.

In popular intercourse the color of a man’s skin is of little more importance in Brazil than the color of his hair. Indeed, it is commonplace to hear people referring to their varying tints in much the same amused and friendly spirit in which our débutantes might speak of a sunburn, and there is no offense whatever in nicknames of color. The Brazilian, in fact, does not recognize a negro when he sees one. Ask him how many of the thirty millions are of that race and he will probably reply, “Oh, eight hundred thousand to a million.” From his point of view that is true. There is no all-inclusive word “negro” or “nigger” in the Brazilian language. To use the term negro or preto is merely to say “black,” and it may be that there are not more than a million full blacks in Brazil. But there are many millions with more or less African blood in their veins, for whom the native language has a score of designations all nicely graded according to the tint of the complexion. There is a difference between the full negro and the mulatto in Brazil which does not exist in the United States; like the Eurasian of India the latter considers himself more closely allied to the whites, and acts accordingly. Thus it is impossible to put the question to a Brazilian as it can be put to an American. After traveling in every state of Brazil, however, I have no hesitancy in asserting that two-thirds of the population would have to ride in “Jim Crow” cars in our southern states.

The question of the mixture of races is unusually interesting in Brazil, especially as many Brazilians seriously believe that their freedom of interbreeding is producing a new type of humanity, under the combined influences of climate, immigration, and the fusion of many stocks by no means all Caucasian, that can endure the heat of the tropics and at the same time retain some of the energy and initiative of the temperate zones. All sentiment or repugnance aside, it is possible that the catholic cross-breeding sanctioned by the Iberian creed may prove economically more profitable to tropical America than the Anglo-Saxon’s instinctive aversion to fusion with the colored races. Yet humanly, it seems to the outsider, the results are not so promising; it looks less as if Brazil were solving the color question than as if color were dissolving Brazil. The citizen produced by the intermixture of Portuguese with negroes is not visibly an improvement on the parent stocks. The mulattoes or quadroons are often brighter, quicker of intelligence, than either the ox-like Portuguese or the full-blooded Africans; but it is widely agreed, even in Brazil, that they have neither the moral nor physical stamina, that they take on most of the faults, and retain few of the virtues of their ancestors.

In Rio de Janeiro evidence of this general interbreeding confronts the visitor at every step, in all classes of society, far more so than in São Paulo and the other southern states, where the flowing tide of Italian and other European immigration has given Caucasian blood the ascendency. Even at his best the average Brazilian is not prepossessing in appearance; in Rio’s most élite gatherings a fine face is a rarity; in her street crowds even a passable one is sufficient motive for an exclamation. Every shade of color, of negroid type and features are indiscriminately mixed together, while poor and insignificant physique, bad teeth, and kindred signs of degeneracy are almost universal. There is something disagreeable about mingling with the throng in Brazil; surrounded on all sides by miscegenation, the visitor develops a subconscious fear that his own blood will inadvertently get a negro strain in it. But by the time he has been a month or two in the country, especially if this has been preceded by a year or more in the rest of South America, he scarcely notices the under-sizedness, the lack of robustness, the patent weakness of character in a Brazilian crowd. He needs an occasional shock of contrast to bring his sense of comparison back to normal. The insignificance of the prevailing type is quickly thrown into clear relief when a pair of burly clear-skinned Scandinavian seamen from one of the ships down at the docks come shouldering their way through a native crowd averaging a head shorter than they.

Yet the equality of mankind irrespective of color is probably in a way as good for the white man in Brazil as it is advantageous to the negro. It saves him from presuming on his own importance simply because he happens to be white, as not infrequently occurs in our own land. Perhaps it is because the Brazilian negro does not himself consciously draw the color-line, because he is instinctively courteous, gives one half the sidewalk like a cavalheiro, yet does not obsequiously shrink before a white man, that he arouses less dislike—or whatever it is—than the American negro; or it may simply be that one’s feelings change with one’s environment.

Yet at bottom there is a real color-line in Brazil, though the casual visitor may never discover it. Evidence of it must be pieced together out of hints that turn up from time to time. Azevedo’s novel “O Mulato,” the reader finds, hinges on the secret color prejudices of north Brazil. One runs across a paragraph tucked away in a back corner of a newspaper:

DISAGREEABLE INCIDENT

It is reported that the intelligent and cultured son of a state senator of Bahia was refused admission to our national military academy for the mere motive that he is black.

I have more than once had a Brazilian of that pale darkness of complexion common to those who have lived for generations in the tropics draw back a sleeve to convince me that the color of his hands and face is climatic rather than racial, at the same time asserting almost in a whisper that the “aristocratic old families” of Brazil are just as proud of their Caucasian blood, and fully as determined that it shall not be sullied with African, as are “os Americanos do Norte.” But positive proof that there is no illegitimate strain in their veins is so rare, and pure-blooded families are so greatly in the majority, that they usually keep their color prejudices to themselves. It does not pay to express such sentiments openly in a land largely in the hands of negroes, or at least of those of negro blood, where the government averages the mulatto tint, where the army which accomplished the change from monarchy to republic is still powerful and overwhelmingly African in its enlisted personnel.

The constitution and the law-making and executive bodies of Brazil are similar to those of the United States, more so, in fact, than in any other country of South America. Here, too, there are states rather than provinces; those states are largely autonomous, even less closely federated than our own and vastly less so than the provinces of Spanish-America, which are governed mainly from the national capitals. In so far as any real one exists, the division between the two main political parties in Brazil is the line separating those who wish a more centralized government from those who wish the present semi-freedom of the states to continue, if not to be increased. It is the contention of the latter that state autonomy permits a fuller development of independent activity, which in the end is of advantage to the entire federation. The other side points to the frequent threats of secession—now of Rio Grande do Sul because it feels it is neglected and exploited by the central government, now of industrial São Paulo, prosperous Pernambuco, or self-sufficient Amazonia as a protest against supporting and being hampered by the throng of official loafers in the federal capital, now of the north from the south for mere incompatability of temperament—as proof that the existing loose bonds are perilous to the future of the republic. As in all Latin-America, however, political parties are much more a matter of personalities, of rallying about some particular leader rather than about a given set of principles, and except in minor details there is no visible difference between the two principal divisions. To put it more concisely, in the words of a frank politician: “Party lines? Well, you see Brazil is like a great banquet table, heaped with all manner of food and delicacies. There is not room for everyone at it, so those of us who are seated are on one side, and those who are constantly trying to crowd into our places form the other party.”

An American long resident in Brazil asserted that the future of the country is in the hands of the fazendeiros of the interior, industrious, tenacious, totally different from the city dwellers, a law unto themselves, original because they have no precedents. However true this may be, one soon realizes that Rio is mainly a port and a point of distribution, living on the “rake-off” from the business passing through its hands, and that such productive activity as exists is chiefly due to foreign residents. The “upper class” Brazilian at least has inherited his Portuguese forefather’s distaste for work and his preference for a government sinecure; thanks perhaps to the climate, he is even more strongly of that inclination than his ancestors. Almost every native of social pretensions one meets in Rio is on the government payroll, and the city swarms with clerks and bureaucrats. The centuries during which the mineral wealth of Brazil poured into the public coffers of Portugal, and from them into the pockets of politicians and court favorites, bred the notion, still widely prevalent in all Latin-America, that “the government” is a great reservoir of supply for those who know how to tap it, rather than a servant of the general population. To the latter, on the contrary, it is something in the nature of a powerful foreign enemy, with which the average citizen has nothing to do if he can possibly avoid it, except to trick or rob it when he gets a chance, yet which he expects to do miracles unaided, as if it were some kind of god—mixed with devil.

It has often been said that the Argentine, Uruguay, and to a certain extent Chile are more progressive than the rest of South America because they are ruled by whites. In her highest offices Brazil, too, usually has men of Caucasian race; but the great mass of citizens being more or less African—though two years’ residence suffices for voting rights—the country is really under a mulatto government. Even immigration is at present unable to better this matter, because white newcomers are numerically and linguistically so weak that they have little say in the government and their efforts merely make the country richer and give the worthless native more chance to engage in politics. Swarms of part-negro parasites, what might be called the sterile class, are incessantly on the trail of the producer, constantly preying on productive industry, and supernaturally clever in devising schemes to appropriate the lion’s share of their earnings. It seems to be a fixed policy of Brazilian government to lie low until a head raises itself industriously above the horizon—then “swat” it! Its motto evidently is, “The moment you find a golden egg, hunt up the goose and choke it to death.” Brazilian taxes make those of other lands seem mere financial pin-pricks. To begin with, there is a “protective” tariff so intricate that it requires an expert despachante to deal with it, and so high that those are rare imports that do not at least double their prices at the customhouse. Then there is the omnipresent “consumption impost.” Scarcely a thing can be offered for sale until it has a federal revenue stamp affixed to it. If you buy a hat you find a document pasted inside showing that the government has already levied 2$000 upon the sale; a 4$000 umbrella has a $500 stamp wound round the top of the rod; every pair of shoes has a stamp stuck on the inside of one of the heels—for some reason they have not yet thought of selling each shoe separately. Almost nothing is without its revenue stamp; and, be it noted, the stamp must be affixed before the goods are offered for sale, so that a merchant may have hundreds of dollars tied up in revenue stamps on his shelves for years, even if he does not lose their value entirely by the articles proving unsalable. There is a “consumption” tax on every box of matches, over the cork of every bottled beverage, be it imported wine or local mineral or soda-water. Tooth-paste is considered a luxury, as by most legislators, and pays a high impost accordingly; there is a stamp on every receipt or bank check, on every lottery, railway, steamer, or theater ticket, on every birth, marriage, or burial certificate; there are taxes until your head aches and your pocketbook writhes with agony, impostos until only the foolish would think of trying to save money, since it is sure to be taken away as soon as the government hears of it. A cynical editor complained that there is no tax on revolutions and that “French women” are allowed to go unstamped.

But this is only the beginning—and these things, by the way, are no aftermath of the World War, but were in force long before the war-impoverished world at large had thought of them. State and municipal taxes are as ubiquitous, and iniquitous, as those of the federal government. Among the few ways in which the Brazilians who overthrew the monarchy did not copy the American constitution was in not decreeing free trade between the states, with the result that politicians who cannot fatten on federal imposts may feed on state import and export duties. Many a state taxes everything taken in or out of it; at least one even taxes the citizens who go outside the state to work. The beans of Rio Grande do Sul, where they are sometimes a drug on the market, cannot be sent to hungry states because the growers cannot pay the high export and import taxes between them and their market. Many a Brazilian city imports its potatoes from Portugal, at luxury prices, while pigs are feeding on those grown just beyond a nearby state boundary. If you buy a bottle of beer or mineral water, you will probably find a federal, a state, and a municipal tax-stamp on it. Every merchant down to the last street-hawker, every newsboy or lottery-vendor, wears or otherwise displays a license to do business.

The politicians are constantly on the lookout for some new form of taxation, but as they have the same scarcity of original ideas in this matter as in others, the ancestry of most of their schemes can be traced back to Europe or North America. Thus they copied the “protective” tariff of the United States, though there are few native industries to “protect,” not only because it was an easy way to raise revenue but because it gave many openings for political henchmen. They were just beginning to hear of the income tax at the time of my visit and to plan legislation accordingly. The more sources of easy money of this kind the government discovers, the worse it seems to be for the country, not only in cramping existing industry but by drawing more of the population away from production into the sterile ranks of the seekers after government sinecures. Thanks partly to Iberian custom, partly to the power of the second greatest class of non-producers—absentee owners of big estates—there is little or no land or real estate tax, except in the cities, and in consequence many squatters and few clear titles. But this is about the only form of financial oppression the swarthy rulers have overlooked, and now and then they show outcroppings of originality that resemble genius. When the outbreak of war in Europe sharpened their wits they had the happy thought, among others of like nature, of charging duty on foreign newspapers arriving by mail and of recharging full foreign postage on prepaid letters from abroad that were forwarded from one town to another within the republic, or even within the same state. Postal Union rules to the contrary notwithstanding. Brazil once ran a post office savings bank, but after taking in millions from the poorer class of the community this suspended payment, and to-day a government bank-book with 5,000$000 credited in it cannot be sold for two-fifths that amount. During the war one could buy a postal order in any city of Brazil, but if the addressee attempted to cash it he was informed that there was no money on hand for such purposes. More than that, if your correspondent returned the unpayable order to you, your own post office would laugh at the idea of giving you back the money. Furthermore, if you received a postal order payable, say, in São Paulo, and presented it at the same time that you bought another order on the issuing office, the tar-brushed clerk would calmly rake in your money with one hand and thrust your order back with the other with the information that the post office had no funds on hand to pay it.

If all or even a large proportion of the income from this hydra-headed revenue system reached the public coffers and passed out from them in proper channels of public improvement, there would be less cause for complaint on the part of the taxpayers. But not only is a great amount of it diverted to the pockets of politicians and their sycophants, even before it becomes a part of the public funds, by such simple expedients as bribery of those whose duty it is to collect them, but the outlets from the public coffers are many and devious, not a few ending in unexplored swamps and morasses. Nor does this well-known and widely commented-upon state of affairs arouse to action the despoiled majority. Bursts of popular indignation take other forms in Brazil. Everyone seems to endure robbery unprotestingly and await his chance to recoup in similar manner. Were all Brazilians honest, it would work out to about the same division of property in the end—and save them much mental exertion. We have no lack of political corruption in the United States, but here at least it is sometimes unearthed and punished. In Brazil the political grafter is immune, both because Portuguese training has made his machinations seem a matter of course and because the “outs” do not propose to establish a troublesome precedent by auditing the actions of those temporarily in power.

The Brazilians are inclined to be spendthrifts individually and nationally. Both the public and the private attitude is suggestive of the prodigal son of an indulgent father of unlimited wealth. Fortunes made quickly and easily in slave times have in most instances long since been squandered; the families who more recently grew rich from cattle, sugar, or coffee have in many cases already gambled and rioted their wealth away. Neither the individual nor the nation is content to live within its income. The politicians periodically coax a loan from foreign capitalists, spend it in riotous living, and when the interest comes due seek to place a “refunding loan,” to borrow money to pay the interest on the money they have borrowed. Financially Brazil had reached a critical stage before the beginning of the World War, not only the federal government owing a colossal foreign debt, but nearly every state and municipality staggering into bankruptcy. The government had issued enormous quantities of paper money bearing the statement “The National Treasury promises to pay the bearer 10$”—or some other sum; yet take a ragged, illegible bill to the treasury and you would probably be told, “Well, you have the 10$ there, haven’t you?” and thus the paper continued in circulation until it wore out and disappeared and the government issued more at the total cost of the cheap material and the printing. Soon after the outbreak of the war all foreign banks in Brazil refused to lend the government any more money, whereupon the politicians authorized the issue of 150,000,000$000 in gold; that is, as it was explained later on in tiny type on them, notes payable in gold, though everyone in Brazil knew that even those already outstanding could not be redeemed. A saving clause at the end of the decree read, “If when these notes come due the government has not the gold on hand to pay them, then it may redeem them in paper.” Such was the mulatto government’s idea of “meeting the present world’s crisis.”

Of a piece with their other schemes are the federal and at least two state lotteries supported by the population mainly for the advantage of the politicians. There are persons who contend that a lottery supplies a harmless outlet for a natural craving for excitement, at a moderate cost to the individual and with a benefit to the state that operates it. With the Latin-American the intoxication of the lottery is said to take the place of alcoholic intoxication in the Anglo-Saxon. All this may be more or less true, but at least the state loses much activity of its day-dreaming citizens, while the bureaucracy and the politicians are fattening on the profits. Lottery drawings succeed one another with feverish frequency in Brazil—the powers that be see to that, whatever other duties they may be forced to neglect. The streets of every large city swarm with ragged urchins and brazen-voiced touts who press tickets upon the passer-by at every turn, each guaranteeing that his is the winning number. Every block in the business section has its cambistas lying in wait in their ticket-decorated shops; besides the veritable pest of street vendors pursuing their victims into the most secret corners, there are cambios all over the country and perambulating ticket-hawkers canvassing even the rural districts. Everyone “plays the lottery.” The young lady on her way home from church stops to buy a ticket, or at least a “piece” of ticket, as innocently as she would a ribbon; school children enter their classrooms loudly discussing the merits of the various numbers they have chosen; the number of persons losing sleep, or going to sleep on the job, figuring up what they will do with the hundred thousand reis they are always sure of winning is beyond computation. The lottery cannot but add to the natural tendency of the Latin-American to put it off until to-morrow, for if it is not done to-day perhaps he will win the grand prize this evening and never have to do it at all. Brazil had long been struggling to get a loan from Europe, but when the war gave capitalists a chance to lend their money nearer home at higher rates and with better security the Brazilians were naturally left out in the cold. Editors complained that when France offered government bonds her citizens rushed forward and subscribed the amount several times over in one day, while Brazil could not get any response whatever from her own people. Yet not a scrivener among them noted that if the Brazilian government could get at a fair rate of interest on a legitimate investment a fraction of the enormous sums her people pay into the state and national lotteries every week there would have been no need to go abroad seeking a “refunding loan.”

Brazil won her political independence a century ago, but economically she is more dependent on the outside world to-day than in 1822. In colonial times wheat was grown in all the half dozen southernmost states; now the big flour-mills of Rio are fed entirely from the Argentine. Brazil is so dependent on her imports, so self-insufficient, importing even the food products she could so easily grow or the most insignificant manufactured articles which she could readily produce, even though she almost wholly lacks coal deposits, that any disturbance of shipping throws her into a panic. Natives refuse to develop the resources of the country, out of indolence, lack of confidence or initiative, or because they prefer to squander their capital in fast living; yet when the “gringo” comes in and starts an industry the native either steps up with a title to the property showing that he inherited it direct from Adam, or, if he cannot take it away from the newcomer in that way, he taxes all the profits into his own pockets. The war forced Brazil to develop some of her own resources, to produce for herself many of the things she had always bought from abroad on credit; it compelled a considerable agricultural development and reduced the number of shopkeepers. Yet the country has already slumped back again into the old rut, and to-day, as before the war, her imports are nearly three times her exports and she is keeping her nose above water only by such stop-gaps as “refunding loans.”

By no means all Brazilians are pleased with the change from a monarchy to a republic. There is still a large and influential monarchical party, composed partly of the wealthier class and those who have always remained monarchists, partly of citizens who have become disgusted with the squabbling and graft of mulatto democracy, or who, on economic and political grounds, have grown dissatisfied with the republican régime and are convinced that the salvation of Brazil lies in the restoration of the old form of government. It is rare and usually a mistake, however, to back water in life, and the imitative faculty of the Brazilian makes it all the more unlikely that the former régime will return, unless a failure of democracy the world over makes it à la mode to bring about such a change.

There was, of course, corruption under the monarchy, but one need not inquire long in Rio to find a man ready to admit that the pall of mulatto politicians and bureaucrats which hangs over republican Brazil is more burdensome than ever were the grasping Portuguese courtiers of a century ago. At least the latter were limited in number and had occasionally a cavalheiro pride that sometimes resembled decency, and old Pedro II in particular, whose habit it was to keep a little personal note-book in which to jot down any lapse from honesty by a public official and to startle the man and his sponsors by bringing up the matter when it came time to reappoint him, is generally admitted to have ruled honestly and generously. But though the revolution of 1889 was in reality only another detail of the world-wide movement of the last century or two for bringing the ruling power down from a select and wealthy class to the uncultured masses, the triumphant proletariat does not appear to have greatly gained by the change. It is natural that the masses, like the foreign firms struggling to keep their heads above water in the form of innumerable taxes and the constant hampering of meddlesome officials, should begin to wonder whether Brazil is not mainly suffering from too much government, whether after all there is not something, perhaps, in the contention of anarchists that the best thing to do with over-corpulent governments is to take them out into the woods and shoot them through the head, as something more burdensome than useful.

One brilliant November day, perorates a Brazilian editor, a few hundred soldiers, enthused by a lucid patriot, destroyed the last American throne amid rousing cries of “Long live the Republic!” And from city to city, from hamlet to hamlet, these words rang through all Brazil. But now, barely a generation later, our armed force is mainly used to suppress personal liberties, the tendency being constantly toward dictatorships; education of the people is given much less attention than is demanded in a democracy, and we are overrun with a devouring swarm of politicians who have lost all idealism and who scarcely occupy themselves with anything but their personal interests, unscrupulously exploiting the public coffers.

The tendency toward dictatorships and the use of autocratic power to cover corruption and aid partizanship was visible even to the naked eye of the casual visitor. At the time I reached Brazil it was ruled over, ostensibly at least, by a nephew of Deodoro, the first president. Never, perhaps, had an administration been so cordially hated. “Dudú,” as the populace called the president, that being his eighteen-year-old wife’s pet name for him, was hated not only for himself but as a tool of the “odious gaucho” senator from Rio Grande do Sul, chief of the “P. R. C.” or Republican Conservative Party, and for some years the national boss of Brazil. When “Dudú” became president, the popular idol and fiery orator, Ruy Barbosa, only survivor of those who overthrew the monarchy, senator also and leader of the “P. R. L.” or Republican Liberal Party, had been the opposing candidate and, according at least to the Liberal newspapers, had been elected by an overwhelming popular vote. To be elected, however, does not always mean to take office in Latin-America, and the combined machinations of the “odious gaucho” and the army, in which “Dudú” was a field marshal, had reversed the verdict.

To hold his own against the popular clamor the Marshal had used methods taken from his own military profession, terminating finally in the declaration of a “state of siege” in the federal capital and that of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Nictheroy across the bay, and in the state of Ceará in the far north. On the surface this did not mean any noted suppression in the freedom of life. But if one happened to be a political opponent of the party in power, or a newspaper publisher, the sense of oppression was distinct. Under the sheltering wings of martial law no articles could be published until they had been submitted to a government censor, whose strictness made impossible the slightest adverse criticism of the powers that were. The suspension of the right of habeas corpus made it possible for “Dudú” to have scores of men thrown into dungeons out on the islands in Guanabara Bay merely because he or some of his followers did not like their political complexions. If the friends or families of the victims happened to find out what had become of them and got a writ of habeas corpus from the Supreme Court—according to the constitution a mandatory order of release—the government answered, “We are in a state of siege and the constitution is not working.” It would be hard to compute the full advantage of this little ruse to the ruling politicians, and the grafting that went on under cover of such protection may easily be imagined. When the decree was finally revoked, on the eve of a new administration, the suppressed news that flooded the papers was little less astounding than the swarms of political prisoners whom government launches brought back to the capital after months of imprisonment without any charge ever having been preferred against them.

Outwardly, of course, the forms of republican government were regularly carried out during all this period. Several times I dropped into the Monroe Palace to watch the House of Deputies meet, report no quorum, and adjourn. Once I went to the Senate, looking down upon that august body from a miserable little stuffy gallery resembling that of a cheap theater, where “any person decently dressed and not armed” had the constitutional right of admittance—unless the state of siege was invoked against him. Brazil’s most famous orator, late unsuccessful candidate for the presidency and the idol of the povo, or collarless masses, was whining through some childish jokes and puns on the alleged bad grammar of a bill destined to establish a new public holiday—as if Brazil did not already have enough of them, with her sixty-five days a year on which “commercial obligations do not mature.” It was evident, too, that the speaker had by no means gotten over his peevishness at not becoming president, for his speech was turgid with personalities and full of innuendos against “Dudú” and his fellow scoundrels. To see the leisurely air with which the senate enjoyed this pastime one might have supposed that no more serious duties faced the wearers of the toga.

Brazil is the only republic in South America that has trial by jury, hence her courts much more nearly resemble our own than they do those of Spanish-America. I attended a trial for murder one afternoon. Whatever other faults they may have, the courts of Brazil cannot be charged with unduly drawing out a trial, once it is begun. The judge called names from a panel of jurors, and as each man stepped forward the promotor, or prosecuting attorney, and the lawyer for the defense looked him up and down much as a tailor might a client and said “Recuso” (I refuse) or “Aceito” (I accept) without so much as speaking to the man or giving any reasons for their action. Evidently they were expected to guess his acceptability as a juror from his outward appearance. Those accepted took their seats, and in less than ten minutes the jury of seven was chosen and the trial had begun. There are juries of three sizes in Brazil, always with an odd number of members, and these do not need to reach a unanimous decision. A simple majority is decisive, though the larger the majority for conviction the heavier the penalty for the crime. Brazilian jurors get no pay, but they are fined if they fail to answer to their names when called.

A paper was passed among the seven jurors, each of whom wrote his name on it; but they took no oath, except that a clerk handed rapidly around among them a glass frame inside which was the sentence in large letters, “I promise to do my duty well and faithfully,” and on this each laid his right hand in silence. There are so many Positivists, free thinkers, fetish worshippers, Mohammedans, and other non-Christian sects in Brazil that the Bible and “so-help-me-God” oath would be even more out of place than in our own metropolis. Then the clerk of the court, who had neither eyes, voice, nor physique, but was a mere living skeleton humped over a pair of trebly-thick glasses, moaned for nearly an hour through the entire proceedings in a lower court the year before. The prisoner was a youthful Carioca, of white race and of the small shopkeeper or hawker type. Throughout the trial everyone addressed him in a gentle, kindly manner. He stated that he was twenty-one, but had only been twenty when arrested, which the promotor whispered to me was merely a ruse to get the benefit of being a minor. More than a year before he had shot a man of his own age in a downtown street, with premeditation, he naïvely admitted. According to the degree of murder proved he might be sentenced to twelve, twenty, or thirty years. There is no death penalty in Brazil, nor will the Brazilian government extradite a refugee who may be punished with more than thirty years’ imprisonment in the land from which he fled, unless that country agrees not to execute him or exceed that limit of punishment.

At length the promotor, who might easily have passed for an American lawyer in any of our courtrooms—until he opened his mouth—began an address in the thinnest, weakest, most worn-out voice imaginable—a common weakness among Brazilians and especially Cariocas, thanks perhaps to the climate—mumbling something about a “villainous premeditated crime” several times before he took his seat. During the next few hours he and the attorney for the defense, the latter in a wire cage across the room, quarreled back and forth, rather good-naturedly as far as outward appearances went, the judge very rarely interfering. It was hotter in the courtroom than in any possible place of punishment to which the accused might be sent, in this life or the next, and the entire throng, from the judge to the last negro loafer in the far corner, was constantly mopping its face. Not a woman was included in the gathering. After the first formalities were over the trial moved forward in almost uncanny American fashion, but with what in our own land would have seemed dizzy speed, for it was finished, with the verdict given and a sentence of six years imposed, by one o’clock the next morning.

Brazilian judges are reputed not often to be open to actual bribery, but to be overrun with sentimentalism, nepotism, that do-anything-for-a-friend or for a friend’s friend, that lack of moral courage necessary to act with full justice when a personal element is involved, which is a crying weakness in all Latin-American countries. Striking evidences of this were frequently coming to the attention, more often in the interior than in Rio itself. A politician in a city farther north, for instance, killed a man of little standing, and went at once to report the matter to his bosom friend, the circuit judge. “All right,” the judge was reported to have replied. “Your sentence is one day’s imprisonment—in my house,” and when a warrant for the assassin’s arrest finally reached him, the judge marked it “Judgment given and sentence served,” and sent it to be filed in the archives. Aside from this weakness, the courts of Brazil seem to be fair; if anything they are too lenient. Not a few Brazilians contend that the jury system is not suited to the temperament of the nation, because it requires a sterner attitude toward human frailty than they can attain. In fact, the extreme leniency of juries is but another manifestation of the liberty-license point of view of Brazil, the same weakness that spares the rod and spoils the child. There were almost daily examples of this attitude of irresponsibility, emotionalism, undue compassion, as if the jurors considered a thief or an assassin at worst a poor unfortunate and were thinking that the day may quite likely come when they will find themselves in the same boat. A baker of a certain large city asked a member of the Chamber of Deputies, to whom he had been supplying bread for months without any suggestion of payment, to settle his bill. Being of foreign birth, the baker may not have known that openly to dun a Brazilian is so great an insult as to be dangerous. The deputy shot him through the heart, and the jury found it “justifiable homicide.” A Carioca boy of fifteen, who had been in jail for a year charged with murder, was tried during my stay in the capital. The whole trial took place between one and twelve P. M., and the accused was found guilty of “imprudence” and sentenced to fifteen days in prison. A well-known citizen of Rio was assassinated on January 5 under revolting circumstances. The case finally came to trial on the afternoon of December 29; the court took a recess from seven to eight for dinner; at 11:20 the jury retired, and at 12:20 there was brought in a verdict sentencing the accused to ten years’ imprisonment. Innumerable examples might be cited, all showing extraordinary sloth in bringing criminals to trial, lightning speed in dealing with them when at last they are arraigned, and a mistaken soft-heartedness in punishing them. On the other hand, the state may, and sometimes does, appeal a case and convict a man acquitted by an earlier verdict.

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X. MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE CARIOCAS

The mixture of races gives Rio a society very different from that of Buenos Aires; its elements are more distinct, more complex, more primitive, much less European. Probably it is the African blood in his veins even more than his Latin ancestry which gives the Carioca the emotionalism and the unexpected violences that often carry the individual or the population to excesses. The Brazilian character may be said to consist of Latin sensibility tinged with the African traits of superstition, fatalism, slovenliness, indiscipline, a certain happy-go-lucky cheerfulness, and an almost total lack of initiative; and to these the country owes most of its social and economic afflictions. It would be unreasonable to expect high things of it. The Portuguese were the cheapest race in western Europe, who won their place in history simply because they happen to live on the sea, and in the New World they mixed indiscriminately and in a purely animal way with the lowest form of humanity. The negro gave the Portuguese more imagination and a better adaptability to the tropics, perhaps an increase of cheerfulness; but with these came other qualities that do not make for improvement. Though he is often quick of intelligence, the Brazileiro seldom shows continuity of effort or any other sturdiness of character; he is exceedingly susceptible to flattery and highly incensed at any mention of the faults which he himself sometimes recognizes. Weather appears to make a difference in man’s disposition, and the climate of Rio does not seem to breed what we call “crankiness.” Outwardly the Carioca is usually good-humored and obliging, with less gruffness than the Porteño. Yet it is evidently not best for a man to be too greatly favored by nature; not only does it make him more indolent, but he seems on the whole to be less happy than in countries where the struggle for livelihood demands continuous and gruelling labor. Though individually and superficially they may be cheerful, the general air of a group of Brazilians is melancholy; as a character in a native novel of standing puts it, “they always seem to be discussing a funeral”—“or pornographic secrets,” adds another. There are more suicides per capita in Rio than in almost any other city in the world, and the finer the weather the more there seem to be reported each morning.

That the Brazilian is superficially courteous and in his way kindly there is no doubt; yet few traces of these qualities are to be found far beneath the surface. Even if he protests, he does so in soft language; palavras grossieras under any provocation are considered exceedingly bad form in any but the lowest classes. Yet there is a distinct suggestion of decadence in this very softness of speech, and one comes to long occasionally for the vigor and manliness of the doubled fist. As fathers the Brazilians have few equals, in all truth, for almost no other race on earth shows more indiscriminate diligence in peopling it. But it is an excellency of quantity rather than of quality. They are good husbands in the Brazilian sense, so long as the woman is content to remain at home and raise children while her lord and master is cultivating similar gardens elsewhere. Divorces are practically unknown because the general sentiment of the country is still Catholic, for all the prevalence of other theologies and philosophies, because the Brazilians have something of the French point of view that the family is primarily a business partnership not to be broken up for such light reasons as lack of love or illicit intercourse, and because the country has no divorce law. Married sons often live with their parents because they are too proud or too lazy to go out and work—though there is a strong family affection among all Latin-Americans, in the long run the principal result of this particular custom is bad for the race. That the rod is spared, often to the detriment of the child, especially of the boys, there is no doubt; one finds proofs of it every hour of the day in Brazil. The average Brazilian is an excellent illustration of the fact that mankind must be disciplined, that even children cannot always be ruled by love any more than they can be fed only on sweets, and the sparing of the rod has had a very large and by no means always beneficial effect on the male adults.

Indeed, there is far too much liberty, too much laissez faire—or deixa fazer, to use the native tongue—in Brazil, as in Spanish and Portuguese life everywhere. No one in the country seems to recognize that liberty may easily slop over into license, that the liberty of one may go so far as to interfere with and even wholly annul that of many others. No doubt democratic liberty should allow street-hawkers to howl the night as well as the day hideous, or let a merry soul pound a tuneless piano until three in the morning. To the newly republicanized Brazilians a law forbidding the interspersing of brothels through every residential district would no doubt be “a despotic interference with our sacred constitutional rights as citizens and equals,” as it would be to compel the hundreds of boys selling newspapers in the streets of Rio to learn some trade or calling, that later they may find some better way to earn a living than by hawking or thieving. But it is the Brazilian, as it is generally the South American, way never to correct anyone or anything unless it is absolutely unavoidable, until a confirmed democrat comes to wonder whether the human race must always have kings or dictators to rule over it rather than ever learning to rule itself. Then one recalls that Brazil has been a democracy, even nominally, only since 1889, and it is not so strange that she has not yet come to see that there may be a seamy side even to liberty.

Though they are constantly asking for credit abroad, either collectively or as individuals, Brazilians trust one another even more rarely than do the average of Latin-Americans. Everywhere are little hints of lack of confidence. The cash system is widely prevalent, which does not merely mean paying the moment the work is done, but often before it will be undertaken, lest the client change his mind or prove insolvent. Thus one pays a dentist before he fills a tooth, the doctor before he will remove an appendix, and a photographer before he will undertake to print one’s films. The mail boxes of Rio are automatic, for instance; the mailman must shove a locked bag under them before they will disgorge their contents, and both box and bag lock themselves as he pulls the latter out again, so that he never sees a letter, much less gets his sticky fingers on it. A judge of Rio stated publicly, when a jury let off a palpable offender, that ninety-five per cent. of the fires in Brazil were set by the owners or their hired agents in order to get the insurance, but that “there are so many artists at this crime who exercise their profession with such admirable perfection that few are ever convicted, however convinced the judge and the public may be of their guilt.” His Honor was, of course, incensed at a specific failure to convict, and perhaps exaggerated somewhat, but there are evidences that he had not greatly overstepped the truth.

There is no more futile occupation on earth than trying to save money in Rio de Janeiro. It melts away like ice under an equatorial sun; in fact, money is of such slight value in Brazil that it seems foolish to try to keep it. Do so and you are more likely than not to find that it has grown even more worthless next morning in exchange for those things of real value which man needs; that you have saved the cash only to lose the credit. Prices were decidedly higher in Rio than in Buenos Aires, or even in Montevideo. A small glass of not very good beer cost 800 reis; a green cocoanut, that finest of tropical thirst-quenchers, growing in superabundance along all the 5000-mile coast-line of Brazil, was considered a bargain at the equivalent of a quarter—and a tip to the man who opened it. The smallest bottle of native mineral water of unquestionable antecedents cost at least a milreis, and thirst lurks on every corner in sun-blazing Rio. Ordinary water? Certainly; if one cares to flirt with the undertaker. Everything else was in proportion to this most necessary source of expense. In the Seccos e Molhados, “Drys and Wets,” as Brazil calls her grocery or provision shops, potatoes sold at six hundred and more reis a kilogram; butter imported from Denmark into this enormous country of splendid grazing lands was a luxury far beyond the reach of any but the affluent. With the smallest coin in circulation worth more than three cents, it was not to be expected that prices would be cut fine. Moreover, there is the tendency of fazendo fita. A Brazilian is ashamed to admit that his money is limited. He has the reputation, and prides himself on it, of being a “good spender,” but this is not so much due to his scorn for money as compared with the better things that money will buy as it is to the fear of being thought less well-off than his fellows. Commerce is largely carried on in public, and the purchaser is thereby forced to pay more for dread of being seen making a fuss. He is afraid to ask the price of a thing before buying, or to protest against exorbitance, lest the by-standers think money matters to him—the ally of the tip-seeker the world over. À la carte restaurants in Rio almost invariably leave the price-space on their menus blank and bring a check bearing only the sum total, knowing that the average client will not have the hardihood to ask for a bill of particulars. Even a Brazilian workman never protests against commercial exploitation, never refuses to take a thing after he has asked for it, but pays whatever is demanded as if it were a pleasure to do so.

Even in the matter of prices a community gets about what it demands, and this national lack of protest has lifted the cost of living in Brazilian cities into the realm of the absurd. Prices of almost anything are out of all reason; the people seem to have formed the habit of paying high to cover the heavy import and other duties and the grafting of their officials, and to expect everything to be marked up in the same proportion. It seems to be more or less a matter of pride with them that they pay more than other people. Third-class fare from Portugal to Rio was 55$000; the return trip on the same ships cost 105$000. The attitude of the entire population seems to be graft and let graft pay through the nose because you can make someone else do likewise. The average Brazilian does not look as hard at a 32-cent milreis as most Americans do at a dime, or Europeans at a copper. Rio is one place where Americans can realize how the European, earning his money with more difficulty than we do, feels when he first comes into contact with our prices.

Numerous proofs may be found that the Brazilian is rather an imitator than an initiator. He seldom has a worthwhile idea of his own, but he is supernaturally quick to grasp those of anyone else. A year or more before my arrival a Portuguese opened a caldo de canna shop in aristocratic Rua Ouvidor. He set up a small cane-press, stood a bundle of choice sugarcanes at the door, laid in a supply of ice, and waited for customers. They soon came, for nowhere does a novelty take more quickly than in Rio. Picking out their own cane as they entered, the clients caused it to be run through the press, the juice straining down through chopped ice, with the result that for a tostão they had a pleasant and refreshing drink. Within a fortnight of the establishment of this entirely new industry fifteen other persons, all Brazilians, had opened caldo de canna shops in the three short blocks of that narrow, vehicle-less shopping street, buying out the former occupants at any price—with the inevitable result that within a month the entire clan, including the originator, were bankrupt. To-day, when the stroller is thirsty yet has no desire to consume alcohol, he can get a glass of iced cane-juice only in a few shops which make this a side-line of their regular business. This is one of hundreds of similar incidents in the commercial life of Rio, and suggestive in general of Brazilian business ethics.

A Brazilian proverb has it that “A cauda do demonio e de rendas” (the devil’s tail is made of lace). Whatever the scientific exactness of that assertion, there is no doubt that the Brazileiro is early, often, and usually successfully tempted by what are sometimes vulgarly called “skirts.” The same may be said of all Latin-America, but in Brazil the undisguised prevalence of irregular polygamy probably reaches its zenith. Rigid, yet provocative, seclusion of the women, thanks to Moorish influence, the former teaching of the Jesuits, to the instinct for self-preservation of the women themselves, is perhaps as much the cause of this condition as the natural polygamous tendency of the males. Being an accepted convention of society that freedom of social intercourse between men and women is certain to lead to more intimate relations at the first opportunity, the women of the better class are inclosed within an impregnable wall of Oriental seclusion, and their contact with men is almost wholly confined to those of their own family circle. Even the French find Brazilian family life unreasonably circumspect. Under such conditions there can, of course, be little social or intellectual activity, little real human intercourse, and it is not surprising that the eager and romantic young men who find it impossible to meet girls of their own class without a cynical chaperon hanging constantly at their heels should fall easy prey to the darker skinned and more accessible members of the sex, or to the imported demimondaines who flourish in all the larger cities.

Naturally fecund, and of strong maternal instincts, the Brazilian woman unquestioningly accepts the tenet that her place is strictly in the home. Marriage does not bring her any appreciable increase in freedom over her closely chaperoned days of virginity. But while she is expected to conduct herself so circumspectly that not a breath of scandal shall ever sully the honor of her fidalgo lord and master, the husband loses none of his bachelor liberty. The average Carioca can, and, above the laboring class at least, usually does, keep a mistress, and not only loses nothing of public esteem, but little of that of his own women. In fact, the politician, the man of big business, of wealth, or of social pretensions, is somewhat looked down upon if he does not maintain an extra household or two; failure to do so is a fit subject for jesting among his friends and acquaintances. The subsidized companions of this class are almost always European, usually French, and preferably blond; rarely are they native born, for the white and better class Brazilians guard their daughters too closely to make possible any irregular approach, and to take a “woman of color” would seem to the wealthy Brazilian like buying poor native perfume when he can get, and all his friends use, the best French product.

But it is not so much the existence of this state of affairs as the perfect frankness with which it is admitted and carried on that astounds the Anglo-Saxon stranger in Brazil. Even the French have never attained the openness and lack of hypocrisy in the sex relationship which has been reached by the Brazilian. Not merely does unattached youth sow its wild oats with perfect indifference to public knowledge; heads of old and respected families cultivate the same crop with intensive, experienced care, quite as openly. The Brazilian who would be ready to challenge to a duel the stranger who spoke to one of the women of his family often brings them to social events, to the races, to a patriotic celebration, and, after installing them in a place of vantage, goes to sit with his overdressed French mistress, as like as not within plain sight of his family, apparently without incurring any censure or even protest from his wife and children and certainly none from society.

The means of acquiring a mistress of proper antecedents are varied. The wealthy and traveled Brazilian brings her home with him from Paris, or entrusts the commission to his friends. There is no difficulty whatever about it, no inquisitive federal authorities, no inquiring protective societies, “not even duty to pay, though that is our chief import,” as a cynical editor put it. If neither of these means are available, and the postal service is incapable of bringing him a prize, the seeker after companionship may advertise in the public prints. Even the staid old Jornal do Commercio, modeled on and in many ways resembling the London Times, does not hesitate to run dozens of such “want ads” every day of the year:

A WELL-CONDUCTED GENTLEMAN

Educated and serious, but with few social relations in the city, wishes to meet a pretty and like-minded girl, in order to protect her secretly. Letters to this newspaper under the name “Xip.”

PROTECTION

A serious youth, married, independent, in the flower of his years, without children, wishes to make an arrangement with a girl or widow of good appearance who will accept a monthly pe

ADVANTAGEOUS OPPORTUNITY

A distinguished youth who is not ugly, who dresses well and has a permanent income, wishes to meet a pretty girl of poor family who is in need of protection, demanding merely that she be not more than twenty years old, that she be white, or at least light-gray (parda), in color, elegant, of good education, and sympathica. He guarantees a good standard of living, and it might be that in the future he would even marry her, a thing which he cannot do now because the laws of the country forbid it. It will be better to send photographs. Letters to João da Silveira at Poste Restante.

Nearly all advertisers emphasize their seriousness and demand it in return, and the word “protection” appears in almost every notice. Nor is the weaker sex backward in appealing for protectors:

PROTECTION

A girl of fine manners and bringing-up, aged 18, elegant, serious, and well educated, will accept the protection of a cavalheiro of the same qualities, with wealth.

GIRL OF DISTINGUISHED APPEARANCE

needs the urgent assistance of a gentleman of position, distinction, and good resources, who will furnish a house for her and give her a monthly pension of 500$000. Letters to “Velda” in care of this newspaper.

Naturally those of less individual lack of morals do not overlook the opportunity of bringing themselves to notice in these columns, often expressing themselves in French rather than Portuguese, not for the sake of secrecy but because those who read French are more apt to belong to the wealthier and better-conducted class to which the imported aristocrats of the easy life appeal:

JEUNE PARISIENNE

arrivant d’Europe, chez Madame Margot, Rua D. José de Barros, n. 31.

MLLES. AIDA and CARMEN

advise their friends and comrades that they have removed from 97 Ypiranga street to 42 Maio, where they have established themselves. Telephone 4,406.

YOUNG FRENCH GIRL

18 years, fresh and gay, arriving from Reims, wishes to make the acquaintance of several gentlemen curious to talk over news of the war and Prussian behaviour. Letters to Mlle. H—— B—— in care of this newspaper.

In addition to all these more or less individual appeals, there is, of course, a plethora of “mulheres da vida”—“women of the life,” as they are called in Brazil, “who,” complains a lone pulchritudinous editorial voice, “are gradually invading all the arteries of the city.” This class has almost completely usurped the first half mile or more of dwellings along the Beira Mar, facing the bay and one of the most gorgeous views in the western hemisphere; yet the citizens of Rio think no more of protesting against this invasion than of striving to hinder the usurpers from drumming up trade from dusk until daylight by repeated trips along the first section of the “Botanical Garden Line.” I am not of those who believe implicitly in our American custom of playing ostrich and concealing our heads in the sand of Mrs. Grundy’s garden, but there is such a thing as overdoing frankness, of making temptation too accessible, of chloroforming public opinion out of its legitimate consciousness; and the ways of Rio and the average Brazilian city do not indicate that perfect candor is any improvement over our own secretive and hypocritical treatment of the same subject.

There are other and more amusing things to be found among the “want ads” of Rio newspapers. Beggars frequently run appeals for assistance:

POOR BLIND WOMAN

Francisca de Barros of Ceará, blind in both eyes, crippled in one hand, ill, and without resources, begs an alms of all good charitable souls, whom the good God will recompense. It may be sent in care of this paper.

BY THE WOUNDS OF CHRIST!

A lady who is ill and unable to work, with a medical certificate to prove it, a tubercular daughter, and without resources to sustain herself, suffering from the greatest necessities, comes to beg of charitable persons, by the Sacred Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, an alms for her sustenance, which God will recompense to all. Rua Senhor de Mattosinhos 43.

If all such beggars were actually ailing or incapacitated, it would be less surprising to find respectable newspapers running their advertisements. But it has often been amply demonstrated that many of them are the most brazen frauds. The editors of the same sheets which run these alms-seeking petitions admit editorially that “Mendicants of the aristocratic variety, who live well, eat well, and except at work dress well, may be found in any street of the city going from door to door, imperiously clapping their hands to call the attention of the residents.” At a fixed stop of all “Botanical Garden” cars a young woman of slight African taint and rumpled garments, with several children quite evidently borrowed for the occasion and frequently changed, canvassed every car, always with profitable results; yet at her home in the outskirts of Ipanema she dressed and lived like an heiress. There are deserving cases, or at least unfortunate ones, among Rio’s indigent army, but the church and Iberian custom have trained the Cariocas to accept begging as natural, inevitable, and in no way reprehensible, and the medieval conception of charity, that the bestowing of largess on able-bodied loafers is to lay up favor in heaven, causes the giver to lose little thought on the worthiness of the case so long as the heavenly bookkeepers duly record his action.

The announcements of “Spiritualist Somnambulists,” who can “diagnose the future in time to permit applicants to change theirs before it is too late,” are legion. One man ran permanently this long-winded assertion:

CURE BY GOD

The undersigned offers to cure anyone of any ailment, cases that are despaired of preferred, by the laying on of hands, from eight in the morning to eight at night, by a special power given him by the Almighty, and by prayer to the invisible divine beings, the only requirement being that those who present themselves shall not be under the care of nor taking any medicine prescribed by, a physician, and that they have faith in the brilliant future of the divinely gifted undersigned.

Apparently he had no connection with the disciples of a similar panacea in our own country.

The more customary “want ads” of our own land, of persons seeking or sought for work, are given a curious twist in Brazil for lack of the succinct word “wanted,” which is replaced by aluga, really meaning “rents.” Thus: “Aluga-se uma menina—there rents itself a girl to do housework.”

Not the least curious of the contents of Rio newspapers are the illicit gambling advertisements. The state and federal lotteries are legal and may advertise as freely as the cambistas who sell the tickets on the streets may howl day and night hideous with spurious promises of easy fortune, but these official games reduce competition as much as possible by legal enactments. Some twenty years ago the director of the Rio Zoo began putting up daily on the gate a picture of one of the animals inside, in order to attract visitors to the establishment. A bright individual recognized this as a brilliant opportunity to start a new gambling scheme. He took the director into his confidence, gradually drew crowds to the gate, and the illicit lottery that resulted flourishes to this day. It is called “O Bicho,” a word meaning literally “worm,” but which in Brazilian slang applies to all animals, reptiles, birds, and even vermin. Twenty-five different “bichos” are used in the underground lottery of Rio, and every day the newspapers carry the notice: “O Bicho—For to-morrow ...,” followed merely by tiny pictures of, perhaps, a snake, a rabbit, and a bear. The game is against the law, yet even the chief of police plays it, and newspapers cannot be enjoined from publishing the announcements, because no jury has ever been officially convinced that they are not merely enigmas for amusing children.

Two points of superiority Brazilian newspapers have over our own—they are not besmeared with the alleged “funny pages” of paint-pot cartoonists, nor do they “feature” divorce cases or any other form of marital misdemeanor, possibly because domestic infidelity is too commonplace to be “news.” On the other hand, they pander to that ultra-morbid streak in the Brazilian temperament which African blood seems to give it. Large front-page photographs of the victims of suicide or revolting crimes are the joy of Carioca editors and readers, the “action of the crime” being posed for in all its gruesome details by models if pictures of the real characters are not available.

Speaking of crimes, there is a good police system in Rio, with several excellent departments and a detective bureau that makes use of the latest European science in the detection and capture of criminals. The prevalence of warnings against “batadores de carteiras,” or pickpockets, is a thermometer of the criminal element. This class is so numerous as to have a thieves’ slang of its own, called “caló” by those who use it, or, in the pamphlet vocabulary published by the police department, “Giria dos Gatunos Cariocas.” Many of the expressions in this criminal dialect of Rio would be Greek even to the man whose native tongue is Portuguese, though a few of them are localisms in more general use. Not a few of the words in the pamphlet grew familiar to my ear before I left Brazil. I learned that “Noah’s Ark” is a pawnshop; to “perform an autopsy” is to go through the pockets of a person fallen in the street; “to strike thirty-one” is to die; a “bond” (in the legitimate language a street-car) is a group of persons; to travel “by Italian bond” is to go on foot; a policeman is a “button” or a “cloud”; a mounted policeman is “a four-footed cardinal,” and “convent” means the Penitentiary. To “give charity” is to kill a person while robbing him; to “disinfect the zone” is to disappear from a given haunt; a patrol-wagon is either a “merry widow” or a “chicken coop”; a “nose” is a person (“He came with three noses”), the real nose being a “smoke-box.” A “soft” is a mattress; a lawyer, a “talking-machine”; “synagogue” stands for head, and “Big Papa” means the President of Brazil. Naturally money has many pseudonyms among the class that is always seeking to lay illegal hands upon it, among them “wind,” “light,” and “arame” (literally, brass or wire). The expression “falta arame” (brass is lacking) is widespread. A ragged youth frequently sidles up to the passer-by, rubbing his stomach and asserting, “Falta arame pa’ matar o bicho” (literally, “money is lacking to kill the worm”); what he really means to say is that he needs money to stop the gnawings of hunger.

It is a common human trait for those somewhat loose in their morals to be doubly stern in outward manners. The Brazilian, even of the more haughty class, is inclined to be lax at home, though in public outward appearance is everything to him. One showy suit of clothes for street and social wear seems to leave the average Carioca willing to spend the rest of his life in his underclothes. It is no unusual experience when calling upon a man to be asked on some pretext to wait until he has put on his outer garments; while among the women the wrapper habit extends from the highest to the lowest ranks of society. The tropical heat partly accounts for this sartorial laxity, but in many ways it typifies the national habit of mind. At home the Brazilian, particularly of the fair sex, can sit for hours in that utterly blank-minded idleness of the Oriental; only when they come out to stroll the Avenida or the Ouvidor late in the afternoon do most of the women put on real clothes and dress their hair. Among the humbler class, the negroes and poor whites of the morros and the narrow valleys between them, or of the one-story tenement houses known as cortiços, there is but slight sense of privacy and much of the family dishabillé and domestic activities are freely exhibited to the public gaze.

Outside his home circle, however, the Brazilian is more than exacting in such matters. In public a man must not only be fully dressed, but is somewhat looked down upon if he indulges in any of those lighter garbs of the “Palm Beach” variety that seem so in keeping with the Brazilian climate. Especially if he is a politician, a business man, a member of high society, or has a desire to attain to any of these categories, must he wear a heavy dark suit and under no circumstances leave off his waistcoat. To be without a coat is a criminal offense in many cities; in the smallest village that has any personal pride, even among many people living in the wilderness of the sertão, it is atrociously bad form. The man riding with a negro functionary in the far interior of the country must cling to his coat if he would not make his companion an enemy for life. One of our recent presidents still has a low rating in certain parts of interior Brazil because he entered a mud village of unwashed, illiterate, largely illegitimate mulattoes in his shirt-sleeves. When several of his party landed in Bahia they were met by a courteous policeman and told either to go back to the ship and get their coats or buy new ones in the shops. Yet in that very city hundreds of men habitually wear no shirt or other garment under an often wide-open coat. More remarkable still, while a man in his shirt-sleeves is denied admittance to some of the most sorry establishments, it is entirely comme il faut for him to come down to the early morning meal in the best hotels in his pajamas. The negro captain of a little steamer far up in Matto Grosso sent word to an American prospector of my acquaintance, who appeared on deck in the latest model of soft shirt, with belt and cravat, that he must not leave his cabin without his coat, yet the majority of the native passengers were lounging about in carelessly buttoned pajamas and kimonos, sockless slippers, the women with their hair down their backs. During my first days in the country a Brazilian aviator made the first non-stop flight from São Paulo to Rio, breaking all South American records for speed and distance. The newspapers shouted with glee at this splendid feat by a “son of the country,” yet one and all commented in caustic editorials on his shocking bad taste in leaving his coat behind and landing at Rio in his shirt sleeves. The street-cars of Rio and every other city of size have at least two classes. The fares are not greatly different, but unless a man is wearing coat, collar, necktie, real shoes—not tamancos, or any other form of sandal—and socks, he must ride second-class. Nor may he carry with him in the higher form of public conveyance anything larger than a portfolio.

Rio gives the impression of being overcrowded. With emancipation the ex-slaves flocked into town in quest of an easier livelihood than that on the plantations, and immigration streams clog here. The swarms of beggars, criminals, prostitutes, hawkers, adult newsboys, two drivers for each automobile, the crowds frequently seen struggling for jobs, to say nothing of the plethora of government functionaries, suggest an oversupply of human beings. More than once in strolling along the wharves I came upon a hundred men fighting for work where twenty were needed to coal or stevedore a ship, often standing up to their knees in sea-water along the Caes Pharoux battling for a seat in the tender waiting to carry the score to their labors. Nor were they “bums” either, but muscular, honest workmen, nearly all of the Caucasian race; while just across the way indolent mulatto government employees lolled in the shade of the customhouse as if they had settled down for life and need never again exert themselves. A “pull” with the foreman who chooses the workmen for a given job is usually essential to being taken on, and he naturally expects his “rake-off.” One day a riot broke out among these wharf laborers; two “fiscals” of the stevedores’ union were killed by members who claimed they had been discriminated against; and the newspapers treated the matter as if it were a frequent occurrence.

Not the least picturesque of the many strange types of Rio are her street vendors, who pass all day long in almost constant procession. The Brazilian woman is not fond of shopping, or at least of going to market. She has the Moorish custom of keeping to the house; she feels most comfortable in négligé, and public appearance requires elaborate full dress; nor does the blazing sunshine invite to unnecessary exertion. This tendency to stay home, and the excess of men over jobs, has given rise to innumerable street-hawkers, who go from door to door, selling both the necessities and the luxuries of life. In the early morning, often before sunrise in the winter months of July or August, one is often awakened by a cry of “Verdura! Verdureiro!” and looks out to see the “vegetable-man” jogging along under a load of green-stuff that would break an ordinary man’s back. Then barely has one dropped off again before there comes a bellow of “Vassoura! Vassoureiro! ’asooooreeeeiro!” from the brush-and-broom man, who marches by all but lost under an arsenal of potential cleanliness, with a side-line of baskets and woven baby-chairs to complete his concealment. Meanwhile from down the street comes the increasing wail of “’llinha! Gallinha Gorda! (Chicken! Fat Chicken!),” and past the iron grilled window shuffles a barefoot man with two large baskets at the ends of a pole over his shoulder, or on the back of a horse or mule, offering housewives their day’s roast or broiler. In Rio people always buy their chickens on the hoof and avoid the risks of cold storage. Then comes the “Peixe! Camarão!” man, whom we might call the fish-and-shrimp seller, pausing here and there to cut up a fish on one of the round board covers of his two flat baskets. He disappears earlier in the day than the others, however, for seafood exposed after nine or ten in the morning to the unshaded heat of Rio is likely to make a greater appeal to the purchaser’s olfactory than to his optic nerves.

Not all hawkers cry their wares. Some have, instead, their own special noise-makers. The cake-and-sweetmeat man, with his large glass-sided showcase on top of his head, strides along, blowing a whistle that looks like half a dozen cartridge shells of varying size stuck together, or like the conventional Pan’s Pipes, and the shrilly musical sound these emit causes every child within hearing to canvass its pockets, parents, or friends for a tostão. When a customer appears the cake-man squats from under his load, depositing it on the pair of crossed sicks in the shape of a saw-horse that he carries under one arm, and the bargaining begins. The tin-man goes by, carrying a great stack of pots and pans and calling attention to his existence by shaking a frying-pan fitted with a clapper. The scissors-grinder stops every few yards to bring every nerve to the top of the teeth by running an iron hoop over his emery-wheel, in the hope of attracting trade. The man who sells plants and flowers comes along, incessantly and regularly beating with a light stick the side of the blooming box on his head. The seller of azucarillas, the ephemeral sweets of Spain, is as familiar a figure as in the Iberian peninsula; the “ice cream” merchant marches about with what looks like an oxygen or gas cylinder on his back, playing a steel triangle to call attention to his little gambling wheel, guaranteed to teach children to gamble early in life by taking a chance on his effervescent delicacies. A few vendors have a limited district, with grouped customers, especially the bread-man who, with his great basket on his head and the stool to hold it under one arm, has only to station himself in the pateo, or courtyard, of a cortiço to be surrounded by a clamoring throng, children snatching the long loaves faster than their parents can buy them and rushing excitedly into their one- or two-room homes with the bread hugged tightly against their soiled chests. But the majority tramp all day long, some treading the hot cobbles in bare feet, some wearing the noiseless alpargatas of Spain and Portugal, many scraping along the cement pavements in wooden tamancos, invading every nook and corner of the city and punctuating the whole day long with their cries and signals. With rare exceptions they are Portuguese or Spanish—it would be beneath the dignity of a native Brazilian to carry things about in the hot sunshine; but the clothing trade is almost entirely in the hands of “Turks,” as South America calls the Syrian, who peddles his wares in every corner of the great republic in which the human race sprouts. In Rio this perambulating clothing-shop announces himself by slapping together two lath-like sticks, making a noise similar to, yet entirely distinct from, that of the plant-and-flowers man. From daylight until dark he plods, to wander back to his noisome little den when night settles down without a slap left in his arm. During his first year or two he carries his goods on his back, and looks at a distance like a walking department store. But by the second year he has usually scrimped enough to buy an elaborately decorated chest of drawers and to hire a youthful or newly-arrived fellow-countryman to carry it, while he wanders along with nothing to do but slap his sticks together and engage in the long-winded bargaining which is unavoidable in any financial dealing with the Brazilian housewives peeping out through their window gratings. But the “Turk” is a more clever bargainer than the best of them, and within three or four years he is almost certain to have advanced to the ownership of a little pushcart and by the end of five years it is a strange mishap if he has not set up a shop, become a local nabob, and driven native competitors entirely out of his district.

This does not by any means exhaust the list of vendors who add their noises to the general hubbub of Rio. No one who has spent a week there could forget the cambistas, the lottery-ticket sellers of all ages and both sexes who invade the inmost privacy with their raucous howls, or the never-ending cries of newsboys, some of whom spread their wares on the mosaic sidewalks of the Avenida Central, while others race in and out of the narrow streets on either side of it. Nor should one overlook, even if it were possible, the creaking of enormous carts, their two wheels twelve feet or more in diameter, with which an immense log or a granite boulder is transported through the streets to the accompaniment of hoarse-voiced cursing of the mule-driver in charge.

If one grows weary of wandering Rio’s sun-bathed and colorful avenues and ruas, there are indoor places worth seeing. The National Library, for instance, is a magnificent building, at least in its material and inanimate aspects. The human element is somewhat less perfect. The president himself could not take a book out of the library; everyone knows he would be sure to keep it or hock it. Being scribbled by hand, the card catalogue is by no means easily legible; it is set so near the floor that the reader of American height all but breaks his back in reaching it, and there are so many authors of the same name that to hunt up a given one is a serious task. Then there is a splendid Brazilian system, evidently imported from Portugal or some still less respectable region, under which directories, biographies, and the like are always arranged in alphabetical order according to the first name.

Let us suppose that the only Brazilian opera of any importance, “O Guaraní,” is soon to be given in the Municipal Theater, and that you wish to know something about the man who wrote it. The announcement mentions that his name is Gomes. You enter the sumptuous hall of the library, hat in hand, wait for the negro attendant and his white bosom companion to stop gossiping and give you a hat check, then you climb to the next floor and, doubled up like a jackknife, claw through the catalogue until you get the serial number of a biographical dictionary in many volumes, containing the life story of the “Most Illustrious Brazilians”—of whom there seem to be millions. Having filled out a “bulletin” explaining which book you wish to consult, giving author, title, the date, the “number of the set,” the “indication of the catalogue,” your own name, address, and other detailed personal information back to the fourth generation, you enter the sumptuous reading-room. Or, more exactly, you wait patiently at the door thereof until you are handed a senha, a slip of paper which gives you the right to enter and—if you can still produce it—to exit. That in hand, you choose a seat and write the number of it on the “bulletin,” hand this to the gossiping tar-brushed attendant, and go and sit down. The attendant finishes his gossip, looks at the slip, and carefully puts it under a book on his desk. By and by he ends another gossip, picks up the book, is astonished to find a slip under it, reads it carefully, and puts it under another book on another part of the desk. Meanwhile you cannot go to look up the books you might want to read at some future date, because you cannot leave the reading-room without giving up your senha with the attendant’s “o.k.” on it. You cannot bring along a book of your own to read meantime, because any Brazilian knows that you would bring some worthless pamphlet and manage to exchange it for a valuable library volume. There is nothing to do but sleep, or study the scattering of fellow-sufferers in the reading-room, where you are sure to be struck by the absence of women. An old maid did enter the library one day while I was there, but she was stared at so steadily that neither she nor the men in the room did any reading.

Finally, if this happens to be your lucky day, it may occur to the attendant to put your book-slip into the automatic tube at his elbow and send it off to the stacks. When the employees at that end of the tube get through discussing politics or the lottery and send the book back by automatic carrier, along with the “bulletin” signed by the man who “executed the request,” a negro attendant wanders over to your seat with it. Then you quickly discover that though the huge volume is devoted to everything from “Gl” to “Gy” there is not a single Gomes in it. This rather surprises you, since Gomes is as widespread in Brazil as Smith in the United States or Cohen in New York, and at least one of that name must have been illustrious at least in the Brazilian sense. But by this time it is four-thirty, and the library takes a recess at five—that is, everyone is ejected and the doors locked by that hour—so you give it up.

Next day you discover quite by accident, your eyes having fallen upon a frieze at the “Theatro Phenix,” that the musician’s name was Carlos Gomes. As soon as the library opens—at ten in theory and about ten-forty in fact—you hasten back and go through the same tape-wound misery again to get the fourth volume of illustrious Brazilians, and wallow for hours through pages upon pages of “Carlos” without finding a single one of them answering to the name of Gomes. Days afterward, when the opera has come and gone, a Carioca acquaintance casually remarks that the man who wrote it was Antonio Carlos Gomes, but that he never used the first name! Back to the library to flounder once more in the ubiquitous red tape, and late that evening you grasp the “A” volume of illustrious Brazilians and finally at nine-thirty—Eureka! “Antonio Carlos Gomes, Paulista, musician, born in Campinas, and ...” and just then you are “put into the eye of the street,” for the library closes at ten and no Brazilian official is so absurd as to let the closing hour catch him still in the act of closing. Wandering homeward or out along the Avenida you muse on how convenient it would be if strangers in our Congressional Library had to look up the 28th president of the United States under the name “Thomas.”

Though at least two-thirds of the people of Brazil do not read or write—more than half because they cannot and the rest because they have no occasion or no desire to do so—Brazilians of the small “upper” class are more cultured in the narrow, bookish sense of the word than the average American of similar rating. “Everyone” knows everyone else in this restricted little circle in Rio, and they retain many of the old-fashioned opinions and manners of the days when the capital was called “the court” and was overrun by the locust swarm of courtiers from the old world. Embracing is still the knightly form of greeting between males in this higher Fluminense society, where it is the custom for a man to kiss a lady’s hand—or glove—upon being presented, and in which young men often give their fathers similar marks of recognition in returning from or departing on a journey of any length. Many of this caste are still monarchists, at least at heart, though they usually find it to their advantage outwardly to acquiesce in, or even to show enthusiasm for, the new form of government.

I attended several “social functions” in Rio—always from a discreet distance, “a mocidade,” which is the same foppish muster of youthful “intellectuals” that is known as “la juventud” in Spanish-America or “la jeunesse dorée” in France, was trying to establish a “Little Theater” for the exclusive use of the élite, “with a view to rehabilitating our histrionic art, so debilitated to-day.” Now and then they perpetrated amateur plays which fortunately were not exposed to the scorn of the general public. One afternoon they arranged a “literary program” for the purpose of raising a monument to Arthur Azevedo, Brazilian dramatist and writer of clever but salacious short stories. It began at four in the handsome new “Theatro Phenix,” usually sacred to the “movies,” and actually got started shortly before five. Being primarily a social event, there were only four of us up in the gallery. On the stage below, two young men in ultra-correct afternoon dress, creased to the minute, displayed themselves to a select female audience in recitations from Arthur’s stories (edited) and plays, with extravagant and unnatural gestures. A self-confident lady who was just recovering from being young, moaned through half a mile of something in French—what this had to do with the glory of Arthur I did not catch, high up under the eaves, unless it was meant to show how well the élite of Rio have copied Parisian manners—and finally there was given a one-act play by the same monumental author, which might have been very funny had the acoustics of the house permitted us gallery slaves to catch more than the reflected mirth of the audience. Through it all a dozen of “our greatest literary geniuses” pranced about the stage before the admiring audience on one excuse or another, while two photographers toiled assiduously taking flashlights from all possible angles of the correctly creased afternoon trousers.

Still another day found me at a soirée musicale in the old “Theatro Lyrico,” back of its newer and more aristocratic municipal successor. This rather breathless old barn was the principal theater of Brazil under the monarchy, and still retains unchanged the imperial loge, a whole furnished apartment in Louis Philippe style. There was only a slight negro strain in the audience, but the orchestra of fifty pieces ran the whole gamut of human complexions. The recital by a pianist still in her teens easily made up for all the tedium I had undergone in attending other “social functions” in the Brazilian capital. As Senhorita Guiomar Novaes has since won high praise in our own land and in Europe, I am pleased to find in my notes on that day’s performance the prophecy, “Here at least is one Brazilian who will prove of world caliber.”

One of the points that distinguish Brazil from Spanish-America is its divergencies of religion. Here, too, the church got in on the ground floor. As early as 1590 the Benedictine monks founded a monastery on the summit of the Morro São Bento; soon afterward the Capucines established themselves on top of the Morro do Castello, and in general the churchmen showed great predilection for the high places of Rio, perhaps to get that much farther away from the wicked world. For centuries Rome ruled Brazil with her customary profitable sternness. Scarcely two centuries ago Protestants attempting to spread their propaganda in the country were roughly treated, and priests publicly burned in the praças of Bahia and other cities the Bibles and tracts offered by American and other colporteurs. To this day and in the cathedral of Rio itself one may find evidences of medieval fanaticism—women of the poorer class making the circuit of the church on their knees, or kissing everything in sight, including floor, walls, and all the wounds of a life-size plaster-of-Paris crucifix under a thin shroud. A few of the hilltops, too, are still sacred to the cloistered life, but the church has lost much of its monopoly and is much less militant and omnipresent than on the West Coast. It is the custom of Brazilian men, even in street-cars or trains going full speed, to raise their hats, often in unison, when they pass a funeral or a cemetery; but the same reverence in passing a church door is by no means so general, and is usually confined to the part-negro portion of the population. Indeed, it is almost unusual to meet a priest, monk, or nun in the streets of Rio, and politically the church is almost an outcast.

Yet the capital pulsates with many religions. The transplanted faiths of the many races that make up the modern Carioca are so numerous that, if we may believe a native writer, “every street has a different temple and every man a different belief.” There are several sects of African fetish worshippers, Methodists, Maronites, Baptists, Physiolatras, Presbyterians, Satanists or worshippers of the devil, Congregationalists, “Drinkers of Blood,” “Brothers,” Adventists, Jews, followers of the “black mass,” Swedenborg disciples of the New Jerusalem, exorcists, literary pagans, sacerdotistas of the future, descendants of the Queen of Sheba, worshipers of the sea, and defenders of many other exotic dogmas, not to mention a large building back of the Avenida Central occupied by the “A.C.M.” (Associação Christão de Moços), in other words, the Y.M.C.A. As far away as the Uruguayan border I had heard an unfrocked priest lecture on one of the newer faiths of Brazil and was astonished to hear the loud and general applause whenever he made a thrust at the fanaticism or immorality of South American priesthood. Up in the Andes he would have proceeded along that tack in public for about two minutes before having a pressing engagement with the undertaker. In Santa Maria my astonishment was as great when I passed an imposing Protestant stone church on one of the principal streets and heard the minister—speaking his Portuguese with a thick German accent—openly preaching his particular doctrine to a large Brazilian congregation. Freedom of worship reigned indeed; in that morning’s newspaper there was a complaint from a town not far away that it could get no mail from Friday until Monday, because its postmaster was an “Adventista do 7º Dia!”

The cult of the sea is found chiefly among the colonies of fishermen scattered about Guanabara Bay. Some of these will under no circumstances leave the sea or its beaches. Their children swim at two and go fishing with the adults at ten. The moon enters considerably into their fanaticism, and their veneration for and fear of the “Mother of Water” is inferior only to their dread of the police, before whom, or in the presence of non-conformists, they pretend to be strict Catholics. One-fifth of all the spiritualist propaganda in the world is published in Brazil, according to a native who made an investigation of the question. This superstition is so widespread that men high in government and business circles have been known to refuse to take a street car which the rabble has left empty because “it is full of bad spirits.” Synagogues are numerous in Rio, for there is a large Jewish colony, running through all the gamut of society as well as of commerce, and widely varying in orthodoxy and religious rites. There are rich Jews in business along the Avenida who spend their winters “playing the markets” and their summers up in Petropolis. In the less showy streets live swarms of poor Armenian, Moroccan, Russian, Austrian, Turkish, French, English, German, Arabian, and even African Jews, all engaged in their customary occupation of buying and selling something or other. About the Praça Tiradentes and in its radiating ruas seethe Jewish women of the streets and their male companions and exploiters, the caftenes, from all the ghettoes of Europe.

There are said to be more than eighty thousand Syrians in Brazil, of whom by no means all wander through the streets slapping together a pair of sticks. Down about the Rua da Alfandega and the lower point of the city “Turks” own important business houses; in the colony are clever craftsmen and even a few doctors, politicians, and journalists. More than half the Brazilian Syrians are Maronite Christians from the Lebanon; the rest are orthodox Mohammedans of somewhat lower social strata, who earn their primitive livelihood as carregadores, carriers of mankind’s material burdens, as shop-servants, and as petty peddlers. Though many of these “Turks” find the difference in language a great barrier to their native loquacity as bargainers, their qualities are near enough those of the Brazilians to cause them to fit quickly into their environment.

Mohammedanism is not confined to the Syrians in the religious medley that characterizes the capital of Brazil. Thousands of former slaves are more or less followers of the Prophet of Medina, though barely aware of it themselves. The negroes shipped out to Brazil in the olden days were from many little nations scattered through the far interior of Africa; hence their religions were as varied as their tongues. But just as the general language of that continent, the cubá, suffices for simple conversation throughout Africa or among the blacks of Rio, so the negro religions practiced in the Brazilian capital may be roughly divided into two general classes. The alufás are more or less Mohammedan, with a background of African superstitions; the orixás are a still more primitive sect upon which the influence of the prophet was never brought. Outwardly, of course, nearly all the blacks are good Catholics, but their saints and gods have been crossed with those of the church until it is a wise negro who knows an African from a Catholic deity. Then, too, the unadulterated fetish worship imported with the slaves still persists, and Obeah and voodoo practices sometimes give evidence of their existence. According to a reputable native writer there are in the everyday crowd that surges through the Avenida, medicine men, magicians, voodoo chiefs, feiticeiros who will agree to mix a love philter or to bring misfortune upon an enemy by mumbling an incantation over a concoction of rat tails, cat’s head, finger and toe nails, and the innocent passer-by would never dream what absurd African rites are taking place behind more than one commonplace façade. There are “holy men” living in the very heart of Rio surrounded by a swarm of servant-women with whom they live in polygamy as in the wilds of the black continent, yet many of whom dress for public appearance quite like their Christian fellow-countrymen, play “bicho,” and die leaving to their heirs many contos of reis. Negro Brazilians who know French and even English, who have been educated abroad and have in some cases become senators, or presidents of states, “men to whom I lift my hat and with whom I shake hands,” in the words of the native investigator, still cling secretly to the old African superstitions. There are rich Brazilians who send their sons to Africa to study the religions of their forefathers, and traffic between Rio, Bahia and Pernambuco and several West African ports is heavy.

Most conspicuous of the non-Catholic sects of Brazil, thanks less to their numbers than to their political power and high intelligence, are the Positivists. Auguste Comte, a Parisian mathematician who spent part of his life in an insane asylum and the rest in penning voluminous explanations of a “positive philosophy” which even the mathematical mind seems to find difficulty in comprehending, suffered the customary fate of the prophet in his own country. “Paris,” according to his Brazilian disciples, “was not prepared for so advanced a doctrine.” In most other countries he won only scattered followers—George Eliot and her lover were among them—but in Brazil his doctrine not only survives but seems likely to increase its standing before it goes the way of other ’isms. Positivist propaganda began in Brazil during our Civil War, but was some time in getting a footing. Finally the “Littréists” Miguel Lemos and Teixeira Mendes became converts, the former becoming the head of the sect in Brazil and the latter—now his successor—his chief lieutenant. But it was Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães who raised Positivism to a political force, first teaching it more or less secretly in the Military School and combining with it the demand for a republican form of government until, in 1889, the sect joined with the army in overthrowing the monarchy. The Brazilian Positivists credit themselves with establishing the republic, separating the church from the state, reforming the teaching and criminal codes, and many lesser accomplishments.

Strictly speaking Positivism does not pretend to be a religion but merely a “philosophy of life.” Yet it bears many reminders of the Puritanical and reforming sects so numerous in our own land. Positivists advocated the abolition of slaves; they are opposed to the lottery; they demanded an easier form of civil marriage in the hope of cutting down illegitimate unions—in other words, they combine religion and morals, which are so completely divorced in the ruling church of South America. They are popularly reputed to be opposed to the use of coffee or tobacco and to take that “blue law” view of life into which our Puritan virus shows frequent tendencies to degenerate, but this they claim to be mere ridicule or counter-propaganda of their enemies.

I arranged by a “want ad” to exchange English for Portuguese lessons with a well-educated native of Rio, who turned out to be a government functionary and a Positivist. Possibly the most striking thing about him was his almost Protestant moral code, contrasted with his genuinely Brazilian tolerance in practice. He saw nothing reprehensible in cheating the public out of more than half the time and effort which they paid him to deliver; he asserted that he and Brazilians in general believed their wives certain to betray them if given the opportunity, and refused to credit my statement that the average American husband does not consider eternal vigilance the price of his domestic honor. Yet often in the same breath he pronounced some Positivist precept that would fit snugly into the code of our sternest sects.

I accompanied my student-tutor one Sunday morning to the principal weekly service at the Positivist Apostulado, or “Temple of Humanity” in the Rua Benjamin Constant. It is an imposing building in the style of a Greek temple, said to be copied from the Panthéon of Paris. On the façade is the Positivist motto in large bronze letters:

O Amor por Principio E a Ordem por Baze O Progresso por Fim.

Inside, the almost luxurious edifice, “sea-green in color, as if one were bathed in hope, and with the high ceiling essential to lofty thoughts,” still somewhat resembles a Catholic church. Around the walls of the nave are fourteen “chapels” containing as many busts, each representing one of the “saints” of Positivism and an abstract idea. They are Moses—Initial Theocracy; Homer—Ancient Poetry; Aristotle—Ancient Philosophy; Archimedes—Science; Cæsar—Military Civilization; St. Paul—Catholicism; Charlemagne—Feudal Civilization; Guttenberg—Modern Invention; Dante—Modern Epic; Shakespeare—Drama; Descartes—Modern Philosophy; Frederick the Great—Modern Politics; Bichat—Modern Science, and lastly, Eloïse, or Feminine Sanctification. It would be easy, of course, to quarrel with the Positivists on several of their choices as world leaders, were they of a quarrelsome disposition. These personages also give their names to the fourteen months of the Positivist calendar, which begins with the French Revolution. Among the decorations are the “flags of the five nations”—Brazil, China, Turkey, Chile and Haiti! Only two South American countries are represented because “these are unfortunately the only ones in which the Positivist faith as yet counts fervid adepts.” China wins place as the “most vast nation of the Orient;” Turkey as the “most cultured people of the East” (!), and Haiti is admitted “in honor of the greatest of negroes, Toussaint L’Ouverture,” whose portrait is the only non-Caucasian face among the many about the walls. There are of men of all ages and nations, whom the Positivists consider of world importance,—Camões, Lavoisier, Cervantes, St. Gall, Cromwell, and many others, the only American among them being an atrocious chromo print of Washington. Higher still, in decorative letters and the simplified spelling of Positivist Portuguese, are scattered the words,—Space, Industry, Architecture, Painting, Earth, Music, Poetry, Politics, Proletariat, Priesthood, Monotheism, Astrology, Family, Humanity, Patriotism, Fetishism, Polytheism, Woman, Morality, Sociology, Biology, Soil, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Logic. Above what, for want of a better name, might be called the altar or the main chapel, runs the inscription:

“Vergine Madre Amen te plus quam me nec me nisi propter te.”

No Catholic church was ever more crowded with images than the “Temple of Humanity.” In fact, the more closely one looked the more did certain forms and beliefs of Catholicism peer through the outward modern mantle of Positivism, as if either the founder or his disciples had not been able to divest themselves entirely of their inherited faith. The most Catholic beata in South America could scarcely have shown greater reverence for the sacred pictures, graven images, and “relics of the faith” with which the temple was crowded. Above the “pulpit” was a bust of Comte on a column, its upper portion covered with green cloth embroidered with white silk “by one of our young female proselytes.” Portraits of Comte and his mistress, Clothilde de Vaux—both painted in China and depicting them with almond eyes—hung in the main chapel, where there were also paintings of each of them on the death bed. Pictures of the Bastille, of Dante and Beatrice, of the Sistine Madonna surmounted by a cross, “because she was an ardent Catholic,” were among the many which a roving eye gradually discovered. Most astonishing of all was the likeness of “Humanity,” a virgin figure with the features of Clothilde de Vaux, dressed as a bride, with a green band at her waist and holding in her arms a pretty boy who grasped a handful of daisies and pansies, the Positivist flowers, and gazed up into the woman’s face, the whole patently inspired by the Catholic madonnas which it closely resembled. In the background were the Panthéon and Père Lachaise cemetery, where Comte is buried.

Like all religions, the new creed already tended to harden into set forms, the failure to carry out which was evidently a more grievous sin than the disobeying of the general principles of the order. Their veneration of pictures of the dead was almost medieval; the railing of the tomb of Clothilde had been brought from Paris and as much fuss was made over it as ever devout peasants did over the shin-bone of a saint; “first sacraments” were administered in the temple; “the faithful” were urged to visit the “sacred places of Positivism;” they had a substitute for crossing oneself, “a sacred formula of our faith in which it is customary for all believers to stand up out of respect for Our Master.” There was even a hint of Mohammedanism, a mark in the cement floor of the porch under the pillars indicating the direction of Paris—the thought of Paris as a sacred city was a trifle startling—“toward which all Positivistic Temples should have their principal axes.”

In the basement of the temple was a printing plant from which issues a constant stream of Positivist pamphlets, books, biographies of Benjamin Constant, and similar forms of propaganda. Here, too, is the original flag of republican Brazil, painted in crude colors on pasteboard by order of Teixeira Mendes. The story of its designing is not without interest. Having been assigned the task by the leaders of the revolution, the present head of the Positivists of Brazil determined to keep the general form of the existing national banner. João VI had given the kingdom a coat-of-arms set in a golden sphere on a blue background. Mendes changed the blue to green, basic color of the Positivist banner and meant also to symbolize the tropical vegetation of the land, as the yellow sphere does the gold in its soil. Then he called in an astronomer, and taking the twenty principal stars of the southern firmament at noon of November 15, 1889, to represent the twenty states of Brazil, he placed nineteen below the equator-like band across the golden sphere, and one above it to indicate that part of the country north of the equator, or of the Amazon. The sphere was inclined on the horizon according to the latitude of Rio, the tobacco and coffee on the old royal coat-of-arms were removed, as “mere commercial things not fit for a place on the national banner,” and along the equatorial band was run a line from the Positivist motto.

The women of the congregation sat on a platform in front of the “altar” rail, the men down in the body of the “church.” Women should love Positivism, according to its disciples, for it dignifies, venerates, and raises them to their due elevation. The “3rd of Guttenberg” on which the temple was dedicated is also the “Feast of Woman” day, on which Positivists celebrate the “transformation of the cult of the Catholic Virgin into the cult of Humanity.” Teixeira Mendes, long the head of the sect in Brazil, sat in the “pulpit” beneath the bust of Comte and “preached,” if his un-sermon-like remarks uttered in a weak, thin voice barely heard through an immense white mustache may be so called. His diminutive form was covered by a dark robe, with a green cord about the neck and embroidered with the Positivist flowers. The “sermon” emphasized the Positivist conception of the “virgin mother” as combining the two great qualities of the feminine type,—purity and tenderness. Like many other religions, this modern creed clings to the legend of a virgin mother. As the gathering marched out to the tune of the “Marseillaise,” I asked my cicerone to explain the frequent recurrence of the “virgin mother” motif in temple and sermon. He replied that it was the Positivist belief that humanity would gradually be educated up to the point where “woman will be able to reproduce alone, without the necessity of ‘sin’ with man!”

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