Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III WHAT THE PEOPLE AND THE COUNTRIES ARE LIKE "Why doesn't somebody tell us the real truth about these countries?" protested an American automobile man, in South America for the first time. At home, optimistic export literature had impressed him with the possibilities in countries like Brazil, with its 25,000,000 population, its great area, its need for motor trucks and passenger cars. What a market! Arriving in Rio de Janeiro, he found that there was not a single road leading out of that mountain- locked city, and but a few hundred miles of modern highway in Brazil's interior. This statement may be discredited soon by the Brazilians themselves, for they have lately held several good roads conferences, and numerous highway projects are afoot—notably, one from Rio de Janeiro to Petropolis, the summer capita] established by the Old Emperor, Don Pedro. There are some good roads in the states of Sao Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul. But South American highways shock the American automobile man who has pictured the Southern countries as much like our own, and that is the point to be made here. Many of the things that Yankees know about SouthAmerica are interesting, but not true, as they learn by a visit to the Southern continent. Some of us expect too much, others too little. Having seen pictures of the capital cities, and heard that Buenos Aires has a finer taste and a longer purse for grand opera than New York, and maybe having met some free-spending Brazilians or Argentinos, we suspect that the South Americans are more cultured than ourselves—as they have admitted. The South American countries are all republics. We expect to find people something like ourselves in absence of caste, equality of opportunity, education, comfort and prosperity. We have heard of Lat...