SOUTH AMERICAN STUDIES

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27404, 17 July 1954, Page 3

SOUTH AMERICAN STUDIES

Brazil. An Interim Assessment. By J. A. Camacho. 116 pp. Uruguay. South America’s First Welfare State. By George Pendle. 100 pp. Both published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs. These informative short studies summarise very competently all that the outsider—traveller, businessman, or student of international affairs—could want to know about two of South America’s most vigorous and interesting republics. Mr Camacho, who knows Brazil intimately and has been for many years a political commentator in the 8.8.C.’s Latin America Service, describes Brazil as a land of geographic, economic, and demographic contrasts, one of the less developed and less advanced countries of the world, yet a land of experiment, whose example in some respects has much to offer to the rest of the world. Brazil is almost entirely free from racial prejudice, and the success of Brazilian miscegenation is indisputable. It has produced a people of greater productive capacity and cultural originality than is to be found in any other tropical country. Mr Camacho outlines Brazil’s economic and political, as well as her racial, experiments, and sketches the progress of her financial, political and cultural emancipation. The work of the Brazilian republic in “self-colon-isation,” or the opening-up of her undeveloped West, he also regards as an example to other countries. His final chapters constitute a guide to Brazilian present-day politics and foreign affairs, with an assessment of future potentialities and the Salte Plan. Uruguay, the smallest of the South American republics, is a country less rich and less important to the rest of the world, but one which is an equally instructive example on account of its social legislation. The work of the celebrated Uruguayan statesman Jose Batlie y-Ordonez in introducing, during his two terms as president of the Republic from 1911-15, many advanced measures of social welfare and state ownership have justly earned for Uruguay the reputation of being the most progressive of the former Spanish possessions. Mr Pendle, who has taught English history at the University of Asuncion, describes the history and present condition of the Uruguayan welfare state in detail, and also outlines the essential facts about trade and production, finance and party politics, religion and the arts in Uruguay. Both these admirable little handbooks are well indexed and provided with a full bibilography.

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A Marshland Omnibus. By S. L. Bensusan. Duckworth. 544 pp. On the east coast of England, round the mouth of the Thames and a few smaller rivers to the north, lies a region not much visited by tourists, and little known even to English people—the Essex marshes. More rapid transport and new ways of life are breaking down their isolation, but for many years they were very much a world oh their own; a community of people with a strongly knit sense of kinship, who thought the not so far distant London “furrin parts,” and whose travels took them not much further than Maldon or Colchester. Yachtsmen knew the area, so did smugglers and others keeping out of the way of the law; Dickens’s convict in “Great Expectations” lay hidden there. Not much has been written about the Essex marshes except by the prolific pen of Mr Bensusan, who since 1898 has made them the setting for more than 500 stories. He knows and loves the area and understands the character and reticence of the people who live there. The present book contains selections from many of these tales. They are nearly all tales of people, and most of the people are “characters" in the Dickens tradition —Fred Mole, Solomon Woodpecker. Mrs Woodspottie. Like his marshland neonle Mr Bensusan’s stories belong to a vanishing tradition but many, of them are gems of their kind and rich with robust comedy of character and situation. The author records not only the people of the district he knows so well but captures as well the spirit of the scene which is so unlike anywhere else in England.