The Press.
London, England, 1856-08-09 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

refinement, and education, whilst the people of the interior
we graciously conceive to combine the ferocity of the
Kaffir with the social cheerfulness of the Esquimaux.
No greater mistake could be made.
In the large towns through which I passed, there exists
great culture. To the matter of languages, especially, the
utmost attention is paid. Children, from their earliest
infancy, are taught French and German; and it is most
rare to meet with a lady who does not speak these two
languages, at all events, with precision and fluency. They
are, in fact, so accustomed to the French, that the ladies
usually employ it for general conversation. English is
not nearly so well known, owing in all probability to the
very slight extent to which the interior of Russia is "done"
by our autumnal travellers. But, nevertheless, it is by no
means uncommon in the larger towns. It would really
appear that the Russians have a special facility for lan-
guages. The men, who in that country as elsewhere will
insist on reserving the best of everything, even in educa-
tion, to themselves, are highly cultivated, especially the
large numbers who serve the Government. In addition to
their practical acquaintance with several languages, they
are usually fond of, and keep pace with, the literature of
foreign countries. Domesticity is a great Russian institu-
tion : homes are almost invariably happy. Excellent
wives and excellent husbands are the rule: everywhere
there is a cheerfulness which is very fascinating. The
taste—and I must also add, the talent—for music is very
general, and there are few more pleasant performances
than the Russian native airs played by the ladies. Na
tional airs, when distinct from the encroachments of other
countries, are always interesting; and those of which
I speak have a peculiar vein of melody very unlike that
of any others with which we are better acquainted.
We should bear in mind that in countries
governed by a system like the Russian, where
every individual is obliged to contribute
towards the policy of the State, and to honour
those whom it is the sovereign's will to honour,
we should be more cautious in our interpreta-
tion of the treatment experienced by strangers
than we should be in Great Britain. Yet we
can discover no point of view from which the
conduct of the Russians towards our country-
men does not appear praiseworthy ; at all
events, whatever we may consider to have
been the cause, the effect remains—the fact
that in the interior of Russia high civilisation
exists, and that the lower orders are at least
as much educated as our own.

We think in this part of his work Colonel
Lake might have been a little fuller than he
has been, with advantage. Something more
upon the Russian domestic system, servants,
diet, costume, division of time, and all those
little matters which compose daily life, would
have rendered his narrative more complete. At
present we have but a sketch, but we are truly
obliged to Colonel Lake even for that, which
is executed with considerable spirit, and has
at all events the merit of novelty.

Paraguay, Brazil, and the Plate. Letters
written in 1852-3, by the late C B. Mans-
field, Esq. Edited by the Rev. C. Kingsley.
Cambridge : Macmillan.
THE tendency of these posthumous letters is
to show the opportunity now existing in South
America for successful colonisation on a large
scale, though the author, from his early and
lamentable death, had no opportunity to
carry his views into practice. Mr. Mans-
field, on his return from South America in 1853,
devoted himself with intense ardour to
chemistry, and in February, 1855, achieved a
discovery and perfected an invention for which
he obtained a patent. One night, at his
laboratory, near the Regent's-park, making
some experiments connected with the patent,
his assistant, by some error, ignited the
naphtha; the machine exploded, killed the
boy on the spot, and so frightfully injured
Mr. Mansfield that he died after nine days'
fearful agony, "in the very prime of life, and
"on the very threshold of renown." This
painful incident lends a peculiar interest to
the volume.
When he left England, in May, 1852, Mr.
Mansfield appears to have had no settled plan
of travel beyond ascertaining the resources and
capabilities of Paraguay, so long cut off by Fran-
cia from all intercourse with the outer world.
Having spent some ten months in Brazil and
South America, he returned, but without learn•
ing much of Paraguay, for, in reply to a friend
in 1854, he writes that he knows little, has really
" nothing to put into formal shape," that he
believed the country to be truly an unspoiled
Arcadia, and that it was " the most interesting,
" the loveliest, and the pleasantest country in
" the world." The cause of so poor a result
after so inip4nous a beginning is to be traced,

763

we fear, to that " infirmity of purpose " which
would seem to have affected Mr. Mansfield
throughout life. With him there was but one
step from satisfaction to satiety. He started
to see Paraguay, ho reached it, propounded
vast schemes for its benefit, did little, said
less, came suddenly home, and devoted the
remainder of his too brief life to scientific
study. Yet the letters, collected from various
friends to whom they were written during the
tour, contain much novel matter, and on the
whole some interesting information.
The first place in Brazil touched at by the
steamers is Pernambuco; and here Mr. Mans-
field, who in travelling never had a will of his
own, stopped on the solicitation of some friends,
and remained in the neighbourhood of the
town for about a month. Pernambuco, on
the north coast, is a fine, handsome town,
massively built, and famous for its fruit, its
filth, and its slaves. The raptures with which
Mr. Mansfield exclaims in favour of this pic-
turesque town, full of life and bustle within,
and without with gardens, orchards, and fields
of maize and sugar-cane, and long green lanes
hedged in with orange trees, and "fringed
" with wonderful shapes of every kind of
" vegetating beauty," will be perfectly appre-
ciated by all who have passed a tedious sea
voyage (and what sea voyage is not, after
forty-eight hours of the " blue above and the
" blue below "?j and have landed at length on a
semi-tropical shore. Even in the hands of
these wretched undeveloped creatures, writes
Mr. Mansfield, what an Eden of beauty !
What a paradise it would be made by Englishmen of
this century ! what a heaven it will be made by the
brother men of the age that is to come ! I need not pour
nut my rapturous admiration of the works of the Great
Poet• Father, as you have seen such, and have worshipped
in similar scenes. The beauty is almost bewildering.
The glorious cncoa•nut trees, bananas, and several kinds
of palms, breadfruit, etc. etc., and the magnificent green
oranges. . . . lam too giddy to write soberly about
anything. I feel inclined to cut capers under the trees
till I am tired, then sigh like a hippopotamus for some
one to pour it all out upon, and then lie down and dream.
As for studying the botany of the country, it is impossible.
Nothing is possible but to photographise everybody and
everything : cameras cannot get giddy with wonder.
To another friend he writes, June 4:—

How I wish you were here, with your head, and camera,
and eves, and, better than any, your heart, to fall down and
worship, and to sympathise with me in my admiration of
the scene, even of the little glimpse I have had of it !
Yet I snppose there is scarcely any one here who values
the glorious imagery of the Mighty Poet who has made all
this. Negroes, Mulattoes, Portuguese, Brazilians, ali have
pigs' eyes, I suppose, by virtue of Adam's fall, and the
English for the same reason are all absorbed in the pursuit
of wealth, and so cannot enjoy.

The negroes are a remarkably fine race, and
come in for their share of admiration :

They are generally (writes Mr. Mansfield) splendid
specimens of muscular development, at least about the
chest and arms, with skins shining like velvet ; most of
them are slaves. Now the first thing that strikes me
about these slaves, so far as I have seen of them, is the
dignity and independent look which they preserve. There
is something Achilles like in the stride of the Nigger as he
brings a dish to table; I only wish such cheeiliii faces
were to be seen among our English poor. If what we see
here is anything like a fair specimen of slavery, my
opinion is that the cry against slavery, as raised in Eng-
land, is a vile sham, and lip worship ; for I do believe we
English are fully as real slaveholders as these people.
A visit to Rio Janeiro, a trip up the Organ
Mountains, and to the coffee plantations in the
interior, convince Mr. Mansfield that popula-
tion alone is the one thing wanted to make
this country of Brazil productive and profit-
able. It possesses a fine soil and good rivers,
and the climate, though hot in the valleys,
is on the tablelands tolerably temperate.
Since the stoppage of the importation of
slaves there is no labour to be got in the
interior—white men cannot work, at least they
say so, and black men will not if they can
help it; and so the coffee plantations are
waning, and the story of Jamaica will soon he
told in Brazil, th.rugh why Chinese labour,
answering so admirably well in Australis,
should not be tried both in the West Indies
and Brazil, does not appear. In riding
through the country the forests of Brazil, Mr.
Mansfield says. are not only magnificent, but
capable of being turned some day to great pro-
fit. The variety of valuable wood is incredible.
" There is no property," he writes, "in
" any wood for any purpose which is not to
" be found in first-rate degree in some wood Jr
" other of these forests ;" and then he bewails
the melancholy reoklessness with which the

~~4

magnificent trees are remorselessly burnt and
sacrificed in clearings. From Rio he starts
for the River Plate, and mentions, as a curious
fact, giving instances of the same, that coal
vessels in these latitudes are frequently burnt
from spontaneous combustion. In due
time be arrives at that misnamed place, Buenos
Ayres. Rosas had not long been overthrown,
Urquiza was in his place, the rivers were
open, and a passage up the Parana just
possible. Some of his sketches of Buenos
Ayres are amusing as the first impressions of
a young English mind unaccustomed to the
wholesale slaughter of cattle and sights of
blood and bones :
Buenos Ayres! What a misnomer! The first thing that
greet d our eyes on landing was the skinless carcase of a
horse lying on the beach on one side cf the landing place ;
the second, another ditto on the other side; and the " good
air " of the town was the stench thereof.

If Buenos Lyres is not the most disgusting place on
this earth, there must be sickening spots indeed. The
roads, from the late rain, were mere belts of mud with oc-
casional pools, with carcases of horses or oxen lying here
and there, in the middle of the road and along the shore,
everywhere ; the air was regularly thick with stench. The
only variation from that of putrid flesh was that of burned
bones. There are actually carcases and their remains in
every stage of putridity, lying in the middle of the streets
and before the doors of the houses in the outer parts of the
town.

This immense slaughter of cattle, he after-
wards remarks, deprives the people of all care
for human as well as animal life. Certainly, in
South America a man's throat is valued as
little as a bullock's, and the cruelties of the
late internecine wars fully bear us out in such
an assertion. " How use doth breed a habit in
a man !"

From Urquiza, whom he describes as a
frank, ruddy-faced, English-farmer-looking
style of man, Mr. Mansfield obtained every
facility to insure a safe visit to Paraguay, and
shortly started on his trip up the rivers.
Of the voyage up the Parana little need be
said. Like all river voyages, it does not pre
sent many striking features. The scenery
varies from marshy flats to lofty barrancas
and noble plains, coursed over by herds of
horses and cattle, and dotted here and there
with clumps of forest, or huge lagoons covered
with myriads of wild duck. The river itself—
studded with islands, of intricate navigation,
with a down current rushing like a mill race,
and with a breadth and depth varying from a
couple of miles to half a mile across, and
from ten fathoms to ten feet—is one of the
noblest in the world. It is navigable
for vessels of two hundred tons as far as
Corrientes, eleven hundred miles from its
mouth. The land on each side—a light,
loamy soil—is of the most productive quality,
but for thousands of square miles lies fallow,
sighing for occupation and human labour.
Mr. Mansfield, who writes in raptures of this
noble river and magnificent country running
to waste, cries boldly out for wholesale
immigration. Colonisation in bodies upon the
old Greek and Phoenician system is the only
one which he declares will answer, and must
be put in force :
Now emigration as we see it in England is &heard—
competition in its worst form, as a youth instead of as a
dotard. We must do as the old Greeks and Phoenicians
did, and as the bees still do,---colonise in bodies, and show
too that we can set about it in a less amateur style than
the Canterbury people have done.

Fancy the capabilities of these lands, where they plant
woods of peach-trees for firewood and to feed their pigs,—
not because the fruit is not first rate, but because there
are not men enough to eat it (or the men prefer swine's
blood)! Olives too grow in great perfection at Buenos
Ayres, and the vine luxuriates in the upper provinces,
Mendoza and Tucuman. Here is a land of corn, oil, and
wine ; and as for the honey, as if it was not enough that
there should be a score of sorts of bees to make it, the
very wasps brew delicious honey. The Banda Oriental
and Entre Rios have the same capabilities as the plain of
the west, with such other advantages as are given by a
more undulating and broken ground, with a great deal of
mineral wealth. Further north, in Corrientes and Para-
guay, you have the semi-tropical and tropical climates,
where the richest oranges, sugar, coffee, tea, yerba maie
(which, mind you, is not to be despised, and has yet to be
sold at the co-operative stores in England), silk, and all
the glories of a sun-blessed vegetation, are to be had for
the asking.
Then for intercommunication. In those Rarts where
the country is hilly there is the best water-camage in the
world ; and over the plains, what a country for railways !
Why, the whole Pampas ought to be furrowed with tram
ways (not to speak of steam-locomotives, which they do
not want yet); here is an employment for the thousands
of horses which are to be had and fed for nothing. All

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the towns of the plain might lay down tramroads from one
to the other, commencing with one from Salta to Buenos
Ayres. The glorious timber of Paraguay will do for the
trams; iron is not needed.

Then he has great plans for the rivers per-
forming much of their own tug and agricul-
tural work themselves, and such like " dyna-
mical dreams," one day, perhaps, to be
proved :

I wonder rivers hare never been made to do their own
tug work ; they have in locks to be sure, but that is a
way of making them do the job only applicable on narrow
waters, and then only for lifting, not for propelling. Of
course the proper plan is to have stationary engines worked
by wheels driven by the river itself, placed at convenient
distances, with endless ropes running round pulleys, to
which the craft bound up and down the river can attach
themselves, and so be towed up and down stream at any
pace. And so, too, vast floating factories might be es
tablished on the Parana, where every kind of machinery
should sing psalms of praise to the Great Father. This
plan is at work on the Rhine, on a small scale, just below
Mannheim: they have a few barges moored in the river,
with water-wheels attached, and corn-mills within; but
these are babytoys to what we may have here. The
power available on this Parana is positively unlimited ;
human hands need do no labour within hundreds of miles
of its banks, however thickly they were populated. Here
it rolls on, a mile all wide and at least three miles an hour
in pace, of all depths, from five feet to twenty and upwards.
All chat is wanted is a floating house, and leave to moor it
in a good position, with as many great screw-propellers
immersed, or feathering paddle•wheels dipping in the
water, as may be necessary to take the power wanted from
the stream. This is the future of these waters. Oh, what
an enormous reservoir of force utterly wasted ! Verily the
exuberant bounty of God is awful, and the idleness of man
is ghastly.

Just below the junction of the two rivers
Parana and Paraguay, and about 1,100 mites
up the former, lies Corrientes, a small town
famous for pretty women, impossible needle-
work, lazy men who breakfast at noon, sleep or
smoke away the rest of the day, and dine at ten
p.m., a few Indians, ugly slate-coloured dogs with
sharp snouts and no hair, and an incredible
quantity of fleas and mosquitoes. The inha-
bitants, who pride themselves upon their pure
Castilian blood, are very ignorant, very pri-
mitive, and very indolent. The climate is not
remarkably hot, seldom beyond 88 deg.
in summer and down to 55 deg. in winter, yet
neither men nor women do much else but
gossip, cultivate sufficient land to feed them-
selves, and kill, skin, and salt down as many
cattle as will pay current expenses. The
town itself is prettily situated, but the vitality
of the place seems to lie in its_ vermin, from
which Mr. Mansfield was only too glad to be
liberated. After six weeks' detention, he at
last got away, add made straight for Assump-
tion, the capital of Paraguay. He achieved
the journey overland on horseback without
much difficulty, and was much struck with
the beauty of the rural landscape and the size
of the men—a well developed, muscular race,
far superior to the Correntinos—something
over six feet without their shoes, with
remarkably fine features and fair coin-
plexions. "It is the most curious thing," he
writes, " this feature and complexion. In poor
" cottages I have seen numerous children,
" whom I should have supposed to be the
" offspring of some high-bred English family,
with delicately-cut features, rather long than
" broad, and hair as fair as any Saxon." He
is inclined to believe that the original Casti-
lians who peopled the country were of remark-
ably pure blood, and that the real old Northern
Vandal is to be found in Paraguay. The
people of Paraguay are poor and uneducated ;
but their insular position and thorough seclu-
sion for the last forty years has fostered a true
feeling of patriotism. The peasantry (says
Mr. Mansfield) are a truly noble race; and
Francia extirpated the aristocracy, so that
classes are almost unknown. The country is
healthy, but the people suffer from goitre. Mr.
Mansfield does not tell us much more ; he
merely describes the country, so far as lie saw
it, as " the perfection of rural landscape ;" with
land capable of growing anything, and with a
warm, though fine and healthy, climate. The
great curiosity of the place is the Chaco.
a vast plain some nine hundred miles long by
three hundred broad, on the opposite side of
the river, and inhabited by a said-to•be
untameable race of Guaycurus Indians, who
originally took refuge in these plains at the
time of the Spanish conquest. To this hour
no attempt to conquer the Guaycurus has
ever succeeded. To Mr. Mtatiiiiild the sight

SATURDAY,

of the Chaco suggested the idea of wholesale
colonisation. He writes :

Here are we, in a town of some 20,000 souls, and on the
other side is the Chaco, wherein of these 20,000 not one
dares set his foot. Can you conceive the looking from your
window over a luxuriant desert, where not even a landlord
or a gamekeeper ever treads,—where perhaps once a year
a party of Indians may be been on horseback for a day or
two, and then vanish? I can stand for hours and gaze
from the hills here over that Chaco. There is about it an
infinite mystery, which nothing that I have seen elsewhere
approaches, except the sight of the starry heavens. To see
this alone is to me worth having come all the way from
England. But you cannot see it without coming here;
for till you reach Assumption, or very little below it, there
are no elevations of the land worthy of the name of hills,
even on the occupied side, from which you can get a view;
and if there were, till you get to Paraguay the river is too
wide for you to see the scenery,—at least you would have
no foreground to lead your eye into the distance, with a
suggestion of what it is like.
One thing, he declares, is abundantly clear to
him :

That the Gran Chaco is the yet empty cradle of a mighty
nation : it must be the theatre of a new era in history—it
is the place. Just cast your eye upon the map : just see
the tract of land, in length from Santa Fe ten degrees of
latitude northwards, and some six degrees of longitude in
breadth from the Paraguay-Parana towards the west, and
consider if it be not a marvel. A splendid country, pos.
sessed by wild Indians alone, who live on nothing but wild
beasts—men who, by their neglect of the earth, have for-
feited their right to claim national property in it,—a wild
garden, surrounded on all sides by provinces occupied, or
pretended to be, occupied by Spanish tribes, none of whom
dare set foot in this territory, and yet have the impudence
to claim it as their own,—this territory isactually an untlis-
c3vered country. One white man's boat has descended ihe
Bermejn, from Oran to the Paraguay; and the Bolivians
are offering 4,0001. to any one who will bring the first boat
up the Pilcomayo to them. It is just known that the rivers
are or may easily be made navigable, and the rich verdure
of the country is visible from the top of this house; and
that is all that is known about it.

A traditional enmity has ever existed between the Indians
and those whose ancestors looked upon them only as
material for slavery; but I firmly believe that Englishmen
with some real Christianity in their souls would civilise
them in some degree. At Corrientes they come across
from the Chaco, and work bravely enough for those who
will employ them. Of course they cut the Correntinos'
throats if they come into the Chaco, because they suppose
their visitors only come to enslave them ; and so they are
said to be as treacherous as Satan 1 dare say they are
treacherous enough, but not worse than the rest of man•
kind. Whether or not the Indian race is to die out, there
can be no doubt that it is our duty to do all we can to pre-
serve it, just as we do the life of an old relation whose
disease may be mortal.
But, besides the Chaco, there is the country
of the Misiones, lying between the rivers
Uruguay and Parana, wholly uninhabited,
because no one up to '62 could agree to the
ownership ; and so Correntinos, Paraguayans,
and Banda Orientalists cut one another's
throats for twenty years, and would let no one
enter on the land. It has since been ceded
to Corrientes :

This district is now absolutely a desert so far as man is
concerned; the rats have not even left their tails. The
Brazilians, Paraguayans, and Correntinos have been fight•
ing about it, pretty nearly, I suppose, ever since the Jesuits
were expelled; and now, since I have been in these parts,
they are going to settle the matter by ceding the territory
to Corrientes. Every one says it is a beautiful country,—
the choice of it by the Jesuits would be sufficient ground
for believing so. This district must be colonised, and the
present governor is very desirous that it should be. See
what a position it is, nor forget the Socialist prestige which
the Jesuits have given it,—the Parani always navigable,
the Uruguay nearly always, and easily made so no doubt.
Then again in Brazil, in the beautiful province of Rio
Grande, colonisation by Germans has already been com-
menced : its climate and richness point it out as a neces-
sary position, and, to tell the truth, the pseudo-Imperial
Government of Brazil would be a much pleasanter atmo-
sphere for a weak infant colony than any of the psuedo-
republics of the rivers.

These views of colonisation are important and.
thoughtful, and worthy of consideration.
There is certainly no country in the world
more adapted for colonisatioa, cultivation, and
commerce than South America. It is truly the
promised land of emigrants. Before it Canada,
Central America, Africa, and Australia must
give place; for they have neither soil, rivers,
climate, nor country to compare to this vast
continent, which lies almost unpopulated and
unrecognised, in the centre of the south-
western half of the globe. With the most noble
rivers, navigable for near two thousand miles
from their mouths ; with every variety of soil
highly productive; with a perfect climate;
with magnificent plains, now covered with
cattle and horses, and, beyond all agriculture 1
purposes, capable of depasturing millions f
cattle, horses, and sheep, and producing the
finest wool in the world ; with vast forests of