Division F Z 2< I 7 Section .B64 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/menmannersmorals00blan_0 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS IN SOUTH AMERICA Frontispiece. IN THE SHADE OF THE BIG PARAISO Men, Manners & Morals in South America BY J. O. P. BLAND /'v- ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1920 Printed in Great Britain CONTENTS CHAP. I. INTRODUCTORY .... • • PAGE I II. OUTWARD BOUND • 13 IIIv RIO AND PETROPOLIS . • 41 IV,- POLITICS EN PASSANT . • 60 V. IN AND ABOUT SAO PAULO . • • 68 VI. BUENOS AIRES .... • • 93 VII. UP THE PARANA : A GLIMPSE OF THE CHACO AUSTRAL 117 VIII. THE DELECTABLE CITY OF ASUNCION • 141 IX. ASUNCION TO MONTEVIDEO OVERLAND • • 166 X. URUGUAY : SOME REFLECTIONS ON GOVERNMENT THE ART OF 185 XI. CHIEFLY ABOUT WOMAN • • 202 XII. MONTEVIDEO .... • • 217 XIII. ESTANCIA LIFE IN URUGUAY • • 234 XIV. THE SON OF THE SOIL • • 258 XV. TRIBES ON OUR FRONTIERS . • • 285 INDEX ..... . 3 ” V AUTHOR’S NOTE For some of the best photographs used as illustrations in this book, the author desires to express his grateful thanks to Miss Kathleen Petty, of Buenos Aires; to Mr. D. Mac- gillycuddy, of the Estancia “ Canta Fiero” (Uruguay); and to Mr. Charles H. Pratt, of Rio de Janeiro and New York. ERRATA The correct titles of the illustrations facing pages 126 and 142 respectively are: Facing Page 126: Native Indian dwellings in the Chaco Austral. Facing Page 142: (left) Corrientes (Argentina) seen from the river. Facing Page 142: (right) Native huts in the Chaco. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Facing IN THE SHADE OF THE BIG PARAISO . . Frontispiece SUNSET OVER RIO BAY ...... 40 IN RIO HARBOUR ....... 48 A TURCO PEDLAR ....... 64 A HAWKER OF BRUSHES AND BROOMS, RIO . . . 64 RUFFO, THE SHEEP-SHEARER ...... 64 A PEDLAR OF TIN AND IRON WARE .... 64 A PICNIC IN THE WOODS ...... 76 THE PLAZA CONGRESS, BUENOS AIRES .... 96 A “CARNE CON CUERRO,” ARGENTINA . . . . I16 CORRIENTES (ARGENTINA) SEEN FROM THE RIVER . . 126 THE WHARF AT ASUNCION, PARAGUAY . . . .142 THE CITY HALL, ASUNCION ...... 142 CROSSING A RIVER IN THE DRY SEASON, URUGUAY . . 166 VIEW NEAR COLONIA, URUGUAY ..... 186 A MODEL ESTANCIA: HORSES AT PASTURE, “ CANT A FIERO ” 212 A MODEL ESTANCIA: A RIVERSIDE POTRERO, “ CANTA FIERO ” 212 A MODEL ESTANCIA I HEREFORD CATTLE AT “ CANTA FIERO ” 234 THE ESTANCIA UP-TO-DATE: “ LOS CORALES,” RAFAELO, SANTA FE, ARGENTINA ...... 234 A LAGUNA OF THE MACIEL ...... 24O vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS viii Facing page LOADING THE WOOL CLIP ...... 244 THE CAPATAZ ........ 250 BENITA . . . . . . . . . 250 LUNCHEON TIME AT THE BRETE ..... 260 PLOUGHING UP “eSPARTILLO” CAMP .... 260 A LAGUNA ON THE SAN SALVADOR . . . .266 GAUCHOS AT DRABBLE STATION, CENTRAL URUGUAY . . 280 “pANTALEOn” — A PEON ...... 280 A GAME OF PELOTA ....... 288 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY Having regard to the present parlous price of paper and to the patience of much-suffering readers, the perpetration of yet another book on South America might appear at the outset to call for some explanation, if not for apology. The list of books published under this heading in recent years is indeed so formidable that the world may well be weary of it. From the library catalogue point of view, the subject might well seem to have been exhausted, every part of the continent having been ransacked and described, all its words and works recorded. Yet, how few there be amongst all these works (as some of us know to our cost) that properly and worthily inculcate the profitable exercise of travel, or that appeal to and justify the wandering instinct of rational man ! Say what you will, the great majority of them are so dreadfully infected with stodgy commercialism, so monumentally useful, that their general effect upon the mind (unless it be the mind of a bagman) can only be compared to a surfeit of suet pudding. Here and there only, rari nantes, amidst all these dreary voliunes, will you find the sort of company for which the Lord of Montaigne looked (alas, how oft in vain !) in all his journeyings — that “rare chance and seld-seene fortune, but of exceeding solace and inestimable worth,” to wit, “ an honest man, of singular experience, of a sound judgment and of manners conformable to yours, which company a man must seek with discretion and with great heed obtaine, before he wander from home,” ay, even in B 2 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS the spirit. I make no claim, in this desultory narrative of uneventful journeys, to provide company of that rare refreshing kind; but at least I hope to follow modestly and, if it may be, profitably, in the path of that prince of travellers, of him who believed that there is “ no better school to fashion a man’s life than incessantly to propose unto him the diversities of so many other men’s fives, customs, humours and fantasies, and make him talk or apprehend one so perpetual variety of our nature’s shapes or formes.” A strange thing, surely, this modern obsession for encyclopaedic information about trade and manufactures, this all-pervading blue-book stodginess of statistics, which permeate the works compiled by laboriously travelling politicians, economists and globe-trotters, concerning lands which (could they but discern them rightly) afford matter for philosophical speculation at every turn of the road or river. It is only another proof, I suppose, of the lamentable truth, that one of the chief results of our vaunted civilisation, of all our labour-saving and man- killing devices, is to deaden the mind of man to the things that matter, to deprive us of those spiritual activities and adventures that are the proper business of fife, and to destroy our perception of relative values. How else shall we account for the fact that, with the exception of one or two naturalists like Waterton and Hudson, or wandering word-artists like Cunninghame Graham and Knight, all those who have written, and are writing about South America, seem to be completely obsessed by the com- mercial and industrial possibilities of the country ? I am not referring, mark you, to the works written by hungry hacks to the order of South American politicians and financiers, of those magnificently bound volumes which confront you in hotel lounges and steamer saloons (the IN SOUTH AMERICA 3 ground bait used by company promoters and Ministers of Finance to attract capital), that read for all the world like prospectuses for investors, and deserve to be treated as such. I am speaking of the standard works of reputable men, even men of high degree, like Lord Bryce, who went there to learn, or M. Clemenceau, who went there to lecture, not to mention the lesser fry of honest journalists and hona fide travellers. All alike seem to revel in compiling soporific statistics of marketable products, in recording the increase of whizzing machinery and the building of railways and grain elevators, just as if the entire population of these delectable lands lived and had their being for the sole purpose of producing pabulum and raw materials to feed our feverish industrialism. How drearily great the host of writers who have gone steadily from one end of the continent to the other, faith- fully describing the present and potential resources of each Republic, singing paeans of praise to the “ produc- tivity of capital,” as if Brazil and Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, had been created and developed solely so that congested Europe might draw from them sustenance and absolution for its economic and social sins ! Throughout all their dismal pages, you hear no sound of laughter, no echo of the Gaucho’s guitar, nor any of the songs of Old Spain that have lingered melodiously in the pampas since the days of the Conquistadores. These scribes deal not with the humanities, make no attempt to look beneath the surface of men’s lives, to tell us of the things that are eternally important, of the way of a ship upon the sea, or the way of a serpent on the rock and the way of a man with a maid. And yet man in South America, even though he descend not to the mental state of an amalgamated Engineer, is just as worthy of study as he is elsewhere; to regard him solely as a wheat-producing, cattle-raising 4 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS machine is merely to proclaim that, because of life, we ourselves have lost the secret and art of living. What we should ask travellers to tell us is not what the country produces per capita — there will always be official automata in Government offices to compile these fearful records — but how the native lives, what are the rational purposes of his existence, what his dreams, and the subjects of his noontide speculation. It is not as if these countries did not provide plenty of fresh and fruitful subjects for speculation and much matter for our learning. Agassiz and Humboldt are there to prove the contrary, to show that a traveller may be concerned with things profitable to commerce and yet remain alive to the humanities. Here, as in the Old World, the stones have their profitable sermons and the running brooks their books. Here, he that has eyes to see and ears to hear, may contemplate mankind in the making, may look forward and descry this continent, veritable heir presumptive of the ages, gathering unto itself the wealth and the culture of Europe. Here one may stand and watch, from the strangers' gallery, many interesting phases of the human comedy — the curious and yet eminently logical results of the working out of Europe’s pohtical and social nostrums, transplanted to soils for which they were never intended. Here one may see to what base uses the worldly wisdom of Rousseau and Mill, of Lloyd George and Jaures, may be converted when applied to races essentially incapable (in their present stage) of representative self-government. One may see, as in a moving picture, the modification and fusion of ancient European types — Spanish, Basque, Portuguese and Italian — slowly but surely yielding to climatic conditions and intermarriage. A journey up the Parani river is as interesting in this respect as the journey from IN SOUTH AMERICA 5 Moscow eastwards by the Siberian Railway, through those regions where East and West meet and insensibly merge. In these days of universal upheaval, the traveller interested in political systems may contemplate in South America the triumphant emergence of the Graeco-Latin ideal and the ignominious eclipse of Germany’s pinchbeck and poisonous Kultur ; also he may observe the struggles of that exotic growth “ Pan-Americanism,” a Washington State Department dream, foredoomed for all its vividness to futihty in lands where the soul of the people holds firmly to the Latin ideal. He may study the growth of socialism in the great cities which live by the labour of the unsophisticated " camp.” Or he may observe the development of party politics, with all the tricks of that evil trade, and the systematic exploiting of productive industry by an unusually attractive, but none the less pernicious, type of demagogue. But above all these, in perennial interest and value, there is the son of the soil, the man in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo, of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the peon of the camp, the light-hearted, hard-working, philosophical hijo del pais ! Speaking without prejudice, and from experience based chiefly on observation of the natives of Uruguay and Argentina, I should say that the peon of South America, like his social equivalents in China and Japan, has a keener appreciation of the things that make life worth living, a more philosophical perception of relative values, than a Manchester mechanic or a Glasgow riveter. He certainly has preserved, far better than the denizens of our drained and paved ant-heaps, a more abiding sense of the wonder and mystery of existence and of the ” glory of the universe.” He does not need to kill time ; he " makes ” it (to use his own word), and when the day’s work is done, or even while he is doing it, he can 6 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS take a disinterested and genuine delight in simple things. He knows something of the joie de vivre and of the love of beauty for beauty’s sake. Even as a Japanese crafts- man, he brings a measure of aesthetic enjoyment to his daily task and can manifest its spirit in the work of his hands. Therefore, it seems to me, that despite the crowded state of our bookshelves, there may be justification and room for a book that shall endeavour to speak of men and things in South America from the hmnan, rather than the commercial, point of view. For the great host of traveUers who shall hereafter make their way, either for business or edification, to the lands of the Surplus Loaf, it is surely advisable that every ship’s library should contain at least one book about these lands, that a man may read without being reminded of his investments. To tell the truth, our ships’ hbraries very seldom contain anything new or interesting about the countries to which they carry us. Even those of the Royal Mail give the im- pression of having been selected, towards the close of the Victorian era, by a cautious purser with one watchful eye on the Company’s purse and the other on Mrs. Grundy. The bulk of the collection is usually in English, and consists of samples of Scott, Dickens, and other respectable classics, supported by modern stalwarts of the Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Hall Caine, Wells, Marie Corelli kind, and a few sea-dogs, such as Clark Russell and BuUen. French hterature is generally represented by Bourget, Daudet, Erckmann-Chatrian and Pierre Loti, with Flaubert and de Maupassant discreetly thrown in, as a concession to the literary taste of the jeunesse doree and viellesse rouee of Rio and Buenos Aires. Then there are a few Spanish and Portuguese volumes of the harmless romantic kind, calculated to give no cause for alarm to anxious mothers IN SOUTH AMERICA 7 of convent-bred flappers ; and for the rest, one or two of the stodgy books aforesaid — Koebel or Foster Fraser on the Argentine — and a miscellaneous lot of decorative works of the propagandist ground-bait order, supplied gratuitously by Ministries of Finance or other Government Departments of malice aforethought. I suppose all this is so because Corporations, even when they deal with those who go down to the sea in ships, really have no souls, and, like the War Office, cannot be expected to have them. If such a thing as a Shipping Company’s soul could manifest itself in Leadenhall Street, it could hardly fail to perceive that the best way to encourage travel would be to nourish the wayfarer’s mind, while yet they are in the way with him, upon such hterary fare as should stimulate the romantic adventurous spirit of wanderlust ; to attune it to the tutelary influences of these new lands and cities, which only yesterday (as time goes) were as remote from us as if they belonged to another planet, and to-day bid fair to rival those of the Old World. Your German shipping companies will use their library, of course, as they use everything else, to sow the insidious seeds of poisonous Kultur, taking every advantage of the fact that he who reads aboard ship is not in a position to run ; but on English boats the catalogue reminds one of a jumble-sale lot at a suburban bazaar. As a matter of fact, it represents no process of selection or mental struggle on the part of any of the ship’s company; for I am told that the builders provide them, en bloc, as an item in the general specification. Two hundred books (assorted) for bookcase in social hall, one parcel music for piano, ditto ; six dozen cushions, one dozen miscellaneous parlour games, and there you are; who could ask more in the matter of comfort for body and soul, on a journey through turquoise seas beneath the Southern Cross ? And yet, as 8 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS I have looked down the promenade deck of the good ship Araguaya or the Avon, rolling down to Rio, and marked the intellectual fare provided for the post -prandial edification of the deck-chair recumbents, how often have I longed to write to Lord Inchcape, or whoever it is that reviews the progress of the Company at its annual meet- ings, and tell him what an excellent opportunity they are missing. Never was there a time and place on this feverish planet so suited to the inculcation of the art and philosophy of travel, as this unbroken spell of sunlit days and star- spangled nights, this oasis of silence and blue sea, beyond which lies infinity. There should be on every ship that makes these voyages, a “ Travellers’ Joy ” library, selected with care and understanding, consisting of books written by men who knew that there are things far more important in a journey than one’s destination; the Odyssey should be there, and Montaigne, Agassiz and Waterton, and of the present generation books like Belloc’s Path to Rome, Knight’s Cruise of the Falcon, and Graham’s Vanished Arcadia, with Sterne and Stevenson, Barrie and Locke; so that a passenger, even though he be a financier, might haply hear a new spirit-stirring message in the song of the south wind, and dream dreams more profitable to his soul than are any that are bred of preference stock or canned beef. Thus might he come to the shores of the New World, as Pizarro and Cortes came and all the splendid dreamers of old Spain, with a fitting sense of wonder and a proper spirit of adventure. The ultimate objective of the three journeys around and about which the present vagabond narrative is compiled, is a certain Uruguayan estancia, a place of flocks and herds, lying far from the haunts of men in the province of Soriano, somewhere betwixt and between the slumbering old " camp ” towns of Mercedes and Dolores. IN SOUTH AMERICA 9 These journeys were made in the years of strife 1915, 1916 and 1919 ; but before and beyond their concern with the pastoral affairs of that remote sequestered spot, they included certain digressions into odd corners of Southern Brazil, Paraguay and the Chaco Austral of Argentina; also they comprised polite visits to such cities as lay by the way, with certain subsidiary purposes of propaganda therein, intended to foil the insidious plots and stratagems of the Hun. This last business provided opportunities for studying the then neutral attitude of South America from more than one interesting point of view, and of gauging some of the probable results of the war, upon men and affairs in that continent. But fear not, patient reader, this is not going to be an addition to the mountainous growth of war literature. It may contain some brief exposition (clearly labelled, that they who read may run) of South American politics in the melting-pot ; but as to the opinions of politicians and trade prophets, concerning either the world at large or their own sordid affairs, I promise you that there shall be as httle as possible. As times go, it has not been possible to write of anything under the sun without reference to the four years’ con- vulsion of Europe, because go where you will, even in the remotest wilds, its results confront you at every step, in a hundred ways. Of these things, of the reverberation of the great struggle, its effects on the bodies and souls of men at the other side of the world, there must needs be some occasion to speak. But the estancia in Uruguay is our ultimate object, the piece de resistance, of this writing — the rest may be regarded as hors d’ oeuvre — and the whole thing is in reality only a pretext (publishers insist on these things) for discursive speculation on the world in general and the moods and manners of South America in particular. 10 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS Also be it understood at the outset, I make no claim to speak with special knowledge of these lands, or as one having authority. These casual impressions and reflec- tions by the wayside are not of the kind that are hkely to help any man to embark on the business of cattle raising or coffee growing ; suffice it if they help him, when once his cattle are sold or his coffee picked, to think and talk about something that, in his haste or his absorption, he may have overlooked; something other than the virtues and vices of horses and the price of commodities. I am well aware that there is a certain type of estanciero, the good old crusty, forty-year-in-the-country resident, who regards it as unqualified impertinence that any tenderfoot gringo should venture to discuss, or even to pretend to understand, the life and affairs of the “ camp.” To him I would observe, with all the respect due to ancient in- stitutions, that it may sometimes be vouchsafed to any person of average intelligence, who has travelled and studied hfe, to perceive truths that are hidden, by reason of their very nearness and famiharity, from the wisest of permanent fixtures. To tell the truth, experience in many parts of the world. East and West, has taught me to admire the oldest resident, but to distrust his judgments of the country of his adoption and particularly his opinion of its people. Even his faculty for observation may frequently become atrophied by long disuse and by the routine nature of his mental exercises; his mind, that once was a sensitive plant (even as yours or mine) may have been over-exposed, so that familiar phenomena make httle or no impression upon it. Amongst themselves, estancieros and other acclimatised residents recognise and profess to deplore the existence of this state of mind in their midst. Nevertheless, your really good conservative specimen infinitely prefers this state to the critical IN SOUTH AMERICA 11 condition of mind which asks the why and wherefore of things, and which may occasionally be led to the conclusion that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Of which things, more in due season. The impressions of a new-comer have at least the virtue of being clear-cut and vivid, and if he happen to possess sufficient experience of human affairs and institutions in other parts of the world to enable him to draw vaUd comparisons and conclusions, it may be (who knows?) that in the long run, his activities may prove as useful as the garnered wealth of an inarticulate wisdom which has forgotten the existence of most things beyond its immediate horizon. The thing is conceivable. In any case, disregarding the warnings of old crusty, let us go blindly forward. Half the world, they say, does not know how the other half lives, nor does it care. It is the business of the peripatetic observer, howsoever foohsh, to remind Peru of China’s existence, and vice versa. At least I may claim to have dealt faithfully with men and things, by the light of such faculties as Heaven has vouchsafed me; wherever possible, I have gathered the crumbs that fall from the table of local wisdom. The result gives no consecutive record of travel deliberately planned to establish either facts or theories ; at the same time, the description of life on the “ camp ” in Uruguay, closely studied on the spot for half a year, assumes to be something more than a casual impression. A gringo, unless to the manner bom, may not be able in that time to pick the scabby sheep from out of a moving flock; he may not be able to recite the two-and-thirty names under which that noble animal, the horse, figures eternally in “ camp ” conversation, and by which his colour, qualities and vices are distinguished. But he must be a poor 12 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS traveller and singularly lacking in curiosity and observa- tion if he has not gathered useful materials for the com- parative study of beasts and man, and picked up by the wayside trifles that may serve either to adorn a tale or point a dozen morals. CHAPTER II OUTWARD BOUND There are several pleasant ways of getting to the eastern coast of South America. For those who, in normal times of peace, would approach it in a leisurely mood, conducive to the appreciation of lands wherein time has been relegated to its proper insignificance, I would suggest starting through Russia, crossing Asia by the Trans- Siberian Railway, thence via Peking and Shanghai to Japan ; from Yokohama either direct or via San Francisco, to Santiago de Chile, and thence across the Andes to the Argentine. Thus travelling, through lands that have seen many an Empire rise and fall, many an outworn creed perish in oblivion, ay, many a race utterly wiped out in the fierce struggle for a place in the sun, one may come to civilisa- tion’s latest playground and storehouse with a fitting sense of the mystery of existence and the effect of time, climate and religion on the destinies of mankind. After contemplating the revolutionary chaos that has overthrown Imperial Russia, the departed glory that once was far Cathay, the swift spreading of the Empire of the Rising Sun, now aspiring to overlordship in the East and the equally stupendous growth of “ God’s own country,” the traveller must needs come to these lotus lands of the South with something approaching to a philosophical conception of the riddle of the universe and a tolerant attitude towards the state of mind of the Spanish- American, who declares that sufficient unto the day is the good and the evil thereof. To come into this atmosphere of manana, 13 14 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS of mas 6 menos, straight from the feverish hustle and bustle of New York or London, is to impose too severe a strain upon the average man’s capacity for rapid adaptabihty ; one should approach it with such mental preparation as may lead to sympathetic consideration for the peon’s outlook on life. As a philosophy, it is probably just as good as that of Wall Street, even when it asserts that nothing really matters except love and war and reasonable intervals for laughter and sleep. And then, gazing across the Gulf of Time, behind this present-day background of easy-going prosperity, behind this vision of a promised land, flowing with milk and honey, the traveller who has heard and understood the teaching of old Europe and Asia may see these lands, these great silent places, as they were before Babylon was, cradles and graves of nations, that, like those of Persia and Babylon, Egypt and Parthia, have gone the way to dusty death and left scarcely a sign of their passing. He may hear the distant footsteps of the hungry generations that have trodden one another down and vanished utterly. Approached in this spirit, Peru, Bolivia, even Brazil and the Argentine, become moving figures in the great shadow-play of human history, more instructive than if we attempt to interpret them by the fierce fight of their newspapers or the wind-borne words of their pohticians. We shall get nearer to the heart of things by accepting the wisdom of the peon and its conclusion, namely, that because of the brevity of his tenure, and the uncertainty of his end, man is not justified in taking himself too seriously, either as an individual or a race; that to have lived, to have known laughter and love, to have done the day’s work without haunting fears for the morrow, is enough. Which wisdom is rarely vouch- safed to editors, pohticians and other word-ridden, restless shadows. IN SOUTH AMERICA 15 But pending the passing of the Bolshevik, and thereafter for those who have not leisure or inchnation for this round- the-world approach, there is another way of getting to South America which combines economy of time and money with a pleasant and profitable process of initiation, namely, the overland route from Paris to Lisbon. It is indeed difficult to understand the minds and manners of men in Brazil, unless one has learned something of Portu- gal ; the big unruly child resembles its parent more closely than any of the Spanish Republics resemble Spain. Under proper guidance, a week in Lisbon and Oporto will serve to give even a complete stranger some insight into things which, seen from England through the medium of Reuter's politico-journalese, are always a puzzle, and frequently an irritant, to the uninitiated. Lisbon, home of a noisy and unstable proletariat, is not Portugal by any means; to understand how and why the nation has been able to survive as an independent State and to preserve something of its ancient dignity, one must go north to the valley of the Douro and beyond and see the thrifty laborious peasantry and gallegos at work. All through the country, the hand of the politician lies heavily upon productive industry of every kind; ignorance and poverty testify to the chronic misrule of a bureaucracy given over to word-warfare and la politiqiie de V estomac ; yet four centuries of this misrule have not succeeded in breaking the stout heart of these rugged toilers or in quenching their native spark of cheerful fortitude. Portuguese officialdom has lived since the seventeenth century upon the labour of these peasants, both in the homeland and in Brazil ; the provincial caciques, Lisbon lobbyists, and other bureaucratic parasites are all alike faithful to the aristocratic tradition that bids them neither toil nor spin. Lisbon lives in imagination upon the glories of her golden age of epic deeds, upon the con- 16 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS quests and discoveries of Vasco da Gama and Albuquerque, but since the French Revolution, her actual life has become a sordid struggle between the haves and the have-nots, and her destinies have been at the mercy of pohtical agitators and adventurers, of anarchists and terrorists, of dreamers who preach the gospel of Bolshevism in the sacred name of liberty. The Republic which, according to its founders, was to restore the glorious traditions of Portugal and to inaugurate a new era of prosperity, has proved that the pet theories of political dreamers, apphed to an undisciphned and highly emotional people, caimot give them the rare and refreshing fruit of their hearts’ desire. The germs of revolution are ever in the air ; con- spiracies of Royalists, Freemasons, Carbonarios, of the army and navy, are endemic — and amidst all their tumult and shouting, the " toil-worn craftsman, with earth-made implements, laboriously conquers the earth,” sending forth his sturdy progeny to the new world overseas, from which they also will remit part of the price of their labour for the maintenance of tax-gatherers and word-spinners in the old country. The history of Portugal, and the present condition of the country, afford many and fruitful object-lessons for the guidance of Jacobins. The most obvious of them all is that nations, like individuals, can stand adversity better than prosperity, and that wealth, when easily acquired by plunder, brings its own swift Nemesis. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the gold and treasures that were poured into Portugal from Brazil made her the envy of Christendom. At the time of the Napoleonic invasion, the nation had been living on this unearned increment so long, that the idea of honest work had become thoroughly distasteful to any man with social pretensions; and the body politic had therefore become completely demoralised. IN SOUTH AMERICA 17 To-day the man in the street has come to expect his daily bread and bull-fight as the price of his vote, and to conspire against any Government which cannot pay that price. Moreover, another result of the law of retribution confronts us, writ plain in the features and morals of the people, namely, the infusion of negro and Brazil-Indian blood which came, through bond-servants and slaves, with the plundered wealth of the New World. It is to the negro strain, with its indiscipline, its fatalism and incapacity for initiative, that Portugal (and, in like manner, Brazil) owes many of her social and economic afflictions. Even under the old Burgundian dynasty, the Moorish and Jewish ingredients of the nation had never fused with the semi-oriental stock of Lusitania sufficiently to give the nation solid stability. The importation of the negro strain saddled it with a weight that cannot be shifted for centuries. At the present day, half of the soil of Portugal is uncultivated, three-quarters of her people illiterate, and her cities are become stamping-grounds for the wild asses of visionary politics. Yet for all that it is a good land and fruitful, the muscles and sinews of the people are healthy. All it wants (like Russia, China and other victims of mis- rule) is a period of progressive education under strict discipline. There are Portuguese in the north, worthy men who lament the expulsion of the religious orders and the befooling of Demos, who will tell you that the people was never so happily prosperous as during the ten years when Wellington’s army upheld law and order in the land. It may seem to the reader that here, at the very outset of our wanderings, he is getting an intolerable amount of political dough and very little sack. But we are going to Brazil, and I repeat, in extenuation, that unless one has studied mankind in the making in Portugal, it is not c 18 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS possible to form a correct judgment of men and events in that greater Portugal overseas. There, as you shall see, the qualities and defects of the transplanted race have persisted, bearing much fruit, some good, some bad, in the prolific soil of their new habitat. There were other reasons, besides a desire for enlighten- ment, to commend the overland trip to Lisbon, in war- time. In the first place you avoided all the nervous strain of anticipating a torpedo attack anywhere and ever5Twhere from Liverpool to Leixoes, not to mention the strain of the Bay of Biscay on the centre of all human emotions. Then, too, you saw Paris, and to see Paris after three years of war was a hberal education in philo- sophy and courage of the highest, because the most intelli- gent, order. It was my good fortime to visit the French capital several times during the war — the first time was just after the Government had migrated to Bordeaux — and each time I left it with what Americans call a sense of “ uplift,” with renewed confidence in human nature and a moral certainty that France and civihsation were going to consign the German’s shining armour to its proper place in the world’s Chamber of Horrors. ” France is dying,” said Hindenburg in 1917. I heard that message in Paris, and took it with me to the Place de la Concorde, where the statue of Strasbourg, still decked with the wreaths of a great nation’s mourning, was awaiting the day of redemption, all confident, surrounded by her peers. “ France is dying,” said the idol of the Huns. The lie was good enough to keep the Berhner in good humour, but the German had not our advantage of seeing Paris, sore stricken but serene and splendid, in the sunlight of that autumn day. Then by the overland route you get little glimpses of Spain — not very satisfactory to new-comers, but to those IN SOUTH AMERICA 19 who know and love this land of idleness made perfect by a race of artists, like the wayside greetings of old friends. There are two main roads for reaching Lisbon from the French frontier, one by Irun — Medina del Campo — ^Villa Formosa, the other via Hendaye to Madrid (Wagons-lits service) and thence to Lisbon by the so-called " Rapide,” direct. In summer both routes are extremely dusty and stuffy. But from your carriage window you can see, with the eye of faith, the Knight of the Rueful Countenance and his trusty squire faring forth in their immortal quest of chivalry. You can see agriculture as it was by the sources of Time, bullock-carts of the type men used in Egypt ages ago and use in Manchuria to-day; women gleaning in the fields as Esther gleaned, and everywhere glad sunlight, and snatches of half-forgotten songs. At Lisbon, before embarking on the Royal Mail, and even more emphatically on returning to Portugal, one learned in war-time something of the possibilities of local bureaucratic formalities, when combined with those of diplomatic routine, as effective checks on an5dhing like unseemly haste; the education thus acquired is valuable anywhere between the Isthmus of Panama and the Straits of Magellan. To get one’s passport stamped by the Gobernador Civil and the French Legation, for example, was a splendid test of philosophic calm ; there were others, provided by the Government’s official launch service, which monopolised the carrying of passengers to and from vessels lying in the Tagus, by the Health Officer who boarded you next morning because his wife was ill last night, and by the Servicio da Republica, Policia Adminis- trativa, which undertook to carry one’s luggage expediti- ously from the wharf to the Avenida Palace Hotel — about 800 yards — and took half a day to do it. It needed but little experience of these official monopolies to confirm 20 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS one’s faith in Cobden and the virtue of private competition. To remonstrate with anything in Portugal that wears gold lace and brass buttons is futile : you might as well argue with a penny-in-the-slot machine. Then, too, there were chronic dislocations of labour, due to the frequency of national festivals, to the inscrutable workings of the repos hehdoniadaire and to strikes, whereby your ship was prevented from coaling or discharging cargo — many inventions, in fact, for persuading the traveller that to-morrow will do just as well as to-day, and that it is not seemly to look upon Lisbon as no better than a jumping-off place. Take your time, Senhores : what matters a day more or less in a lifetime, especially when all the world is upside down ? Saunter down the Via Aurea, on the shady side, and learn how man may be completely idle and yet well satisfied. Sip your vermouth at the cafes of the Rocio and read the latest exposition of Affonso Costa’s plan for establishing the millennium on the principle of the widow’s cruse. Or take leisurely trips to Cintra and Bussaco and the sleepy old towns of the northern coast and learn how contentedly men may dream their httle lives away, a stone’s throw from the hurly-burly of your machine-made modernity, yet worlds apart. This may not have been the idea at the back of the mind of Lisbon’s officialdom — perhaps it does not entertain ideas — but it was the impression that one got from it. Take the case of the Gobernador Civil and the stamping of passports. Let us say that you landed at Lisbon from South America in the evening, and wanted to take the express via Madrid, leaving next day at 4.55 p.m. The Civil Governor’s office bore a legend to the effect that it was open from 10 to 4. So it was, but the janitor (weary, because he had explained it for years and years) informed you that His Excellency never arrived till 11.30 and usually IN SOUTH AMERICA 21 at twelve. You employed part of the interval in a voyage of discovery to find the place, some streets away, where they sold you the stamps which the Civil Governor’s office would presently affix; only the uninitiated would expect to find them in that office, said the tired clerk, who relieved the tedium of your subsequent waiting with a careful enumeration of the various formalities to be observed. The vise at the French Legation was a serious matter, unless you were an old hand at the game and carried a stock of photographs suitable for pasting on to passports, for they required you to deposit two copies in the archives. (Why is it, by the way, that passport photographs, all the world over, make you look like a criminal in posse ?) It usually took two days to get your papers passed by the French Legation and they charged you two and a half milreis (roughly seven shillings) for the privilege, which, judging by the number of applicants, must have gone some way towards paying the expenses of the establish- ment. No doubt the object of all this was to make war- time travelling difficult and unpleasant ; but to the unofficial mind it would have seemed simpler and better for all concerned to check it, by refusing to issue passports in the first instance, except for approved purposes. The purposes once approved, why harass the traveller with clinging coils of red tape