"Accounts are settled every two months. It often happens, even to-day, that the colonist is in the planter's debt. The planter has kept up the custom of making advances, and every family newly established in the country is, as a general rule, in debt. But the advances are always small, the colonist possessing so little in the way of securities; he has few animals and next to nothing in the way of furniture. His indebtedness towards the planter is not enough, as it used to be, to tie him down to the plantation; that many of them continue to leave by stealth is due to their desire to save their few personal possessions, which the planter might seize to cover his advances. At the last payment of the year all the colonists are free; their contract comes to an end after the harvest. Proletarians, whom nothing binds to the soil on which they have dwelt for a year, they do not resume their contracts if they have heard of more advantageous conditions elsewhere, or if their adventurous temperament urges them to try their luck farther on. "The end of the harvest sees a general migration of the agricultural labourers. The colonists are true nomads. All the planters live in constant dread of seeing their hands leave them in September. Even the most generous _fazendeiros_ experience the same difficulty. According to the Director of Colonization, 40 per cent. to 60 per cent. of the colonists leave their _fazendas_ annually. It is difficult to confirm this statement; but at least it is no exaggeration to say that a third of the families employed on the plantations leave their places from year to year. Towards September one meets them on the roads, most often travelling afoot; the man carrying a few household goods and the woman a newly born child, like the city labourers at the end of the season. One can imagine what a serious annoyance this instability of labour must be to the coffee-planter. Long before the harvest the planter is planning to fill up the gaps that will appear in the colony directly after the harvest. He secretly sends out hired recruiting agents to the neighbouring _fazendas_ or to the nearest town; he employs for this purpose some of the shrewder colonists, to whom he pays a commission for every family engaged. Finally, at the end of his resources, if he no longer has any hope of finding workmen in the neighbourhood who are experienced in plantation work, he decides to apply to the colonization agent in San Paolo, and resigns himself to the employment of an untrained staff, whom he will have to spend several months in training. "The instability of agricultural labour is the most striking characteristic of rural life in the State of San Paolo. It is a result of the unusual and even artificial nature of the hasty development of coffee-planting."[29]