think there must be very few cities which in a few years have managed to destroy and rebuild, according to new plans, so large a part of themselves. Naturally the work has cost millions; but on the few occasions on which I timidly dared to make a remark to this effect, I received the laughing answer: “We are optimists; and we believe in progress!” This ædilitian transformation of Rio de Janeiro filled with pride all Brazilians, including my lettered and philosophical friends, on account of its rapidity and grandeur; and their pride was swelled by the thought that no European states, but perhaps the United States of North America alone, their great elder brother, could have done so much. Everybody thought, moreover, that the whole of Brazil ought to be modernised just like Rio, from top to bottom. I visited São Paulo, the great coffee-producing state. I traversed from end to end Minas Gerães, the great agricultural and mineral state which, as a symbol, as it were, of its intention to modernise itself entirely, has recently constructed a smiling and graceful new capitol, Bello Horizonte, in a most picturesque position crowning the hoary Ouro Preto. Everywhere I found politicians, officials, professors, literary men, commercial men, bankers, Brazilian and European immigrants, united in the same thought: that railways must be built, machinery bought, able engineers engaged, mines explored, cultivation extended, and industries founded to increase the country’s rate of progress by modernising it entirely. It was useless for me to try to prove even to those of my Rio acquaintances who were endowed with the highest and finest intellectual culture, that this conception of progress was too simple and material; that real progress is not to make new or to make quickly, but to make better; that it is not enough to augment wealth, but that it is necessary also to put it to good use, a more difficult problem than the producing of it. I tried to convince my friends that if so simple and material a notion of progress acquired a strong hold on the popular mind, the public would infallibly be impelled to create, not a lofty and noble civilisation, but a sort of opulent barbarism. In Brazil, as much as in Argentina, my arguments beat harmlessly against a faith and a passion which demands no proofs. “American Progress” for the Brazilians too was the great historical force of the future, which is going to create the new world, and the new civilisation whose dim foreshadowing seems to be agitating the masses at the present time.