Below the commercial element comes that of labour, stratum of entirely different composition; it differs too in varying localities, from that of the south, where slavery tailed off in São Paulo, never penetrating the more southerly states, and where white labour of immigrant origin performs field work, to the central section where the _mestizo_ (mixed blood) of white and Indian or, about Bahia and Pernambuco, white and negro, blood is the worker; in and near Bahia itself thousands of pure-blood negroes or mulattos form the labouring class, to the almost total exclusion of any other. Farther north the negro element fades out and the Indian mixture predominates in a wiry strain which furnishes all the labour of the Amazon valley. Upon this great mass of mixed-blood labourers the educational systems of Brazil make a certain if slow impression. Intelligent and apt, docile if conciliated and stubborn if crossed, the _mestizo_ has some excellent qualities; the indolence of which he is often accused is sometimes want of direction, and sometimes the result of ill-health in certain regions, disappearing when the enervating malaria and ankylostomiasis are conquered, exactly as in the South of the United States where the same troubles are common. With better sanitation in the crowded warm regions, and persistence in good schooling, the _brasileiro_ of the labouring classes would not need supplanting with introduced immigrants. Between him and the legislator there is a great gulf fixed; its existence might be dangerous were not the habit of the Brazilian gentle; it can be bridged only by education. “We have no organization for the expression of popular opinion,” declared a Brazilian writer recently. “The statesman, the government official, the legislator, the administrator has to be a kind of powerful Jehovah, capable of creating worlds out of nothing ... unless the bachelor (_bacharel_—“doctor”) president, the bachelor governor, the bachelor minister or the bachelor deputy should sally forth through Brazil (_saiam por esses Brazis afóra_), over mountains and valleys, to enquire at the window of every farm, at the door of every store, at the entrance of each factory, in each lacemaker’s shop and at each blacksmith’s forge, what Agriculture, Commerce, Industry and the Proletariat wish for their practical and effective betterment....” At least it can never be said that the faults and lapses of Brazil are not understood and discussed by her own educated classes; there is no country where self-criticism is more hearty. During the early part of 1916 a party of specialists in tropical maladies from the Rockefeller Institute passed through Brazil and made some investigations; one of the weeklies of Rio famous for its cartoons and skits on public affairs remarked that the visitors need not have come to Brazil to study malaria—they would find that in a hundred places: they should study the troubles that were really peculiar to Brazil.