REPUBLICANISM IN BRAZIL.
BY HIS EXCELLENCY THE BRAZILIAN MINISTER AT WASHINGTON, SALVADOR DE MENDONÇA.
When, on the 15th of November, 1889, the telegraph announced
to the world that a republic had been proclaimed in Brazil, “in
the empire of good old Dom Pedro,” the astonishment was general.
It was like a thunderbolt from a cloudless sky. The opinion was
universal that the Brazilian nation, which, on the 22d of Septem-
ber, 1822, had received its independence from the hand of Dom
Pedro I., and two years later its constitution, was enjoying, after
sixty-five years of parliamentary government under a monarchy,
an enviable prosperity. There was a vague knowledge, it is true,
that the first emperor of Brazil had been forced to abdicate in
1831 by a forcible expression of the popular will; but the idea
generally entertained of Pedro II., based on his really lofty moral
qualities, but propagated and exaggerated by those whose inter-
ested admiration was given rather to the monarch than to the
man, had surrounded his name and his reign with an aureole so
brilliant that the whole world regarded as indisputable the excel-
lence of the monarchical government of Brazil.
To such as were intimately acquainted with the internal con-
dition of the empire, the absorption of all the constitutional powers
by the crown, the farcical character of the electoral syatem which
indorsed every act of the monarch, the intensified centralization
which was stifling the provinces of the empire in the political
embrace of the court, the atrophy and decay of the several mem-
bers of the body politic, out of reach of the vitality of the centre,
the constant deficits in the budget covered by the chronic abuse
of national loans,—to those, above all, who knew that the heiress
to the throne prided herself on her resemblance to her grand-
father, the impetuous, irritable, tyrannous Pedro I, rather than
