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, Dom Pedro I. attempted to attract 

 German emigrants to his new empire. From that period 

 dates the Colony of San Leopoldo, near Porto Al^gre, 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 indc- 



22 * GG 



