In one sense, Brazil is an old country, as far as any American nation may be termed so, and in its three hundred years of life since the white man became established within its shores life has taken on a settled form and engrafted itself upon its environment. It is a land of marked social customs and distinctions. It has an aristocracy, a culture refined and stable. Education, music, poetry, the arts, are revered and enjoyed, and in this sense the traveller is transported to the Old World. Yet Brazil is democratic in its ideas, as far as democracy has been possible in the Latin American Republics--a matter which is of circumscribed limits at present. The foreigner, unless he specially lay himself out to know the folk of the Latin American lands, cannot readily look into their homes. They are a people, as elsewhere remarked, full of reserve, almost mediaeval in their seclusion, sensitive, yet extremely hospitable and open-handed whenever these barriers of reserve are penetrated. This is naturally but the Iberian social character transplanted to America. It is to be recollected, moreover, that Brazil was a slave-owning land, with all in social life that that condition brings. Brazil was always a viceregal or monarchical country too. The fall of slavery in 1888 in part brought about the fall of the empire. Thus we have here everywhere--except in the southern States where recent immigration has brought other thoughts and customs--a rigid ruling class and caste, the privileges of an old society, such as does not exist in its neighbour of Argentina, for example, and which is foreign to the United States. Essentially an agricultural country, the land, moreover, belongs almost in its entirety to this ruling class. Yet this condition of land-owning seclusion and reserve is not necessarily accepted as a final and irrevocable circumstance. "In the cities, and especially Rio, where social life is more developed and the national character tempered by contact with foreigners of all nationalities, the country magnates, ignorant of the ephemeral passage of the fashions, are the subject of ready ridicule. The country magnate's name is never pronounced without exciting merriment."[24] This is a curious circumstance, and shows how custom differs in varying lands. In England, for example, the "country magnate" is generally a personage upholding all that is best in the community. In Brazil there is a marked taste for country life, such as is scarcely yet developed in the Spanish American Republics. The elegant suburb does not necessarily attract the newly rich Brazilian, who loves to return to the _fazenda_, or country estate. It has been said, however, that this is less the result of delight in rural amenities than in the lust of power, for in the _fazenda_ he is absolute master, with a power over his dependants stronger perhaps than in any other land. [Illustration: PALM AVENUE, RIO DE JANEIRO. Vol. II. To face p. 128.]