Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/560

556 United States, the stimulus of a comparatively rigorous climate, and the examples of white neighbors organized into a complex and highly competitive industrial civilization. The reserve of foresight, energy and ambition which the white Brazilian has inherited from his ancestors stands him in good stead in the easy and enervating surroundings, while the negro will only work when he is obliged to.

The race which will inherit the fertile and salubrious plains and plateaux stretching north from the Argentine border to the lowlands of the Amazon will probably be of Caucasian origin and descent, although its characteristics may have become much modified in fitting its new surroundings. The Azorean hoes his little patch of ground with the painstaking industry of the Norman peasant, but his gaucho descendant in Rio Grande neglects agriculture for riding after cattle. A capacity for indolence may perhaps be one of the conditions of survival in tropical climates, and the future master of these regions will possibly possess oriental characteristics, and may lose some qualities he inherits from his immediate ancestors, the restless Latins, Celts and Teutons of western Europe.

So far as it has gone, Brazil's experience tends to prove that the white man has the adaptability, vitality and fecundity to ensure his preponderance in the tropics as well as in the temperate zone, and that the other races will exist there upon his sufferance.