ACROSS UNKNOWN SOUTH AMERICA 
three years by suffrage; and a Judicial power constituted 
by the High Court of Justice, Juges de droit — law 
judges — and District Judges. To be elected President 
of Goyaz State all that was necessary was to be a Brazilian 
citizen, over thirty years of age, and able to read and 
write. The same applied to the election of Deputies, for 
whom a residence of only two years in the State was 
sufficient. 
The capital of Goyaz, which is situated on the Rio 
Vermelho, a tributary of the great Araguaya River — 
had, according to the census of 1900, a population of 
some 13,475 people, but I rather doubt whether it 
possessed as many as eight or ten thousand souls 
when I visited it. One could notice indications that in 
days gone by Goyaz had been a flourishing place. There 
were a number of fine churches, and a large cathedral in 
course of construction, but since abandoned. Some of 
the buildings, too—the finest was the prison—must 
have been quite handsome, but were now in a dilapidated 
condition. It was really heart-breaking to see such a 
magnificent country go to rack and ruin: a State naturally 
the richest, perhaps, in Brazil, yet rendered the poorest, 
deeply steeped in debt, and with the heavy weight of 
absurdly contracted loans from which it had no hope 
whatever of recovering under present conditions. They 
had in the province the most beautiful land in Brazil, but 
it was a land of the dead. People, industries, trade, 
commerce, everything was dead. Formerly, in the time 
of the Emperor and of that great patriot General Couto 
de Magalhaes, Goyaz City could be reached, within a 
few kilometres, by steam on the beautiful river, the 
Araguaya, which formed the western boundary of the 
province, an ideal waterway navigable for 1,200 kilo¬ 
metres — in Goyaz Province alone. In the time of the 
Emperor, when Brazil was a wild country, steam navi¬ 
gation actually existed up the Araguaya River from 
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