Many parts of South America have suffered from over-praise as much as from unmerited blame. None have suffered more than Brazil, shut off from the non-Latin world rather more than is Spanish America because of her Portuguese idiom. There is little enough thorough study of Spanish on the part of Anglo-Saxons, but it is mighty compared to the study of Portuguese, a beautiful language and probably rather more readily acquired than the formal and clear-cut idiom of Castile. Non-comprehension of Portuguese and Spanish has been a bar to understanding of the soul of Latin America; nearly every person who wishes to learn something about any part of the Southern Continent runs to the libraries for a book of travels, generally written by a foreigner, himself sparsely acquainted with the language of the country about which he is writing, and frequently entirely from an outside viewpoint. There is a remarkable absence of study of South America from the South American’s viewpoint, and it is for this reason that I have tried in this book to quote from Brazilian books and newspapers rather than from the ideas of foreigners, however distinguished. It is a loss to the Anglo-Saxon that so much fine and acute comment and description of South America by South Americans falls on deaf ears because of the language difficulty; perhaps the next few years may see the new interest in things South American stimulated by translations from many more of the writings of South American authors. Only by understanding the South American better can the Anglo-Saxon see the relation that mutually exists, and realize the depth of the gulf between them at the same time. Especially since the outbreak of the European War we have seen an astounding number of agreeable but visionary articles written on the subject of the strong logical tie, geographical, political and mental, between North and South America. The truth is however that the two continents have little geographical connection—Panama was once a strait—and perhaps even less racial, religious, and mental leanings. Both sections of the Americas have drawn their blood, language, religion and political ideals from Europe, but from two strongly marked sections—one, the Protestant Anglo-Saxon, commercial, mechanically inventive: the other, the Roman Catholic Latin section, artistic and mentally brilliant but not usually a born _commerciante_. It is just as well to realize this difference clearly, to know that, at least in the past, the Americas have been more closely bound to Europe than to each other; the ties are especially strong in Brazil, more tender than in many parts of the New World, because separation in a political sense was obtained without violence. It is only through understanding of the mental and social attitude and conditions of the Brazilian that the newcomer can avoid pitfalls.