Page:Brazil, Its Conditions and Prospects.djvu/72

66 was growing worse. The crops failed, and by April and May the poorer people began to flock to the villages for food. The forage had disappeared, and the stock-raisers began to slaughter their cattle for their hides and tallow. There was local relief as long as the generously disposed had the means. Some provisions were brought in from neighboring provinces on the backs of animals. Such relief, of course, could only be very limited. The territory was then, and is now, so unprovided with good roads and means of transportation, that a drought, which under different circumstances could have been tided over without much suffering, reached there and then the proportions of a tragic and melancholy famine. By the middle of 1877 many thousands of the interior inhabitants were fleeing, half naked and in a state of destitution, toward the coast cities. Many perished on the way, but many thousands more, who arrived at places where there was food, subsequently died of disease. Probably it is quite within bounds to estimate the mortality in the province, from the famine, at two hundred thousand. The General Assembly of Brazil finally voted a large sum of money for the relief of the destitution.

An observing friend, who recently traveled in the province of Paraná, has given me his impressions of the condition and manners of the people there. In his opinion, the natural fertility of the soil tends to make the inhabitants indolent. Each head of a family plants a small plot of ground, whose produce may last a year. He does not try to do more. He does not raise crops for the market. Nearly all of the commerce of the province is in the yerba maté but even this they do not cultivate. It grows wild, and the people who bring it to town do so from the necessity of having to procure certain neces-