By this time coffee culture was coming into favour, the slave business was doomed, although the actual abolition of slavery did not occur until 1888, and planters invited immigrants to their developing estates. The work of obtaining immigrants was undertaken by individuals, as the Vergueiro family by Theophilo Ottoni and the Visconde de Baependy, with varying success, as well as by the International Society of Immigration of Rio, with headquarters in Antwerp. Colonists sent to coffee estates worked on the _métayer_ or _parceria_ system, inherently vicious. The colonist had the satisfaction of considering himself an independent worker, but as he started with a large debt, never owned land and earned no wages, his lot was a poor one if crops failed or the _fazendeiro_ chanced to be unfair. He arrived owing for the passage of himself and family, and was given a house and a quantity of food—of the country; he cultivated a certain number of coffee trees, or allotment of sugarcane, took the harvest to the owner’s mill and received half the result after milling. It is said by J. L. Moré, in his book _Le Brésil en 1852_, that the hardworking Bavarians and Holsteiners who worked on this system in São Paulo often paid off their debts in four years and then had money in hand; but other investigators spoke adversely on the subject, finding colonists of ten and twelve years’ standing still indebted and living hopelessly. In the end the _parceria_ gave way before a general wages system. The _métayer_ plan still exists in some parts of Minas, Espirito Santo, São Paulo and other coffee regions, and can be found in the sugar districts and in the cacao region of Bahia, but large ownership of great scientifically-run estates has driven it from general employment. Investigations made by J. von Tschudi, sent by the Swiss Government in 1857, and by the German Consul Haupt ten years later, proved the failure of the share system; colonists could be seized and imprisoned if they tried to leave the estate on which they worked, and, unable to support life on the produce of their allotments, would have been even worse off had it not been for the “many acts of benevolence for which the emigrants had to thank the kindness natural to so many Brazilians,” says the author of _Brazilian Colonization_, a little brochure published under a pseudonym in London in the year 1873.