"In addition to its social authority, this Brazilian aristocracy enjoys political power as well. Brazil has, it is true, established universal suffrage; but the sovereign people, before delegating its sovereignty to its representatives, confides to the ruling class the duty of supervising its electoral functions. The large landed proprietors choose the candidates, and their instructions are usually obeyed. They form the structure, the framework, of all party politics; they are its strength, its very life; it is they who govern and administer Brazil. And the administration is a great power in Brazil. Its province is very wide, and much is expected from it; whether the explanation is to be found in Latin atavism, or in the material conditions of life in this limitless territory, or in the fact that the individual is so powerless, and association so difficult. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the administration plays the same part in Brazil as in a European colony like Algeria, or as in India. "Between the members of the all-powerful administration who during my travels granted me facilities, and their friends and relations, whose hospitality I enjoyed in their _fazendas_, I was perhaps in danger of becoming exclusively acquainted with the superior social class of which a portion directs the agricultural exploitation of the country while the remaining portion governs it. It would be a great mistake to suppose that this class, by itself, is Brazil. I have done my best to see beyond it, and to keep in mind the populace, which is both more numerous and more diversified; a confused mass of people upon whom, before all else, the whole future of Brazil depends. It lives under a benign climate; or at least under a climate which makes impossible what we call poverty in Europe. It is also a rural class; all the agricultural labour of the country is performed by its hands. "In Southern Brazil the population has been renewed, all through the second half of the nineteenth century, by a stream of European immigration. In San Paolo the Italians have provided the long-established Paulista population with the labour necessary to the extensive production of coffee. They live on the plantations, in villages which are veritable cities of labourers. Nothing ties them to the soil; they do not seem to feel the appetite for land; very few buy real estate. They bind themselves only by yearly contracts; they readily change their employers after each harvest. No more nomadic people could be imagined; they change incessantly from _fazenda_ to _fazenda_. Neither is there anything to retain them in the State of San Paolo; and not the least danger of the coffee crisis is the exodus which it is producing among the Italian colonists.