[Footnote 48: H. Handelmann's "History of Brazil" (Berlin, 1860), a remarkably profound and instructive work, devotes a special section (p. 933) to the subject of German emigration, and gives a very copious and complete insight into the various missions and works since 1819 to the present day, which treat of German emigration and colonization.]
So long as the unoccupied lands are not surveyed, laid out in lots, and sold at a small rate to the settler, as, for instance, in the United States; so long as the immigrant is unable to improve for himself his own plot of ground, but must remain a mere field-labourer, working for some foreign master, according to the iniquitous _Parceria_, or half-profits system;[49] so long as the expense of transport of the emigrant is to be worked off by future payments out of his labour, so long must every friend of humanity strongly dissuade the emigrant from proceeding to the great South American Empire.
[Footnote 49: The modern Brazilian system of _Parceria_ may be shortly stated as that by which a planter engages in Europe such of the poorer classes as are desirous of emigrating, and has them transported at his own cost to Brazil, where they are engaged as farmers, with half profits, upon the coffee and sugar plantations, and contracting to reimburse him, by their personal services and labour, for the outlay he has been at for their transport, maintenance, instruction, &c. Until all these have been repaid by the improvement in the rent or productive powers of the land, they must remain, as working out their emancipation from the lord of the soil, veritable "_adscripti glebæ_." After that has been attained they are free people, and may leave if they please, or may sink into the rank of "unattached labourers," which implies their assigning half of the net produce of the land to the ground landlord, the remaining half being their remuneration for labour. Proprietorship in the soil is never attainable by these farmers on half profits, inasmuch as the Parceria system can only exist where the soil is already exclusively vested in a planting aristocracy. (See Handelmann, etc., p. 568).]
For Brazil, beautiful, fertile, and abounding in undeveloped natural wealth, two alternatives are alone open at present--either ruin to the producing power of the population through deficiency of industrial power, or the throwing open the land to foreign emigration by means of the most extensive concessions. The longer this is deferred, the more oppressively will the want of manual labour manifest itself; and the more advantages will foreign emigration secure.