"The limitation of the markets renders the economic life of the country unequal and ill-adjusted. It exposes it to continual partial crises which naturally check its development. When production exceeds consumption the local market cannot unload itself upon the neighbouring markets, in which the producers would perhaps receive better prices, since these, on account of the cost of transport, are shut off, as it were, by water-tight compartments. Prices accordingly fall, without any possible remedy; immediately production is limited and becomes insufficient; then prices rise, and there is no importations from without to limit their rise. Reawakened by better prices, production is once more stimulated; and its very improvement provokes a new crisis. I found the settlers of Paraná accustomed and even resigned to the sudden leaps of the market, which they had come to regard as a normal and inevitable state of affairs. They live, therefore, always in a state of uncertainty, never able to foresee what will be their resources for the coming year. The spirit of saving has decayed among them. In the same way wholesale trade used to suffer formerly from the extravagant variations of exchange. The Brazilians have at last come to understand the dangers of such conditions. There is only one remedy: to improve the means of communication. The great question of Brazil is above all a question of roads."[28] * * * * * In Brazil the question of means of transport is a serious one. The magnificent network of railways (largely built by British capital) serves only the more settled part of the country. The great export trade of Brazil, with its staple products, furnishes a stream of gold, which, more or less, becomes dispersed throughout the country, and creates strong ties of union between the various States, which otherwise might not exist in unison. As to sugar, however, Brazil is in large degree its own customer. The great export is coffee, as it was once sugar, and in part rubber. Meat also finds its principal market at home. Brazil will soon supply its own wants in flour, which now comes in part from Argentina. The rise of the coffee-growing industry in Southern Brazil, in the rich State of San Paolo, has in it the element of an economic romance.