was little interfered with, Portuguese officials continued to be appointed to Brazilian posts, and if Spain did not adequately defend them because her hands were already desperately full she at least did Brazil the kindness to leave it alone. The one serious administrative measure she took was the formation in Lisbon of a Junta to care for Brazilian commerce, similar to the Council of the Indies sitting in Madrid, and this was undoubtedly useful: the narrow monopolistic trading policy pursued was simply in line with the ideas and practice of the times. It was protection carried to an extreme, was useful at the time of its initiation, and, if it outlived its usefulness in its most irksome manifestations, the principle has so far survived that today, in the third lustre of the twentieth century, it may be said that only one great commercial nation has ever definitely thrown it aside. The group of capitanias extending from Espirito Santo northwards to Ceará were when Brazil came under Spanish rule the most productive of all; it was but eighty years from the date of Cabral’s discovery, and only fifty from the time of colonization, but flourishing populations were settled along the seaboard, growing sugar, tobacco and cotton and cutting stacks of dyewoods to fill the fifty ships a year that called at the main ports. Bahia, seat of the Captain-General’s administration, was also a bishopric, and the chief religious orders had settled in each considerable town and founded churches, schools and convents. In 1570 a Royal Decree forbade the compulsory use of Indians as labourers, and to fill the ranks of field workers Africans were brought in: to this idea the Portuguese were inured, for the West Coast of Africa had been a source of labour supply for them since 1440; it was the discovery that negroes could be transplanted to the Americas and would there work with docility, thrive and multiply, that made possible the cultivation of thousands of square miles of land, both in North and South America, and warmly as we may reject the principle of slave labour now, it was the only one which could have opened American lands to the extent which they attained in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The white man could not have performed this physical labour. Indian labour was abolished at the instance of the priests; it was remarkable that to the enslavement of Africans under circumstances equally brutal no objection was made. Negroes were brought to Brazil from 1574 onwards until the abolition of the slave trade, though not of slavery, in 1854. The debt of Brazil to the African negro is a very heavy one.