end sooner or later in victory for the republic, and while the friends of free institutions on this continent are waiting more or less anxiously for the result, does not propose to write that history. Nevertheless, it does not appear inopportune to delineate briefly the general features of that struggle begun in the colonial period and continued to this day.
Republicanism in Brazil has its heroes and its martyrs worthy of historic mention when the annals shall be written of that nation to which was apportioned a territory as vast as that of the great North American Union, and which in the next century is destined to play in South America the same part as that which in this century and in this portion of the continent has been taken by the United States.
Even before the French invasion of the Liberian peninsula
had, in 1808, forced the royal family of Portugal to take refuge
in Brazil, already in the free mountains of Minas the seed scat-
tered to all the winds by the movement for independence in North
America had germinated.
In an almost forgotten page of the diplomatic correspondence
of this country, one of the founders of the great American Union
refers to that fact in language which under the present circum-
stances it is pleasant to recall. Thomas Jefferson, writing to
John Jay from Marseilles on May 4, 1787, alludes to an interview
which he, had recently had in Nismes with a young Brazilian
student who had come to consult him in regard to a proposed re-
publican movement in Brazil. The young man had represented
to him that many enlightened and patriotic men in his country
were eager to follow the example of the United States and rid
themselves of the oppressive yoke of the mother-country. The
difficulties in the way of such an attempt would be almost in-
superable unless they were supported by some friendly nation,
and for such support they naturally turned to the great Ameri-
can republic.
The movement in Minas, although without the aid of the most enlightened men of Rio de Janeiro and the north, had at its head a band of magistrates, men of letters and patriots, among whom were Colonel Alvarenga Peixoto, Judge Thomas Antonio Gonzaga, the lawyer Claudio Manoel Dacosta, poets all three, whose writings were the beginning of our national literature, and Silva Xavier, commonly known as Tiradentes.
