There are men whose lives are the best books they have written; to this company Manoel de Oliveira Lima belongs. He has identified himself so completely with the cultural history of his nation that, as I said at the beginning, he is an integral part of it, and if his works were removed from the national bookshelf, a yawning gap would be left. That is the better nationalism, to which he has devoted an unchauvinistic career of the higher patriotism. He has, on the other hand, become so essentially cosmopolitan as to have earned the rare title of world-citizen. If more diplomats have not been able to reconcile these two supposed “opposites,” it is not because such a patriotism is incompatible with the international mind, but because under their ceremonial clothes they hide the age-old predatory heart and serve the age-old predatory interests. Lima has not labelled others, and I am not going to label him; men, like countries, must remain ever different. But countries, like men, may bridge the gulf of difference by patient understanding, and the rivers of blood that flow under those bridges must be the blood of human tolerance and aid, not the blood of barter and battle. It would be easy to point out a certain “conservatism” in Lima, as in more than one other, and yet, if it be possible for us to live in anything but the present, he is a man of the future, for he has always dwelt above boundaries, above battles, above most of the sublimated childishness which we grown-ups pompously call “the serious business of the world.” FOOTNOTES: [1] See Introduction to _The Evolution of Brazil compared with that of Spanish and Anglo-Saxon America_. Stanford University, California, 1914. The introduction, by Professor Percy Alvin Martin, should be read with care, as it assigns Lima’s year of birth erroneously to the year 1865, and gives wrong dates for the _Aspectos_ (1896, not 1906) and _Pernambuco_ (1894, not 1895); moreover, it ascribes to Björnstjerne Björnsen, instead of to Goran Björkman, the bestowal upon Lima of the epithet “intellectual ambassador of Brazil.” [2] Lima here refers to Dr. Roque Saenz-Peña, inaugurated 1910. The citation is from Lecture VI (and last); the series was delivered in English. [3] See Preface to his book on Argentina (1920, Spanish version, Buenos Aires). [4] In a recent letter to me. VII GRAÇA ARANHA