ed against the chaos of servile interests,
showing that the Constitution of the United States was not that "league
with death" and that "compact with hell," as was boldly declared by
Garrison upon the breaking out of the abolitionist reaction. And when
the Union rose again, still clinging to liberty, on the ruins of slavery
and dismemberment, we who had heard the earthquake, we who had witnessed
the opening of the abyss, we who had seen swallowed up in it a million
lives and an incalculable amount of wealth, and knew of the misfortunes
and tears it had caused, were surprised by the divine dawn which finally
appeared with the consoling victory of justice; and we felt the
penetration of its rays here into the depths of the Brazilian
conscience, realizing, with a holy horror of the tragedy of which we had
just been the witnesses, that we were still a country of slaves.

Very soon, however, the law of September 28, 1874, immediately
thereafter Brazilian abolitionism, and shortly thereafter the brilliant
stroke of abolition in 1888, responded to the splendid American lesson
by our purification from this stigma.

And if we adopted this lesson in 1889 and 1891, when we embraced the
federal system and framed a republican constitution, it was not, as has
been said, in obedience to the wishes, caprices, or predilections of
theorists. Ever since the beginning of the past century, the liberal
spirit among us had become imbued with Americanism through reading _The
Federalist_. The idea of federation carried away the Brazilian Liberals
in 1831. The condemnation of the monarchy in Brazil involved
fundamentally that of administrative centralization and the
single-headed form of government which were embodied in that regime. The
United States gave us the first model, and up to that time had furnished
us the only example of a republican form of government, extending over a
territorial expanse such as only monarchies had previously shown
themselves capable of governing. The dilemma was inevitable. We had
either to adhere to the European solution, which is a constitutional
monarchy, or else establish a republic on the American model.

We are still today as far from the perfect model which the United States
present of a federal republic, as we were from a likeness to England
under the parliamentary monarchy, although England was the example we
followed in that regime, just as the United States is our example in our
present government. But