In the Argentine the city of Buenos Aires is the centre and fount of business; every great house has its headquarters there, its railway links and commercial arms reach out into all productive parts of the country. To Buenos Aires everything comes to be marketed whether from the interior or from abroad: it is _the_ city, the head and heart of the Argentine. It is not possible to point to any one city in Brazil and to say the same. Not even lovely and splendid Rio, federal capital and gay vortex as she is, can claim to represent the commercial interest of the country; she is the spending-place of much of Brazil’s income, but she is not the greatest earner. This honour falls to São Paulo, with Santos as the biggest exporter of values; no one denies the commercial palm to the Paulistas, but it is not heresy to say that the elimination of the coffee industry would not destroy the life of Brazil as, for example, the disappearance of the cereal or cattle industry would threaten the Argentine. She would still retain her _herva matte_, her cattle, her mines; her rubber, wax, fruit, cotton, sugar, and tobacco; her hardwoods and forestal drugs and dyes, her cacao and fibres and nuts. A whole world of interests divides São Paulo from Bahia, Bahia from Pará, Pará from Pernambuco, Maranhão from Victoria, Maceió from Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro from Manáos, Ilhéos from Paranaguá, Mossoró from São Francisco, Fortaleza from Florianopolis; some of these ports are great economically, alive with shipping, while others are little developing points which have not yet achieved international fame; but each has its distinct _raison d’être_ and has a divergent social and economic impulse from that of many of her sisters. It is true that certain states seem to produce almost everything tropical or sub-tropical as well as being endowed with minerals, as Minas Geraes, growing coffee, cotton, raising cattle, mining precious stones, gold and iron ore, weaving her cotton and running a great dairy business with interstate shipments of her famous cheese and butter; or Pernambuco and the other states of the great promontory, with a host of different products; or São Paulo, where an energetic Brazilian _fazendeiro_, to show what his state can grow besides coffee, cotton, rice and sugar, has gardens containing “every known fruit” of temperate and tropical zones. But the distinct local industries of the widely varying Brazilian soil and climate are the most striking and promising elements of her economic life.