Note 985 — Chapter VI
Reading edition
The probabilities appear to be specially in favour of music, to which the native races and the negroes alike show a great predilection (id. pp. 545, 546). As M. da Silva-Prado urges, what is needed is a systematic home-instruction, as liberally carried out as was Pedro's policy of sending promising students of the arts to Europe. Thus far, though education is good, books have been relatively scarce because of their dearness. Here again the United States had an immense preliminary advantage in their ability to reproduce at low prices the works of English authors, paying nothing to the writers; a state of things which subsisted long after the States had produced great writers of their own.