To the Amazon and Home 333 



exceptional men, although such men can render great 

 service. The real conquest, the thorough exploration and 

 settlement, is made by a nameless multitude of small men 

 of whom the most important are, of course, the home- 

 makers. Each treads most of the time in the footsteps 

 of his predecessors, but for some f 6w miles, at some time 

 or other, he breaks new ground; and his house is built 

 where no house has ever stood before. Such a man, the 

 real pioneer, must have no strong desire for social life 

 and no need, probably no knowledge, of any luxury, or 

 of any comfort save of the most elementary kind. The 

 pioneer who is always longing for the comfort and luxury 

 of civilization, and especially of great cities, is no real 

 pioneer at all. These settlers whom we met were con- 

 tented to live in the wilderness. They had found the 

 climate healthy and the soil fruitful ; a visit to a city was 

 a very rare event, nor was there any overwhelming de- 

 sire for it. 



In short, these men, and those like them everywhere 

 on the frontier between civilization and savagery in 

 Brazil, are now playing the part played by our back- 

 woodsmen when over a century and a quarter ago they 

 began the conquest of the great basin of the Mississippi ; 

 the part played by the Boer farmers for over a century in 

 South Africa, and by the Canadians when less than half 

 a century ago they began to take possession of their 

 Northwest. Every now and then some one says that 

 the "last frontier" is now to be found in Canada or 

 Africa, and that it has almost vanished. On a far larger 

 scale this frontier is to be found in Brazil — a country as 

 big as Europe or the United States — ^and decades will 



