The national uneasiness has even affected the art of the country; Graça Aranha has written, in _Canaan_, the drama of the contact of races. "For the moment," says Milkau, the blond invader of the half-breed country, "we are nothing more than a solvent acting upon the race of the country. We are effecting a new conquest, slow, persistent, and pacific in the means employed, but terrible in its ambitious intention." Hentz, his companion, proudly describes the triumph of the white man, and the { 296} expulsion of the "coloured man who was born on the land." He prophesies a terrible future: "The Germans will arrive with their thirst for possession and domination, and their originality, the harsh originality of barbarians, in unnumbered legions; they will kill off the sensual and foolish natives who have built up their societies upon this splendid soil and have degraded it by their turpitude."
It is the purging of a territory infested by African slaves. Germany, mother of men without number, _officina et vagina gentium_, invades with her blond legions the land of brown men, sends forth her chaste Teutons to the conquest of the lascivious forest.
Without denying the reality of this peril, we cannot but realise that it would be difficult to establish on Brazilian soil colonies which should reflect the glory of _Das Deutschtum_. Already 350,000 Germans are lost in the national mass; demographically they signify nothing as against the 19 millions of Brazilians. To found a colonial empire in the interior of the Lusitanian Republic it would first of all be necessary to have a strong basis of population; the theorists of the Germanic movement of expansion would dispose of 18 to 20 million emigrants in these rich southern provinces. Moreover, the Germanic invasion is not concentrated upon Brazil. The United States absorb the Germanic alluvium; and the Brazilian half-breeds being fertile, the numerical disproportion between the natives and the blond invaders would in the future be enormous.
On the other hand, the contingent of Teutonic immigration is diminishing. The modern cities of industrial Germany are increasing in numbers and in population; they are absorbing new elements into their artificial life. The rural multitude which migrates is changing the direction of its painful journey; it no longer forsakes its fatherland, but leaves the silent fields for the enervating life of the { 297} cities. Its taste has become sophisticated; it prefers urban attractions to the adventures of emigration. In the last ten years barely 30,000 Germans have left the _Vaterland_ each year. Not with such scanty legions as these will Germany establish a centre of domination oversea, for even these are divided among the United States, Central America, and Brazil.