The system under which land is made over to colonists demands more explanation than space permits; São Paulo, briefly, only sanctions the establishment of _nucleos_ near a railway line or navigable river, with an eye to marketing, and has inserted colonization clauses in more than one railroad concession to help develop these settlements along the route; lots are never, originally, of more than fifty hectares, and may be half this size if quite close to rail or river; “urban” lots are granted to settlers with money in hand to start a business, and “rural” lots to intending agriculturists; nobody can obtain a lot unless he has a wife and family, but sons twenty-one years old can also obtain grants while bachelors; payments are made on easy terms, generally at the end of each harvest for five successive years, prices varying according to locality from a few milreis to a couple of hundred per hectare—roughly speaking; I have never heard of unfeeling treatment in cases where settlers are unable to keep up payments in bad years, but encountered many stories of help given by the authorities. When the male head of a family dies before payments are complete, the widow and family are handed clear titles if three-quarters of the debt has been liquidated, and if ability to continue work is demonstrated; if not, the family is sent back to Europe at State expense. Rebates of ten per cent are given to settlers able to pay on taking up land. Following this plan, it happens that for several years after the foundation of a new centre the colony is in debt, becoming _emancipado_ as the obligations are paid off; São Paulo state is dotted with pleasant examples of these “emancipated” colonies, today flourishing agricultural regions well-farmed by the industrious and ambitious Europeans, adding enormously to the productivity of the State. At the end of 1915 the State was acting as god-mother to half a score of _nucleos_, of which the most promising are Campos Salles, Jorge Tibirçia, Nova Europa, Nova Veneza, Gavião Peixoto, and the Martinho Prado group. In the same year, the President’s message states, two hundred and ninety-three colonists completed payments on their lots and received definite titles in place of the provisionary ones first issued: over one hundred and eighty-five contos was paid on lots. “The total population still under State administration is 13,793 persons, who occupy an area of 54,666 hectares; of these over 14,000 are in cultivation, yielding produce worth 1800 contos of reis last year,” said Dr. Altino Arantes (July, 1916). Twenty thousand people came into the state in 1915, of whom six thousand were Portuguese, four thousand Spanish and four thousand Italian; this is but twenty per cent of pre-war average immigration to S. Paulo.