Pedro II., is from this moment in his majority, and in the full exercise of his constitutional prerogatives. The majority of his majesty, Dom Pedro II.! Viva Senhor Dom Pedro II., Constitutional Emperor and Perpetual Defender of Brazil!! Viva Senhor Dom Pedro II!!!"

And the vivas rolled up by millions. The revolution which had threatened disaster was at an end. The multitude who would not receive a regent of fifty, shouted over an emperor of fifteen! Ah, well, an elephant may be led by a gay ribbon, which would snap a seven twisted chain.

Dom Pedro II is, no doubt, the most popular of living monarchs, and we may perhaps justly add, deservedly so. His mind was early cultivated with much care, and his later studies have been uniform and persistent. With a reputable scholarship, he unquestionably possessed statemanship of no common order. He has been the steady advocate and patron of arts and sciences, of internal improvement and commerce, and his enlightened and liberal policy has greatly elevated his nation in spite of their superstition and ignorance. At the rate of progress witnessed during the past decade, ere many years Brazil will take her place among the first-class powers of the earth.

Let not this be deemed an unwarrantable statement. Steam power is just beginning to be employed for transportation. In 1852 ground was broken for the first railroad, and the year following saw the first locomotive placed on Mauá Railway, and a line of steamers on the Amazon. The commerce of Brazil, yet in its infancy, is becoming important. It is to be decided whether the trade of Brazil shall be with the United States or with Europe. The sympathies of Brazilians are with us; we are their neighbors; they have articles which we must import; we have articles which they must import; and yet, says Dr. Thomas Rainey, in his paper read before the New York Historical Society:

"It is a most singular fact that the United States, with the largest commercial marine in the world, disputing with the last great contending rival the championship of the seas, and claiming an aggregate civilization equaled by that of no other people on the globe, should lag behind some, even of the most insignificant nations of Europe, in the prosecution of that trade which all the natural advantages of geographical contiguity would proclaim peculiarly her own; that she should not sustain a single steamship line of any class to those vast, important, and growing countries, (alluding to Brazil, West Indies, Spanish Main, etc.,) while to Brazil alone, Great Britain, with a trade but fifty-four per cent. larger than ours, (though far more rapidly increasing,) is now supporting two distinct lines of first-class steamships; France, with fifty-six per cent. less trade, also two first-class lines; Genoa, with a trade not two and a half per cent. of ours, one first-class line; Portugal, with only twenty-five per cent of ours, one first-class line; Hamburg one; Belgium, with a trade of only

ten per cent. of ours with Brazil, has also one first-class line. This record is indeed startling."

We have not room for the statistics with which the volume before us fairly bristles, illustrative of the above remarks, and the importance of early securing this extensive trade; but we will insert some items of the annual trade, exports and imports, with Brazil. 1856. Imports and Exports united: New York, $7,823,599; New Orleans, $6,376,697; Baltimore, $4.271,538; Philadelphia, $2,61.231; Boston and Salem, $1,524,361; Richmond exports 110,000 barrels of flour, value not given; imports $149,345; while Charleston imports $269,169, and exports $23,470.

We shall add an extract or two from Appendix H. of the volume before us:

"We see from a generalization and combination of these tables and analyses, that our great advance in the Brazilian trade has arisen from imports instead of from exports, whereas the trade of Great Britain has advanced in both, and particularly in her exports, which already were large, the tendency being to enrich Great Britain and impoverish us: that until 1850 her exports were stationary, while ours were increasing, due, doubtless, to the superiority of our clipper ships at that period, which placed us much nearer than England to Brazil; that she is now taking the coffee trade from us and giving it to her own and other European merchants and shipping; that she is rivaling us in the rubber trade; wholly distancing us in that of manufactures; and that from 1850 to 1855 she has doubled a large trade of profitable exports, and increased her aggregate imports and exports two hundred and twenty-five per cent.; whereas it has taken us thirteen years to double a small trade, composed mostly of imports: it being evident that, with equal facilities, we could outstrip Great Britain in nearly all the elements of this Brazil trade, as we were doing from 1840 to 1850."

The remedy for this is in the establishment by our government of a line of mail steamers. Private enterprise can do much, but it needs this aid from the administration. Our people have clamorously demanded it, and in an able report to the House of Representatives, its feasibility and necessity were demonstrated beyond question. It is to be hoped that a subject of so much importance will soon receive the attention and aid it so richly merits.

We pass from commerce to give a hurried glance at Brazilian institutions.

Institutions!--The word at once suggests the idea of African slavery; for other things may be incidents, this has a graver name and character. It is a sad fact that this curse blights the rich land of Brazil. From its fields, bright with many-hued flowers, go up to God the groans of the captive. Slavery is essentially and unchangeably evil. Yet there are facts which greatly mitigate the curse, and render Brazilian slavery less hopeless than the domestic institutions of this

"Land of the free and home of the brave!"

1. The Brazilian constitution does not, either directly or indirectly, recognize color as the charter of civil rights; hence, once free, the black man or mulatto, if he possess industry and talent, can rise to a social position from which his race in North America is debarred." This is, indeed, a difference! There is not, in these United States or territories, a single square foot of ground, from Rio Grande to St. John's River, from Eastport to San Francisco, where a man may claim citizenship or self-ownership by virtue of his manhood. It is color, color alone! If white, if the Circassian tint is the ruling one, though ignorant as the white-haired Celt who has just landed upon our shores, or "taken me first papers, shure," he is intrusted with the functions of citizenship! He may be ignorant, brutish, priestowned; no matter,

Color makes the man!

But if a darker hue be his-he may be a scholar, he may be brave as Ajax, may be worthy to walk with princes-no matter, that rude Celt may eject him violently from the public conveyances of the street, and our laws and our courts approve it. Social clevation and political rights are and will be denied the African race in this country. In Brazil he may ascend the social and political scale.

"In Brazil everything is in favor of freedom; and such are the facilities for the slave to emancipate himself, and when emancipated, if he possess the proper qualifications, to ascend to higher eminences than those of a mere free black, that fuit will be written against slavery in this empire before another half century rolls around. Some of the most intelligent men I have met with in Brazil, men educated at Paris and Coimbra, were of African descent, whose parents had been slaves. Thus if a man have freedom, money, and merit, no matter how black may be his skin, no place in society is refused him. It is surprising also to observe the ambition and the advancement of some of these men with negro blood in their veins. The National Library furnishes not only quiet rooms, large tables, and plenty of books to the seekers after knowledge, but pens and paper are supplied to such as desire these aids to their studies. Some of the closest students thus occupied are mulattoes. The largest and most successful printing establishment in Rio, that of Sr. F. Paulo Brito, is owned and directed by a mulatto. In the colleges, the medical, law, and theological schools, there is no distinction of color. It must, however, be admitted that there is a certain, though by no means strong, prejudice existing all over the land in favor of men of pure white descent. . . . . I was informed that a man of mental endowments, eren if he had been a slave, would be debarred from no official station, however high, unless it might be that of imperial senator.-P. 133.

2. There is a possibility of freedom. "By the Brazilian laws a slave can go before a magistrate, have his price fixed, and purchase himself." The price is fixed, not by the owner, but by a magistrate supposed to be disinterested. We have no such custom."

66

3. While the condition of Brazilian slaves is bad enough, we know of no law against instructing them. If an amiable "elect

lady" should teach Sambo to read, we have no evidence that she would be imprisoned therefor.

Mr. Fletcher regards slavery as surely doomed in Brazil. In 1850 the slave-trade was suppressed, and since then there has been a heavy immigration. Europe has rolled a countless tide up the beautiful bay, and along the coast. Free labor is everywhere coming into contact with slave labor, and the result is obvious. The question unavoidably suggests itself, whether, the climate and soil of Brazil being adapted to the colored race, may not many of that doomed people, who feel deeply their anomalous condition, find there the home and the nationality denied them here?

Since the commencement of the reign of the present emperor, there has been an increase in the facilities for popular education, and the influence of the crown is altogether in its favor. There is a common school system for the realm, and its teachers and officers seek quite eagerly for reports from United States' Boards of Education, as imbodying safe principles and practice. This system is becoming popular, and although, perhaps, one half the children are educated in private schools, or those under provincial authority, yet the reports of 1855 show that in the schools of the empire there were sixty-five thousand four hundred and thirteen children. The government has also founded colleges, naval and military academies, and seminaries of law, medicine, and theology. There is also an imperial academy of the fine arts, with professors of painting, architecture, sculpture, and design, which receives annually about seventy pupils, and even provides for the support of a number of its graduates at Rome.

It is also worthy of note that the Brazilian press is free, something unusual in an empire of which Romanism is the tutelar deity. Rio de Janeiro has its four dailies, besides weeklies, tri-weeklies, etc. Any citizen may ventilate his opinions by paying for the privilege, for journalism is made a profitable affair.

It is true there is a vast amount of ignorance in Brazil; but we have reason to be modest in our censures until the damaging disclosures of the United States census are forgotten. It must be remembered, however, that her educational and literary apparatus has been newly created. There is progress. Inquiry is encouraged, books are scattered, papers are multiplying, public libraries are being opened, and there must be an intellectual elevation of the

masses.

It is, however, a gloomy look-out when we sweep over the moral and religious condition of this vast empire. When we see its mummery, and take the present condition contrasted with what it might have FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XI.-3

been had success smiled upon the colony of French Huguenots, whose songs went up to God, sooner by half a century than Protestant psalmody was heard elsewhere in the New World, but which was destroyed by the base perversion of their leader, Villegagnon, we have another illustration of the unsearchableness of Divine counsels. Why was that colony blotted out, and that embryo empire abandoned to the man of sin?

The blight of Brazil is its ecclesiastical system in the hands of a profligate and ignorant priesthood. These "successors of the apostles" perform the ritual of the Church at all canonical times, but are careful to add no unwritten duty. They shun the hospital, but attend the race-course; they preside in the confessional when not allured to the cock-pit. There is no preaching to the people, but processions and gorgeous pageantry are seen upon every hand. The ecclesiastics live in open licentiousness, and sink to its lowest degree. There are proofs of all these statements given, but we prefer not transferring them to these pages. Such things are the legitimate fruit of a system which so separates between the man and the minister; between what he is personally, and what he does officially; allowing him to be vile as Satan, and claiming for him power to create his God, and to absolve from all punishment the victims or companions of his debaucheries. Lest we be deemed guilty of misrepresenting the true condition of Brazilian morals under infallible training, we will give a few specimens of the advertisements which may be read in the newspapers, or found affixed to church doors. The first is of a festival in the Church of Santa Rita:

"This festa is to be celebrated with high mass and a sermon, at the expense of the devotees of the said virgin, the Most Holy Mother of Grief, who are all invited by the Board to add to the splendor of the occasion by their presence, since they will receive from the above-named lady due reward.”—P. 146.

This is modest, however, and decidedly reverent, compared with some others, as per example:

"The Judge and some devout persons of the Church of Lady of our Estrella, erected in the village of the same name, intend to hold a festival there, with a chanted mass, sermon, procession in the afternoon, and a Te Deum, all with the greatest pomp possible, on the 23d instant; and at night there will be a beautiful display of fireworks. The managers of the feast have asked the director of the Inhomerim Steamboat Company to put on an extra steamer that will leave the Praia dos Mineiros at eight o'clock in the morning, and return after the fireworks. It is requested that all the devotees will deign to attend this solemn act, to render it of the most brilliant description.

"Estrella, Sept. 17, 1855. FRANCISCO PEREIRA RAMOS, Sec."-P. 146.

And yet again:

"The Brotherhood of the Divine Holy Ghost of San Goçalo [a small village across the bay] will hold the feast of the Holy Ghost, on the 31st instant,