The sweeping charge that South America is a land of revolutions is made so often and so lightly that few people stop to consider the record of the vastly different countries comprising the area below Panama. When the writer has remarked—outside Brazil—that Brazil has never as a whole had any blood-stained revolution, the statement has been received with looks of polite incredulity, and yet it is true. Prior to separation from Portugal a few local, factional feuds occurred, as in Pernambuco when the natives quarrelled with the petty merchant Portuguese, and in Minas when the Paulistas fought the men of other states for claims to the gold mines, but there was no more serious internal disturbance. Independence from Portugal was achieved almost without bloodshed, by force of a proclamation: the end of the monarchy and establishment of a republic was attained peacefully. After the republican régime began there was occasional trouble, a mere candle flicker compared to the republican bonfires in neighbour states, the insurgents of Rio Grande giving trouble for some years; there were two revolts by the navy, of a not too creditable kind. In none of these were the Brazilian people deeply concerned, nor did they affect the government of the country. No Viceroy of Brazil, no King and no President, has been assassinated in the history of the country. External troubles, excluding the fights for twenty-four years to expel the Dutch from Pernambuco, are limited to two, with neighbours in the south; the first of these was as much the fault of Brazil as that of Argentina, and she was forced to give up the Cisplatine Province (Uruguay) forcibly annexed: but in the second, the Paraguayan war, Brazil acted only after years of aggression obliged her to take up arms. The fact is that the Brazilian is a peace lover, that Brazil has had few wars in the past and has no cause for quarrel as far as can be foreseen. Wars between South American states have frequently hinged upon questions of boundaries, the result of vague delimitation in colonial days when much of the interior was still a sealed book. Brazil took steps early in her history as a republic to avoid such differences: that good diplomat the Barão de Rio Branco worked for years on the subject of Brazilian boundaries, and succeeded in making definite settlements with the Argentine, Bolivia and French Guiana.