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A Letter From Brazil.
By José Clarana.

IN ACCEDING to your request that I send you "one or two letters about the color problems in Brazil," I keep within the limitations of my capacity and comply with your admonition that I "make them as short as possible," by writing one letter with the simple statement that there is no color problem in Brazil.

By way of explanation, however, I must add that this does not mean that a black skin is an open-sesame to any and every drawing-room and a shibboleth of easy access to the heart of any maiden and the purse of her father. It means, for one thing, that a man is not necessarily black because his skin is not so white as somebody else's skin. In the terms of the "social equality," which the telegrams say that German spies have been trying to obtain for the not-quite-white-enough in Alabama, it means that the color of the pelts in a drawing-room is the exclusive business of the people who wear them, and that if the son of some gentleman violates the servant girl there is no law to prevent him from marrying her because she does not come up to the popular specifications as to complexion. In a word, in Brazil the mere possession of a white skin does not entitle a man to superior civil rights and opportunities, nor does an increased pigmentation condemn its owner to
the status of a pariah.

Occasionally an attempt is made in Brazil to establish a standard of whiteness to which all aspirants to a life of the greatest usefulness must conform. Generally, if not always, these attempts to divide the Brazilian people are made by foreign residents. For instance, the son of a colored teacher was not long ago refused admittance to a college conducted by Belgian priests. I do not know how this affair ended, but the action of the rector of the school was severely criticized by the newspapers. A striking contrast to the attitude of the Belgian friar is the fact that recently one of the largest and wealthiest churches in Rio was crowded with people attending a mass of intercession for the early triumph of the ideals of the Allies, including, of course, those valiant defenders of the rights of oppressed peoples who used to cut off the hands of the natives on the rubber plantations in the Congo. Most of the worshippers at that mass were altogether white and many of them were distinguished foreigners. The celebrant was a colored man, who, when he is not saying mass or singing in the choir of a church, conducts a school whose students are nearly all white.

Americans, of course, are not slow in attempting to establish caste discrimination, especially when they first come here. A friend of mine told me, shortly after he arrived here, that the Negroes ought to be separated from the whites in public places. I do not know whether he got that notion so much from having resided in Alabama as from reading The Outlook, which is ashamed to tell American public that, in trying to show how superior they are to the "niggers," white people have disgraced their civilization by committing acts of savagery unexcelled by the 
lowest tribes in the heart of Africa. It does not mind libeling the colored people of the States by characterizing as "envy" the natural desire of a decent man to sit in a clean railway carriage or to enter a restaurant without fear of buying a steak fried with spit or sharing the fate of the
colored Georgian who, in neutral Chicago, was killed for the crime of unwittingly seating himself at the side of a Texan at a public lunch counter.

I got the Chicago story from an eyewitness, the son of a Confederate officer, who told it, with the greatest sang froid, at lunch in a Brazilian boarding-house. I mention it here in the hope that some of 

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A LETTER FROM BRAZIL

the editors, politicians and counting-house
anthropologists who make the color question
in the United States and who are really responsible for crimes against civilization
and against the good name of the United States like the Waco Horror, may have another concrete example of the effect of the "social equality" humbug in a land where nearly every one has some learning, but too many of the people have only enough to enable them to read a newspaper.

Perhaps one reason for the absence of a color question in the countries of South America, where there is any great variation in the color of the inhabitants, is the fact that there are not so many people who can read as in the United States, but, proportionately, more persons who do more than just read, because they have more time, let us say. One of the thinking readers of Brazil and unquestionably one of the greatest intellects of all America, Ruy Barbosa, in speaking of slavery and its consequences in this country, says: "For three generations we were free, prosperous and rich at the cost of the oppression of our fellow-men. We are today undergoing the great expiation which never fails, which does not pardon historic outrages and capital crimes against humanity."

The fact that slavery was a crime against humanity and not merely an economic mistake is, I think, something that no important public man in the United States would admit without reserve. In Brazil, it is the essential immorality of the institution, the inherent injustice to its victims, that is most emphasized. The date of the Abolition of Slavery, May 13, is duly commemorated as a national holiday, and there is no effort to reintroduce it in any form. Whatever penalties the nation may now be paying for the original error of importing and maintaining African slaves there is no desire to postpone the day of atonement and increase the sacrifice by aggravating the old offense.

A friend of mine, a very likable fellow in himself, assures me that "the only way to handle an American 'nigger' is to knock him on the head and talk to him about it afterward."

African blood is, perhaps, as plentiful in the States of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro as in Georgia or Texas, but in a country where great statesmen think and feel that the humblest blacks are their fellow-men, it would not be possible for white men to drag a man through the streets, bleeding from head to foot from the nails and knives thrust into him, burn him, still living, and wear his dead teeth as charms to "keep the 'nigger' in his place."

Brazilians are very religious, but they are not quite that superstitious. Among them every one finds his place naturally. If one can afford to travel in a first class public conveyance, no one will attempt to make him go second class and pay first class fare. If a man wants a cup of coffee or a glass of milk or cane-juice, which are the most popular beverages among the Brazilians, who, by the way, are not prohibited from drinking whiskey if they want to, no café will refuse to serve him if he is clean and decent. They even serve Americans and Europeans who get drunk so long as these do not offend other people. When the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose policy is to be one of approximation to the United States, embraces the lawyer who makes a public address of godspeed and presents the Minister with a gold pen with which to sign his first official act, nobody has any objection to make because the Minister is white and the orator brown. The newspapers do not even mention the color of the people concerned. They never do, except, sometimes, in reporting civil statistics, accidents and crimes. In such cases the person is not called black if the skin is not black. Whether white or mixed, the color is mentioned only once, parenthetically, for identification, and not used to substitute proper nouns and pronouns, in a manifest effort to associate complexion with crime, as in the two inch paragraph I once cut from the New York Times, which contained nine references to the color of a man accused of a commonplace crime. The man, of course, was a Negro, more or less.

Nobody wastes any time in the Republic of the Southern Cross in trying to determine the moral and intellectual potentialities of a people by skin color or facial configuration. In this country a man's accomplishments are the measure of his ability. Even before the complete abolition of slavery, the greatest statesman of the Empire was a mulatto. A black of the