Page:Statesman's Year-Book 1871.djvu/537

 POPULATION. 5OI

In the session of 1869 the General Assembly voted the necessary funds for a census of the whole Empire.

Vast tracts of Brazil are uninhabited, or peopled only by a scattered population. The masses of inhabitants congregate near the coast, and around the chief seaports; thus the district of the municipality of Rio de Janeiro comprises about 450,000 inhabitants, while in the province of Para, with an area of 672,780 English square miles, there live but 350,000 individuals, or not more than one person on every two square miles.

The population of Brazil is made up of an agglomeration of many races. While Brazil remained a colonv of Portugal, but few Avomen accompanied the emigrants to South America. The earliest European settlers intermarried and mixed with Indian women ; and afterwards an extensive intermixture of race occurred with the Africans who were bought for slavery. In the northern provinces the Indian element prejDonderates, while in Pernambuco, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas the negroes are numerous. At the seaports, the chief part of the population is of Eurojiean descent.

The 1,400,000 slaves are scattered all over the country, but the greater portion belong to the farms in the interior. A law of the 7th November, 1831, abolished the slave trade, declaring free all those introduced in the empire after its promulgation ; but notwith- standing the efforts of the Brazilian government, the slave trade continued unlawfully until the passing of the Act of the 4th Sep- tember, 1850, which put a stop to it on account of its severe pro- visions, enforced by the Act of the 5th June, 1854. The negroes captured during the period of the slave trade became free, but under the tutorship of the state, most of them in the public estab- lishments ; they were all definitively emancipated on the 24th September, 1864. The movement for the emancipation of the existing slaves is going on actively in the empire, and partial mea- sures to the effect have already been adopted by the Legislature and the Provincial assemblies.

To promote immigration into Brazil, an Act was passed the 18th September, 1850, offering large inducements to colonists, in particular as to the easy purchase of crown lands. Numerous bye- laws were published afterwards for the benefit of the colonists. The immigration of settlers from Europe, particularly Germans and Swiss, has been' otherwise encouraged by the government for a number of years. According to an official report of 1869, there existed in the empire above 50 colonies, or nucleus of settlements, with about 40,000 settlers, the greater part of them in the Southern Provinces. Many of the colonies have become independent of state direction in consequence qf their flourishing condition.