Brazilian thinkers have protested against this German conquest in disguise; they recognise the {295} danger, and seek to avoid it. Sylvio Romero suggests, as a means of limiting this expansion, the education of the race along Anglo-Saxon lines, which would develop the love of initiative and the sense of effort, a migration of Brazilian proletarians who should occupy these southern territories and hold them against the Germans, and finally, the establishment of military colonies in the threatened regions. It is the traditional struggle for nationality, for the possession of the very soil itself. Language is an instrument of conquest; it is therefore urgent to enforce the use of Portuguese in the schools of the South, where the far-sighted colonists teach only their own tongue. Foreign syndicates acquire large and numerous stretches of territory; Señor Romero would have these land trusts inhibited, and would favour the establishment of indigenous centres among the German populations, in order to contend with this perilous invasion by an alien race.[1] The national uneasiness has even affected the art of the country; Graça Aranha has written, in _Canaan_, the drama of the contact of races. "For the moment," says Milkau, the blond invader of the half-breed country, "we are nothing more than a solvent acting upon the race of the country. We are effecting a new conquest, slow, persistent, and pacific in the means employed, but terrible in its ambitious intention." Hentz, his companion, proudly describes the triumph of the white man, and the {296} expulsion of the "coloured man who was born on the land." He prophesies a terrible future: "The Germans will arrive with their thirst for possession and domination, and their originality, the harsh originality of barbarians, in unnumbered legions; they will kill off the sensual and foolish natives who have built up their societies upon this splendid soil and have degraded it by their turpitude." It is the purging of a territory infested by African slaves. Germany, mother of men without number, _officina et vagina gentium_, invades with her blond legions the land of brown men, sends forth her chaste Teutons to the conquest of the lascivious forest.