Brazilian Colonization From An European Point of View

h, and that the best way to kill a calf is by bleeding it to death. Some people, again, think emigration of Englishmen to Brazil advisable. It is easy enough to understand these assertions, and many similar ones, and yet to hold a diametrically opposite opinion. The fact is, so much depends on the point of view. In the following lines I propose to take my stand rather with the cod-fish, calves, and colonists, than with gourmands and colonization agents. Brazil has been contemplated so often from the rosy point of view people paid and unpaid have at various times been so fulsomely mendacious on her account placards, newspapers, guide-books, and itineraries, have contained such startling paragraphs often under the hand of those who ought to have known better about the marvellous fertility of the empire and the exceptional advantages it offers, that a little sober truth becomes more than ever necessary. And this is especially the case at a moment when the demand for white labour consequent on the Slavery Abolition Bill, to say nothing of particular interests, has given a new stimulus to the emigrant . trade. For it is with emigrating as it is with crimping cod-fish and bleeding calves few con- stitutions will stand a repetition of the process. To be once either crimped or emigrated is enough, or more than enough, for one lifetime. Emigrated yes, that is the rub. If the advantages of Brazil, its balmy climate, its deep soil, its mineral wealth, its warm reception of emigrants, its rigid adherence to contracts, its sound institutions, and the affinities of its people for things and minds Teutonic, were left to spread their light by the radiating force of truth alone if the importation of whites was restricted to facilitating the transit and establishment of those who followed that natural attraction which the means of wealth and happiness necessarily exercises upon the poor and miserable without official meddling, subsidizing, or puffing if these were the conditions of the movement, then there would, indeed, be nothing to say against it. But would it then ever take place at all As far as regards the English agricultural labourer, I think we may answer, never as it is, he is emigrated, contracted for at so much a head, caught like a fly by a pretty paper, tickled by hyperbolical expecta- tions, hallucinated with visions of an earthly Para- dise and thus, addleheaded, dumb-cattle like, re- liant on others, helpless and exacting, he is shipped off to the Eldorado to be sold. The object of the Brazilian is perfectly plain and comprehensible. He wants work done, and has himself an innate personal aversion to doing it. As the country develops and old races die, degenerate, or adopt the same view of labour as himself, he is compelled to seek fresh blood and sinew. It is important to him that they should be of the best suitable and available quality. Accustomed, in a sense shockingly literal, to look on labour, that is man, as a commodity, the question of how he gets it, is one about which he is not likely to be over- scrupulous. How he has hitherto got it is well known. Africans were imported, Aborigines were ransomed that is, bought or stolen... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.