GENERAL IMPRESSIONS OF BRAZIL. 513 
Brazil to increase its prosperity must be slow and ineffec- 
tive. No wonder, then, that, immediately after the decla- 
ration of independence, Doni Pedro I. attempted to attract 
German emigrants to his new empire. From that period 
t 
dates the Colony of San Leopoldo, near Porto Alegre, on the 
Rio Grande do Sul. It was not, however, till the year 
1850, when the slave-trade was actually abolished, and it 
was no longer possible to import labor from Africa, that 
these colonization schemes assumed a more definite and 
settled character. In this attempt the planters and the 
government were agreed, but with a different object. The 
plan of the government, undertaken in perfect good faith, 
was to create a laboring population, and a class of small 
landed proprietors. The planters, on the contrary, ac- 
customed to compulsory labor, thought only of recruiting 
their slave ranks by substituting Europeans for Africans. 
This led to terrible abuses ; under pretence of advancing 
their passage-money, poor emigrants, and especially the 
ignorant Portuguese from the Azores, were virtually sold 
under a contract which they subsequently found it very 
difficult to break. These abuses have thrown discredit 
upon the attempts of the Brazilian government to colonize 
the interior, but the iniquities practised under the name 
of emigration are now corrected. In fact, the colonies 
established directly by the government, on public lands, 
have never suffered wrong ; on the contrary, the German 
settlements in Sta Catherina, on the Rio Grande do Sul 
and on the San Francisco do Sul are very prosperous. 
The best evidence of the improvement in the condition 
of the colonists, and of the more liberal spirit of the na- 
tion towards them, is the spontaneous formation in Rio 
de Janeiro of an international society of emigration inde- 
22* GG 
