THE BRAZILIANS 



the country, to become a living part of it ; and many things which 

 were perhaps worthy to strike root in the soil are swept away by 

 their successors. The growth of the cities is proceeding at such a 

 pace that men are forced to build where and how the opportunity 

 offers. In Sao Paulo a house is finished every hour. Thus, even in 

 such a vast country as Brazil, too hasty settlement and too rapid an 

 increase of the population are deepening the gulf between Nature 

 and human activities. 



Once — namely, before the close of the fifteenth century — this was 

 otherwise. Then America had her own people, which, having sprung 

 from her soil, had evolved, and developed its culture, in intimate 

 relation with its natural environment. That the Indians were 

 capable of building up a high civilization they showed in Peru and 

 in Mexico. In the La Plata Museum (Plate 26) I saw a collection 

 of vases found in the province of Catamarca, in Northern Argentina, 

 whose refinement of form and nobiUty of design were worthy of 

 all admiration. The more we learn of the ancient Indian civilization, 

 the more intolerable is it to remember that the crushing of this 

 civilization by the conquerors has deprived us of a promising and 

 irretrievable bough of the tree of human evolution, and robbed us 

 too of the harmonious evolution of the continent from the soil of 

 its own past. 



From this point of view I am forced to regret that Columbus ever 

 discovered America. If only the Europeans had arrived a few 

 centuries later they would have been readier to receive the treasures 

 offered them, and the Indians might have been able to develop 

 their States and their defences to such a point as to retain their 

 country for themselves. America would then indeed have been a 

 New World for us, an individual work of art, and would have 

 exerted a fascination equal to that of India, which, as I myself have 

 often felt, does not excel Brazil in natural beauty, but only in the 

 fact that the works of man have in the course of the centuries har- 

 moniously taken their proper place in the landscape, down to the 

 cultivated fields, the cities, and the people themselves, with their 

 clothes and their customs. All these are Indian, and so the impression 

 produced by the whole is individual and consistent. 



It will be objected that the civihzation of the Brazilian natives 

 was by no means equal to that of Peru and Mexico. But who can 

 say that a people has not the power of evolving? As a forest folk, 

 the Indians of Brazil had as little reason as the Germans to erect 

 buildings of stone. As regards their character and their abilities, 



2 A 369 



