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went further. Abandoning the helmet of their stern ancestors for the sombrero of the planter, and their valiant sword for the feitor's whip, they wrapped themselves in their hidalgo's mantle, and left the conquered tribes to accumulate wealth for them. Disdaining the tardy productions of the soil, so fertile under the tropics, they looked only for gold. To obtain a few ingots of this, they burnt forests, overturned the soil, exterminated Indian tribes, and condemned several million negroes to slavery. They have as yet opened neither highways nor canals.^[1] Two of the largest rivers of the world, the Maranhão or Amazon, and the Paraná, which take their rise near each other, and which form in their immense triangle the great arteries of southern commerce, are to-day nearly what they were on the arrival of Cabral. Up to within a few years, a few Indian canoes alone furrowed their waters. If you enter a village in the interior, you will find churches and monasteries by dozens, but not a single school-house. The inhabitants are obliged to have recourse to London or New-York for the simplest engine, and for the smallest stretch of railroad; yet iron is found in many places upon the surface of the soil, and almost in a native state. Finally, a thing almost impossible to be believed, Norway sometimes furnishes building timber for this country, which is the richest in the world for woods of every description.

The repugnance to labor, the philosophical indifference which the conquistadores always professed in regard to comfort, cannot be attributed to a want of energy; for no people with which I am acquainted ever displayed in the history of the world a greater amount of boldness and stern activity, than that Celto-Iberian race shut in between the mountains and the sea. After rolling back the waves of Islamism, finding themselves too constrained in their narrow belt of country, they were the first to brave the fearful mysteries of an unknown and boundless ocean; and they explored the coasts of Africa, passed around the stormy Cape, opened the great route to the Indies, and established their merchants in Asia; while, on the other hand, Cabral, pushing out to the westward, found the continent that Columbus had sought in vain. It was likewise a Portuguese, Magellan, who, braving the rigors of the South Pole, entered the Pacific by a new route, and procured for his companions the glory of navigating the sea and the earth in their entire circumference, through parts hitherto closed to science and human investigation. Such men could not understand the new spirit. Listen to their rich, sonorous idiom, so passionate in singing the exploits of heroes or the canticles of the saints; it becomes mute when you require a scientific treatise or a work on practical industry. It is the language of knights and not of artisans. As the language, so is the nation. Inheritors of the Roman world, and the last personification of the middle ages, these men of the sword saw in labor only the appanage of serfs. Every innovation that infringed upon that basis was a crime. They replied to the Reformation by the Inquisition. While the Anglo-Saxon races opened their ears to the great voice of Luther, they placed themselves under the patronage of Dominic and Loyola. The two seeds have borne their fruit.

The future of Brazil, however, must not be despaired of; and however slow the action of ages upon human revolutions, a presentiment may already be formed of the changes that time is destined to work in that country. Two things alone are wanting: the fecundating breath of science, and a new infusion of the ardent blood that flowed in the