es of travel, will appreciate it at once; and I trust that the
time is near at hand when our mercantile men, by the perusal of such a
work, will see how wide a field lies before them for future commercial
enterprise. This portion of the tropics abounds in natural resources
which only need the stimulus of capital to draw them forth to the light;
to create among the natives a desire for articles of civilization in
exchange for the crude productions of the forest; and to stimulate
emigration to a healthy region of perpetual summer.

It seems as if Providence were opening the way for a great change in the
Valley of the Amazon. That immense region drained by the great river is
as large as all the United States east of the States of California and
Oregon and the Territory of Washington, and yet it has been so secluded,
mainly by the old monopolistic policy of Portugal, that that vast space
has not a population equal to the single city of Rio de Janeiro or of
Brooklyn. Two million five hundred thousand square miles are drained by
the Amazon. Three fourths of Brazil, one half of Bolivia, two thirds of
Peru, three fourths of Ecuador, and a portion of Venezuela are watered
by this river. Riches, mineral and vegetable, of inexhaustible supply
have been here locked up for centuries. Brazil held the key, but it was
not until under the rule of their present constitutional monarch, Don
Pedro II., that the Brazilians awoke to the necessity of opening this
glorious region. Steamers were introduced in 1853, subsidized by the
government. But it is to a young Brazilian statesman, Sr. A.C. Tavares
Bastos, that belongs the credit of having agitated, in the press and in
the national parliament, the opening of the Amazon, until public
opinion, thus acted upon, produced the desired result. On another
occasion, in May, 1868, I gave several indices of a more enlightened
policy in Brazil, and stated that the opening of the Amazon, which
occurred on the 7th of September, 1867, and by which the great river is
free to the flags of all nations, from the Atlantic to Peru, and the
abrogation of the monopoly of the coast-trade from the Amazon to the Rio
Grande do Sul, whereby 4000 miles of Brazilian sea-coast are open to the
vessels of every country, can not fail not only to develop the resources
of Brazil, but will prove of great benefit to the bordering
Hispano-American republics and to the maritime nations of the earth. The
opening of the Amazon is the