But the mysterious Amazon, whose entrance was guarded by the town of Para, seemed most attractive of all. No civilised man had penetrated its length since Orellana's adventurous voyage of a century before. In 1638 Jacome Raymundo, an able Brazilian, temporarily acting as governor of Para, determined to explore the great river. The expedition which he sent out found its way up the windings of the mult.i.tudinous channels, and after eight months reached the first Spanish settlement in the east of Ecuador. The Spanish authorities at Lima and Quito saw no particular value in a route through a territory in which no gold or silver had been discovered, and which by the Spanish policy could not be used for commerce. But when, two years, later Portugal regained her independence the expedition turned out to have been of vast importance. The Portuguese had found the practicable route into the great river valley; they controlled the mouth of the stream; and though the whole territory lay west of the Tordesillas line Spain never a.s.serted any effective claim to it.

Meanwhile the conquest of the great interior plateaux to the south was rapidly proceeding. The wars with the Dutch rather stimulated than r.e.t.a.r.ded it, for, so long as the Dutch commanded the sea, the widely separated provinces were obliged to communicate by land, and the Indian routes became better known to the Brazilians. Settlers driven from the sugar plantations on the coast took up cattle-raising in the interior of the northern provinces. In the extreme South, as early as 1635 the Paulistas had rooted out the Jesuit settlements from the whole region of the Parana. To the North they traversed the So Francisco valley and the plateau of Goyaz. Manoel Correa explored the latter region in 1647, and in 1671 another Paulista, Domingos Jorge, penetrated with a force of subject Indians into the great treeless plains which extend beyond the mountain ranges bounding the So Francisco valley on the north. These plains are now the state of Piauhy. At about the same time the cattle-raisers who had established themselves on the lower So Francisco in Bahia, crossed over into the same territory of Piauhy. Within a short time the Indians were reduced to submission, and the cattle ranges were extended over the plains of Piauhy, southern Ceara, and the adjacent provinces. This great conquest completed the junction of southern and central Brazil with Maranho and Para. Long lines of land communication were established, and over them travel was more frequent than would seem likely. Piauhy and Ceara soon produced an enormous surplus of cattle whose export into other provinces brought about a revolution in the alimentation of the coast Brazilians. The Indians along the north-east coast were gradually incorporated, destroyed, or pushed back, though it was not until 1699 that they were finally subdued in Rio Grande do Norte. From this time dates the astonishing development of the population of Ceara, who during this century have furnished nearly all the labour for the gathering of rubber.

In the South, settlements multiplied up and down the coast from Rio until nearly the whole of the present state was occupied. Rio and So Paulo flourished with the profits of the clandestine trade with the Spanish colonies. The Paulistas continued to spread in every direction.

By 1654 they had occupied the headwaters of the Parahyba and west as far as Soracaba.

During the period just following the expulsion of the Dutch the Portuguese government was not able to enforce its policy of commercial exclusivism. Treaties with Holland and England gave the citizens of those countries a right to trade with Brazil, and the colonists kept up their commerce with the Spanish possessions. Munic.i.p.al charters were freely granted to Brazilian towns, and the existing franchises reformed according to the most liberal model in Portugal--that of Porto.

Brazilians were relieved of the absurd feudal distinctions which exempted n.o.bles alone from liability to torture, and regulated the clothes a man might wear. The extraordinary rapidity of Brazil's increase in population and territory during the middle of the seventeenth century was largely due to comparative freedom from vexatious restrictions and exactions--commercial and governmental. By the end of the century there were three-quarters of a million people in Brazil--a fivefold increase in seventy years, in spite of the fact that the most populous provinces had been the scene of war for twenty-four years of that time.

But the Portuguese government lost little time in returning to the old restrictive conditions. Since the loss of the Indies, Brazil was Portugal's princ.i.p.al source of wealth, and aristocracy and Court made the most of the unhappy colony.

Navigation companies were chartered and given a monopoly of all commerce--export and import. The Jesuits renewed their efforts to gain control of the Indians. In So Paulo they had no chance of success, but in the North the celebrated Padre Antonio Vieira, one of the greatest geniuses that Portugal has ever produced, was given a free hand. He nearly smothered the whites of Maranho and Para with a ring of missions, and his successors established settlements on the Amazon which finally spread so as to communicate with the Spanish missions in Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay. The Brazilians of Maranho and Para did not object to the occupation of the valley of the Amazon, but they bitterly resented the Jesuit encroachments in their own neighbourhood. In 1684 a rebellion finally broke out in Maranho under the leadership of Manoel Beckman. He paid the forfeit with his life, but his work had warned the Portuguese authorities that they must not push their favours to the Jesuits too far.

During the long Dutch war many Pernambucan negroes had fled into the interior, where they had established themselves in independent communities and refused to recognise white supremacy. They fortified their villages with palisades, obtained wives by raids on the plantations, elected chiefs, devised rude forms of administering justice, and adopted a religion which was a mixture of the nature worship of their African ancestors with the outward forms of Christianity. In spite of numerous efforts to destroy them, these strange republics lasted fifty years. It was not until 1697 that a Paulista chief, Domingos Jorge, who was employed after the regulars had failed, succeeded in shutting the negroes up in their great palisade at Palmares. Seven thousand men took part in the a.s.sault, and of the ten thousand negroes who defended it none were spared.

This was the only serious attempt at revolt on the part of the blacks which ever occurred in Brazil. Except for a few easily suppressed insurrections which mostly occurred in Bahia among the recent arrivals, the negroes remained in abject submission until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. The comparative mildness of the Brazilian treatment of negroes, the practice of voluntary manumission, and the fact that no impenetrable race barrier existed all contributed to make slavery a less fearful thing in Brazil than in North America.

Both Spain and Portugal claimed the coast between Santos and the river Plate under the treaty of Tordesillas, but neither nation had made any serious attempt to take possession up to the end of the seventeenth century. As a matter of fact, the Tordesillas line pa.s.sed near the southern boundary of the Brazilian state of So Paulo, but the Portuguese maps pushed all Brazil eight degrees to the east, and Portugal claimed that the line pa.s.sed near the point where the Parana and Uruguay unite to form the Plate. The Paulistas had made this claim effective over much of the disputed territory.

For a century after the foundation of Buenos Aires the Spaniards failed to occupy the north margin of the Plate, and in 1680 the Portuguese fore-stalled them by founding a colony and fort, called Colonia, directly opposite Buenos Aires. The Spanish governor promptly resented this piece of audacity and captured the place, but was compelled to restore it immediately by orders from Madrid. Louis XIV., who was then arbiter of Europe, had no mind to allow a war to be precipitated over so insignificant a matter as a post in an uninhabited part of South America. However, the question of right to the territory was left open for future determination. Colonia at that time was chiefly valued as an _entrepot_ for clandestine trade with the Spanish provinces, but to its existence can be traced Brazilian possession of the great states of Parana, Santa Catharina, and Rio Grande do Sul, and even Brazil's dominance in the Upper Parana valley, a dominance which would have been lost had Spain insisted upon the true Tordesillas line.

CHAPTER XI

GOLD DISCOVERIES--REVOLTS--FRENCH ATTACKS

The early attempts to find gold and silver had not been successful. A little gold was found in So Paulo in the sixteenth century, but no great discoveries were made until nearly the end of the seventeenth. The Paulistas, who scoured the interior in their slave-hunts, occasionally came across indications of gold, and rumours constantly reached the coast. But for a long time the Paulistas failed, either through ignorance or design, to give sufficiently exact information. After 1670 the rumours became so circ.u.mstantial that no doubt was felt that the mountain ranges around the headwaters of the So Francisco River were gold-bearing. Stimulated by government promises of liberal treatment, the Paulistas undertook the hunt in earnest. About 1690 they found the rich gold washings of Sabara, where to-day is one of the great mines of the world--the Morro Velho. This is three hundred miles directly north of Rio. In 1693, Antonio Arzo, a Paulista, penetrated west from this region to the seacoast at Victoria, bringing with him native gold in large nuggets. These were sent to Portugal and created intense excitement. The Paulistas followed up these first discoveries by soon finding half a dozen other fields--all of them yielding gold in abundance to the crudest processes. A rush started that threatened to depopulate the seacoast and even Portugal itself. The find was the greatest gold discovery which had been made in the history of the world up to that time. The one province of Minas Geraes produced seven million five hundred thousand ounces within the first fifty years, and its total product to the present time has been twenty-five million ounces.

The Paulista discoverers of the mines soon became involved in quarrels with the swarms of adventurers who poured in from Portugal. The government at first did not establish any regular control over the mining region, and disputes arose between the old and new comers as to proprietorship of claims. Anarchy and civil war ensued, but the foreign element, nicknamed the "emboabas," came out on top with a strong man, Nunes Vianna, at the head of affairs. He became the virtual ruler of the region, and the Portuguese authorities at Rio, seeing their perquisites endangered, tried to get rid of him by force. They were unsuccessful, but finally managed to seduce his followers and secure a recognition of their own paramount authority by solemn promises to concede the reasonable demands of the miners. These promises were not kept. Vianna, though he had been induced to surrender on a.s.surances that his life would be spared, was a.s.sa.s.sinated.

The mining laws, at first liberal, were narrowed until exploration was discouraged and production oppressed. For years the authorities tried to collect a fixed amount for each slave employed--a provision which discouraged searches for new deposits. Then the system of requiring all gold to be taken to government melting-houses was enforced. Export in dust or nuggets was forbidden, and no gold was allowed in circulation except that which bore the government stamp showing it had paid the king's fifth. This involved the searching of every traveller's pockets and the posting of detachments of soldiers at every crossroads. So oppressive and inconvenient was this that finally the chief miners and munic.i.p.al authorities agreed to be responsible for a lump sum yearly.

The war of the emboabas ended in 1709, but troubles broke out in the mining regions from time to time down to the end of the colonial period.

These struggles for local self-government--for the right to exist--were not confined to Minas. In various forms and at various times they were repeated in most of the provinces, and a strong belief in local autonomy never died out, though for long periods it was apparently crushed out of existence.

Simultaneously with the overthrow of the semi-independent government of Minas, which had been set up by the emboabas, a civil war broke out in the old province of Pernambuco. This was a struggle of the oligarchy of native Brazilian sugar-planters against the rigorous and corrupt rule of the royal governors and against the encroachments of the newly arrived Portuguese. Then, as now, foreigners conducted the trade of Brazil; the Brazilian aristocrats remained on their plantations, disdaining the small economies and anxieties of commerce. The Portuguese were the peddlers, shopkeepers, and money-lenders for the community, as well as the officials of the government. In both capacities they pressed hard on the extravagant Brazilians. Olinda, the old capital, was the headquarters of the latter. Recife, three miles south, was the port and chiefly inhabited by native Portuguese. It had outrun Olinda during the Dutch occupation, but was legally only an administrative dependency of the older and smaller town. In 1709 the Portuguese government made Recife a separate city--a step which was bitterly resented by the Brazilians and especially by the close corporation of native families who controlled the Olinda munic.i.p.al government. Hostilities broke out between them and the governor. Two thousand Pernambucanos invaded Recife; the troops deserted and the governor fled for his life, while the royal charter to Recife was torn to bits by the mob. The heads of the insurrection met to determine what form of government should be adopted. Bernardo Vieira, the best soldier in the colony, proposed that a republic should be founded on the plan of Venice, probably the first time a republic was ever advocated on American soil. The proposition met with much favour, but the conservatives shrank from so radical a departure. The bishop was made acting-governor, but his hand proved not firm enough to control the divergent interests and ambitions. The Portuguese--"mascates" they were called--revolted in their turn and drove him from Recife. The Pernambucanos besieged the place, but the loss of the seaport was a heavy blow. The Olinda oligarchy was not able to secure the co-operation of the smaller munic.i.p.alities, and civil war spread throughout the province. When a new governor appeared with a commission from the king, he had little difficulty, by promises of fair treatment, in inducing all parties to lay down their arms. No sooner, however, was he safely in power than he imprisoned and banished the chiefs of the revolt, especially selecting those who had favoured an independent republic.

All three great revolts--Beckman's in Maranho, that of the emboabas in Minas, and the Olinda rebellion of 1710--followed substantially the same course. Local feeling was strong enough to sweep all before it for a time, but lack of capacity for organisation, intestine quarrels, want of persistency, soon enabled the Portuguese officials to re-establish themselves more firmly than ever.

Meanwhile Portugal had become involved in the War of the Spanish Succession. Colonia was again captured by the Spanish of Buenos Aires, and though it was restored at the end of the war its trade was never so prosperous afterwards. In the Upper Amazon Spanish Jesuits had come down from Quito, but the Portuguese expelled them, thereby confirming Portugal's t.i.tle as far as the foothills of the Andes. The Spaniards of the eighteenth century no more than the Peruvians and Bolivians of the nineteenth were able to cope with the difficulties of transit from the Pacific side of the mountains. Portugal's effective possession reached to the 70th meridian from Greenwich--sixteen hundred miles west of the Tordesillas line.

Rio was the only important Brazilian port which had escaped attack by hostile fleets during the preceding century, and the discovery of the gold mines gave a tremendous impetus to its prosperity and wealth. The only gateway to the mining territory, its population of over twelve thousand was soon one of the richest and busiest in all America. The opportunity was too tempting to be neglected by the French prize-hunters. A daring Frenchman, named Duclerc, appeared before the city in 1710, but, seeing that he had not ships strong enough to force the entrance, landed with a thousand marines forty miles down the coast.

They met with no resistance in their march through the woods and arrived back of the city without loss. Thence they proceeded coolly to charge into the narrow streets in the face of the artillery fire from the hilltop forts that surround the city. The audacious enterprise was very nearly successful. The Portuguese regulars offered no effective resistance, and the main body of the French penetrated to the very centre of the city. There they were checked by a little party of students who had climbed into the governor's palace and were firing out of the windows. The French finally took the palace by a.s.sault, but meanwhile the city had risen behind them, their scattered detachments were ma.s.sacred in detail, and the main body in the palace had to surrender at discretion. The Portuguese sullied their victory by acts of mediaeval cruelty--killing most of the prisoners.

The victims did not long remain unavenged. As soon as the news reached France, Admiral Duguay-Trouin, one of the ablest seamen his nation has produced, volunteered to lead an expedition to Rio. Wealthy merchants of St. Malo supplied the money, and in June, 1711, he sailed with seven line-of-battle ships, six frigates, and four smaller vessels, manned by five thousand picked men. Secretly as the expedition had been despatched, the Portuguese had received warning. The garrison had been re-enforced and the narrow-mouthed harbour and hill-commanded city were defended by three forts and eleven batteries, besides four ships of the line and four frigates. Favoured by a foggy morning he ran boldly in, suffering little loss. Of the Portuguese men-of-war not one escaped.

Fort Villegagnon was blown up by the mismanagement of its garrison, the Portuguese became demoralised, Trouin put a battery on an unoccupied island within cannon-shot of the city, and disembarked troops to the left of the town where a range of hills made it easy to dominate the low ground. The poor governor knew no better tactics than to let the French enter the streets and then overpower them in fighting from the houses.

But Trouin was too old a soldier to be caught like his fellow-countrymen the year before. He coolly advanced his batteries and soon had the town commanded on three sides; it was only a question of getting his cannon into position when he could batter the place at his leisure. Panic extended from the citizens to the soldiers, and a week after the French had entered the harbour the governor fled ignominiously to the interior, and the French took possession unopposed.

Revenge and plunder had been the objects of the expedition. It would have been very difficult for the French to have remained in permanent possession of the city, and a conquest of the interior, with its large population and mountainous character, was not to be thought of. The city was admitted to ransom on giving up the surviving prisoners of the Duclerc expedition. Duguay-Trouin sailed triumphantly back to France with a treasure which netted the Norman merchants who had fitted him out ninety-two per cent. on their investment, in spite of the wrecking of the biggest ship on the homeward voyage.

CHAPTER XII

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Montevideo was founded in 1726 and became the nucleus of the Spanish settlements which have grown into the modern country of Uruguay. Except Colonia, the only Portuguese settlements south of the 25th degree were the town of Santa Catharina Island, the unimportant village of Laguna on the coast-plain, and the scattered ranches of a few adventurous Paulistas on the plateau.

The founding of Montevideo drew the serious attention of the Rio government to the valuable country between the Plate and Santa Catharina. The Paulistas had thoroughly explored the plains and found them swarming with cattle. The chief obstacle to the foundation of a military post as a nucleus for the settlement of Rio Grande and eastern Uruguay was the lack of a harbour on that sandy coast. When the next European war broke out, in 1735, the Spaniards again besieged Colonia, and established forts and settlements along the Uruguayan coast, from Montevideo to the present Brazilian border. In 1737, the Portuguese authorities sent an expedition to take Montevideo, which failed. On the way back the Portuguese built a little fort at the only entrance which gives access to the great series of lagoons which run parallel to the coast for two hundred and fifty miles north of the southern Brazilian frontier. This is the site of the present city of Rio Grande do Sul. A few years later, a considerable number of settlers from the Azores Islands were introduced, who engaged in agriculture along the fertile borders of the great Duck Lagoon.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RIO GRANDE DO SUL.]

In 1750, Spain and Portugal made an attempt to reach an amicable and rational agreement about their South American boundaries. Up to that time, Spain had stubbornly claimed the territory as far north and east as Santos, and Portugal was even more unreasonable in a.s.serting her exclusive right to the coast as far south and west as the mouth of the Uruguay. The treaty of 1750 virtually recognised the _uti possidetis_.

Portugal agreed to give up Colonia, and the boundary to her possessions and those of Spain was drawn between the Spanish settlements in Uruguay and the Portuguese settlements in Rio Grande. The seven Jesuit missions in the interior, two hundred miles to the north, were abandoned by the Spanish government. Spain deliberately ceded these tens of thousands of peaceful and prosperous civilised Indians, and even agreed that her troops should a.s.sist the Portuguese in the cruel dispossession. The Indians fought desperately and unavailingly. But this iniquitous provision of the treaty was the only part of it which was ever carried into effect. Spanish public opinion protested, the boundary commissions could not agree, Portugal put off the surrender of Colonia on one pretext or another, and in 1761 the treaty fell to the ground and all the questions were left open.

That year Spain and Portugal became embroiled on opposite sides in the Seven Years' War, and the Spaniards from Buenos Aires invaded the disputed territory in overwhelming force. Colonia was taken and in 1763 the Spanish governor led his army against the Portuguese settlements in Rio Grande. The fortified town of Rio Grande fell, the superior Argentine cavalry drove the Rio Grandenses back to the coast, and the Portuguese territory was reduced to the north-east quarter of the state.

The flourishing farms of the Azorean settlers were laid waste, and from this invasion dates the adoption by the Rio Grandenses of pastoral habits. The Treaty of Paris put an end to the war in Europe. The Spaniards ceased their advance, they restored Colonia once more, but retained their conquests in southern Rio Grande.

The Rio Grandenses made good use of the breathing-spell. They cared little whether there was peace or war in Europe, and four years later made a desperate effort to recapture their old capital and regain their farms in the south. Disavowed by their government, they still kept on fighting; soon they made a regular business of raiding the territory occupied by the Spaniards; the beef they found on the plains was their food; they were always in the saddle and soon became the finest of irregular cavalry and partisan fighters.

The Spaniards retaliated by invading northern Rio Grande, but never succeeded in routing the Rio Grandenses from their last strongholds. In 1775 the Brazilians were re-enforced from So Paulo and Rio and took the aggressive, and the following year recaptured the city of Rio Grande.

The Spanish government took prompt steps to avenge this loss. A great fleet was sent out, Santa Catharina was captured, an army of four thousand men was on the march up from Montevideo to sweep the Portuguese out of all southern Brazil once and for all. But in this crisis European politics again saved Brazil from dismemberment. France and Spain were forming a coalition against England in the War of American Independence.

Spain wished to have her hands free and to isolate England. The Spanish fleet and army were at the gates of Rio Grande when the Treaty of San Ildefonso was signed in 1777. The Portuguese definitely relinquished Colonia; Uruguay and the Seven Missions remained Spanish, but most of southern Rio Grande which the Portuguese had lost in 1763, as well as Santa Catharina, was restored to them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD RANCH IN RIO GRANDE.]

The thirty-four years of peace which followed in Rio Grande were employed in steady growth. A craze for cattle-raising set in, and the plains were divided up into great _estancias_ which were distributed among the governor's favourites or those who had distinguished themselves during the war. Substantially the entire population engaged in the cattle business. The Rio Grandenses and their cattle multiplied so rapidly that they spread out over the western part of the state, which was still Spanish, and to the south. In 1780 the curing of beef by drying and salting was introduced, which permitted its shipment, and afforded a stable market.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WASHING DIAMONDS.]

After the great gold discoveries in Minas during the late years of the seventeenth and early years of the eighteenth centuries, the prospectors ranged north from Sabara along the great Backbone Mountains, finding washings at many places in North Minas and Bahia. By 1740 the fields in Bahia were producing fifty to a hundred thousand ounces a year. As early as 1718 an expedition had penetrated fifteen hundred miles to the west and discovered good placers on the plateau where the headwaters of the Madeira and the Paraguay intertwine. This was the beginning of Cuyaba and the state of Matto Grosso. In ten years a million five hundred thousand ounces were taken out from these diggings. A little later still other fields were discovered farther west on the Madeira watershed.

The miners at the gold camp of Tijuca in North Minas had noticed some curious little shining stones in the bottom of their pans and thought them so pretty that they used them for counters in games. Soon a wandering friar who had been in India recognised them as diamonds. This occurred in 1729, and the field thus opened up supplied the world with diamonds until the discovery of Kimberley. In the years from 1730 to 1770 five million carats were taken from the original Diamantina district, and the deposits are still second in productiveness only to those of South Africa. The diamond region was at once declared Crown property and a deadline drawn around it which none except officials were allowed to cross.

In 1716 an exploring expedition ascended the Madeira, and in the years following the Tocantins, the Araguaya, the Rio Negro, and the princ.i.p.al tributaries of the Upper Amazon were navigated. The Jesuit settlements in the Amazon valley continued to flourish. While the interior and the South were expanding rapidly, the coast provinces were relatively declining. The growing compet.i.tion of the West Indies reduced the price of sugar. During the seventeenth century Brazil had furnished the bulk of European sugar consumption, selling her product at non-compet.i.tive prices. But the growth of the English and Dutch colonial empires brought into the field compet.i.tors who possessed as good a climate and soil and enjoyed the inestimable advantage of better government. Portugal's vicious and narrow-minded colonial system was not changed until Brazil's compet.i.tors had so far pa.s.sed her that she has never since been able to make up lost ground.

The wealth from mines and taxes that Brazil poured into the Portuguese treasury was squandered by the dissipated bigot, John V. When he died in 1750 he left Portugal in a bad way, and though Brazil had managed to grow in spite of mismanagement, the outlook was discouraging. The Spaniards were threatening the new settlements in the South; So Paulo had been depopulated by the migration to the mines; Bahia's and Pernambuco's sugar and tobacco industries were decadent; in Ceara and Piauhy the golden days of the cattle business had pa.s.sed; Maranho and Para had stopped short in their development, and their spread into the interior had been cut off by the Jesuits.

Contemporary doc.u.ments prove the horrible corruption. From ministers of State down to the humblest subordinate every official had his share in the pickings. The farmers of the revenues openly paid bribes and might exact what they pleased from the taxpayers. All trade except that with Portugal was forbidden, and this was hampered in a hundred ways. Salt, wine, soap, rum, tobacco, olive oil, and hides were monopolies. All legal transactions were burdened with heavy fees; slaves paid so much a head; every river on a road was the occasion for a new toll; the exercise of professions and trades was forbidden except on the payment of heavy fees; anything that could compete with Portugal was prohibited altogether. Taxation shut off industrial enterprise at its very sources, and many of the worst features of the system then put in vogue have never been discontinued.

The governors and military commanders interfered constantly with the administration of justice in favour of their friends and favourites; they accepted bribes for allowing contraband trade and permitting the immigration of foreigners; they misappropriated the funds of widows and orphans; they ignored the franchises of the munic.i.p.alities; they imposed unauthorised taxes; they forced loans from suitors having claims before them; they obliged free men to work without pay; they forcibly took wives away from their husbands; they impressed the young men for the wars on the Spanish border, required every able bodied man to serve in the militia, and commonly practised arbitrary imprisonment. How even one of the best of them interfered to regulate private affairs can best be shown by his own words:

"I promoted the good of the people by forcibly compelling them to plant maize and pulse, and threatening to take away their lands altogether if they did not cultivate them diligently; I required the militia colonels to make exact reports about this matter and thus brought about a great increase in the production of food crops and sugar. I called the militia together for exercise on Sundays and holidays, days which otherwise the people would have spent in idleness and pleasure. Many have complained, but I have never given their complaints the slightest attention, having always followed the system of taking no notice whatever of the people's murmurs."