Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/559

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THE CAUCASIAN IN BRAZIL.
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611,000, while the negro arrivals had ceased almost entirely with the abolition of the slave trade. The census of 1890 does not give race numbers as to many localities, but estimating these on the basis of the sections where the relative proportions were ascertained, the percentage of whites is 44; of negroes, 18; of mulattoes, 35, and of Indians, 3. Dividing the total population into its race elements according to the principle already used with the figures for 1872, after making an allowance for the lessening proportion of dark blood among the reported 'whites,' we find that in 1890 there was 49 per cent, of white blood, 47 black and 4 Indian.

The tendency of the pure negroes to decrease in numbers is conclusively shown by the accurate statistics of the slave population kept during the existence of that institution in Brazil. In 1818 the slaves numbered 2,350,000; in 1872, 1,510,806; in 1887, adding their children born free under the gradual emancipation law of 1873, 1,183,250.

The immense extent of Brazil, the wide variations in climate, soil and altitude, the predominance of sugar culture with the employment of great gangs of slaves on large plantations in some localities, and of the cattle industry which the whites are fond of in others, and the fact that sometimes the Indians were collected into villages of their own and sometimes were enslaved and almost exterminated, have caused great differences between the various states in the relative numbers of the three races. The limits of this article do not permit a discussion of each state separately, but it would confirm the conclusions already indicated.

Even in the parts of Brazil which are the most tropical and least attractive to Europeans, and where white immigration during the last century was inappreciable, such as the non-coffee and sugar states of the central and northern coast, and the wild and remote interior included in the states of Goyaz, Minas and Matto Grosso, the whites have increased more rapidly than pure negroes or Indians. The latter tend to disappear into the mass of mixed bloods who constitute the bulk of the population. A large proportion of the Caucasians have, however, maintained themselves in direct, prolific and unmixed lines for three hundred and seventy years, and their commercial and intellectual dominance has never been threatened.

In the favored regions of the south the preponderance of the whites is enormous and is rapidly increasing. On the coffee plantations of Sao Paulo, where the negro slave formerly did all the work, he has been completely displaced by the immigrant from Europe. The negroes and mulattoes have little chance of intermarrying with the whites; their unions among themselves produce a small number of children, and they show little providence in forming and taking care of families. They do not have, as do their contemporaries in the