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.