While the republics of America have passed, without prudent transition, from colonial dependence to self-government, Brazil, by means of paternal autocracies, was prepared for the ultimate realisation of its republican dreams. There liberty was not the immediate gift of unrealisable constitutions, but the logical end of a painful conquest. Brazil was successively a tributary colony, an independent monarchy, an absolutist empire, and a federal and democratic republic. One principle, that of authority, was dominant throughout this process of evolution. A rigid despotism gradually ceded secular prerogatives before the attacks of an ardent liberalism; progress was definite and order lasting, and revolution has been powerless to shake the principle of monarchical continuity. Portugal has not yet been invaded by the French armies. The royal family, carrying the monarchical _penates_, have fled toward their distant colony, the idyllic and tropical Brazil. We are in 1807: Maria, Queen of Portugal, is insane; João de Braganza, the regent, placid and undecided, hopes for a _bourgeois_ ostracism, without political convulsions. In Brazil, the monarch, guided by conservative spirits, transforms the economic system and decrees {181} the freedom of the ports, and the metropolitan monopoly is thereby abolished. England, watching over the exodus of the king, demands protection for her products. The factories which a policy of lamentable rivalities had closed are reopened. As early as 1808 the king wishes to found an empire in this colony, devoid as it is of political personality; in 1815 he raises it to the category of kingdom, thus laying the foundations of nationality. Independence, after this, will only be the natural segregation of an organism already formed. The government of the Portuguese king develops all the national forces which were embryonic in the colony--art, law, literature. He founds the Bank of Brazil, establishes a military academy, a national library, and a botanic garden; he fosters agriculture and immigration. His new domain seems to have transformed the mediocre monarch. Under the influence of his queen, Charlotte, eager for power and display, he longs to extend his dominion over Uruguay and Paraguay, perhaps even to reconstitute, to his own profit, the vice-kingdom of La Plata. He seizes upon French Guiana, which remains in the power of Brazil until 1817. But such vast plans as these do not strengthen the hands of the monarch. The Court, silent and extravagant, does not please the Brazilians, and the King favours the Portuguese merchants by an extreme prodigality. He creates a new nobility, that of the "sons of the King," and its influence in the palace and its insolent display soon weary the colonists. The old _régime_ is still extant; a parasitical bureaucracy, recruited among the Portuguese, weighs heavily on the destinies of Brazil.