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Brazil in Transition

The Princeton Economic History of the Western World
Joel Mokyr, Series Editor
A list of titles in this series appears at the back of the book

BRAZIL IN
TRANSITION
Beliefs, Leadership,
and Institutional Change
Lee J. Alston, Marcus André Melo,
Bernardo Mueller, and Carlos Pereira
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock,
Oxfordshire OX20 1TR
press.princeton.edu
Jacket art: Tarsila do Amaral, São Paolo, 1924. Oil on canvas, 57" × 90". Courtesy of
Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Alston, Lee J., 1951– author.
Title: Brazil in transition : beliefs, leadership, and institutional change / Lee J. Alston,
Marcus André Melo, Bernardo Mueller, and Carlos Pereira.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2016] | Series: The Princeton
economic history of the Western world | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016005035 | ISBN 9780691162911 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Brazil—Economic policy. | Brazil—Social policy. | Brazil—Politics and
government.
Classification: LCC HC187 .A55875 2016 | DDC 330.981—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005035
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Sabon and Helvetica Neue
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Mary, and our grandchildren, Anya and Luke,
who were born while this work was in progress
To Bella, Binha, and Dani with love
To Suely, Beatriz, and Henrique and to my parents,
Charles and Suzana
To the memory of my father, Carlos,
and to my mother, Annete

CONTENTS
List of Illustrations xi
List of Tables xiii
Preface xv
Abbreviations xvii
Part I. An Overview of Brazil in Transition: Beliefs, Leadership,
and Institutional Change 1
Chapter 1. Introduction 3
Economic Development and Critical Transitions 3
Brazil: This Time for Real? 7
A Sketch of the Conceptual Framework 14
Analytical Narratives and Economic Development 16
Road Map for the Book 19
Chapter 2. A Conceptual Dynamic for Understanding
Development 24
Beliefs, Leadership, Dominant Network, and Windows
of Opportunity 24
Difference in Difference in Changing Beliefs 28
Overview of Dominant Network, Beliefs, and Institutions
in Brazil from 1964 to 2014 33
1964– 1984 33
1985– 1993 36
1994– 2014 38
Summary 39
Part II. Introduction to the Case Study of Brazil, 1964– 2014 41
Identifying Beliefs 45
Appendix: A Primer on the Brazilian Political System 50
Chapter 3. From Disorder to Growth and Back:
The Military Regime (1964– 1984) 54
From Chaos to a Short Period of Order 54
From Order to Unsustainable Growth 59

viii • Contents
The Miracle Fades 64
Back to Disorder 67
The Decline of Developmentalism 70
Chapter 4. Transition to Democracy and the Belief
in Social Inclusion (1985– 1993) 71
A New Belief Emerges 71
The Transition to Democracy 72
Codifying Beliefs: The Constitution of 1988 76
The Constitution- Making Process 78
The Constitution’s Delegation of Powers to the President 87
Back to Uncertainty and Chaos 90
Failures of the Brazilian Economic Plans before the Real 91
The Collor Government: Great Hope, Huge
Disappointment 93
Chapter 5. Cardoso Seizes a Window of Opportunity
(1993– 2002) 97
The Real Plan 99
Early Institutional Deepening: Constitutional
Amendments 103
Coalition Management under Cardoso 107
Asserting Fiscal Control over States 108
Staying the Course against the Early Opposition
to the Real Plan 110
Sustaining Stability in the Face of External Shocks 116
Cardoso’s Second Term: Combining Macro Orthodoxy
with Social Inclusion 117
The Reassertion of Presidential Fiscal Authority 119
Conclusions 120
Chapter 6. Deepening Beliefs and Institutional Change
(2002– 2014) 122
The Uncertain Transition 122
Continuity in Change 126
Deepening the Social Contract 128
Checks and Balances vs. Strong Presidential Powers 138
The New Economic Matrix and Dilma’s Policy Switch 150
Beliefs? Really? . . . Really! 154
The Messy Process of Dissipative Inclusion 161
Conclusion 165

Contents • ix
Part III. A General Inductive Framework for Understanding
Critical Transitions 169
Chapter 7. A Conceptual Framework for Understanding
Critical Transitions 171
Understanding Critical Transitions 172
How Does Our Framework Fit in the Literature? 173
The Building Blocks of Our Conceptual Framework 176
Windows of Opportunity 176
Dominant Network 177
Beliefs 180
Leadership 186
Institutions 189
Economic and Political Outcomes 190
Dynamics 191
Argentina: An Illustrative Use of the Framework 199
The Camelot Years: 1912– 1930 200
Electoral Fraud and the Rise of Perón: 1930– 1946 201
Instability Is the Rule: Oscillations between Populism
and Military Rule: 1946– Present 204
Concluding Remarks 207
Chapter 8. Conclusion 209
Better and Worse at the Same Time 210
Assessing the Framework 214
Brazil and the Critical Transition 216
Afterword 221
References 227
Index 243

ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1.1 Brazilian GDP per capita growth relative to the rest
of the world 9
Figure 2.1 Autopilot and critical transitions 27
Figure 2.2 Comparative change in beliefs: government vs.
individual responsibility, 1989– 1993 and 2010– 2014 31
Figure 2.3 Comparative change in beliefs: hard work vs.
luck and connections, 1989– 1993 and 2010– 2014 32
Figure 2.4 Total governmental expenditures (percent of GDP) 37
Figure 3.1 Percentage of bills enacted by proponents in Brazil
(1946– 1985) 56
Figure 6.1 Country risk, exchange rate, and commodity prices
for Brazil 123
Figure 6.2 Per capita social spending in US$ at constant
2005 prices 130
Figure 6.3 Federal social spending, 1995– 2010 131
Figure 6.4 Real minimum wage evolution, 1984– 2012 132
Figure 6.5 Poverty and inequality, 1981– 2009 134
Figure 6.6 Changes in the composition of social classes 135
Figure 6.7 Household per capita income (deciles) in Brazil,
1976– 2009 136
Figure 6.8 Changing combinations of inequality and
redistribution over time 138
Figure 6.9 The quality of public administration in Latin
America 142
Figure 7.1 Dominant network 178
Figure 7.2 Expected outcomes given a set of formal
institutions 181
Figure 7.3 Expected outcomes from all possible formal
institutions 182
Figure 7.4 Choice of formal institutions given beliefs 183
Figure 7.5 Autopilot and critical transitions 191
Figure 8.1 Better institutions with more discontent 212

TABLES
Table 1.1 Number and Percentage of Countries:
High, Low, and Transition 5
Table 2.1 Brazilian Development, 1964– 2014 34
Table 8.1 GDP Growth and Inflation 219

PREFACE
Why isn’t the whole world developed? Why do some countries
break from their past and enter the rank of sustainable economic, legal,
and political development? These questions are the Holy Grail for the
social sciences and motivate our book. We chip away at the fundamental
question of development by building a framework to understand the dy-
namics of development of Brazil, from 1964 to 2014. Brazil is currently
on the trajectory of a critical transition to sustainable development. To
complete a transition requires an iterative process of institutional deepen-
ing. Our analytical framework is inductive from the case of Brazil, but
it can yield insights for development in other countries. Our hope is that
other scholars will take the framework, and with modifications, apply
it to understand development in other countries, and ultimately better
understand the general process of development.
In our intellectual journey, we acquired many debts to many scholars
and organizations. The project got off the ground thanks to the Rocke-
feller Foundation hosting us as residents in Bellagio. It was an intellectual
experience we will never forget. We benefitted enormously from detailed
comments provided by the anonymous reviewers for Princeton University
Press and from a book conference at Northwestern University, funded by
President Schapiro at Northwestern University and Princeton University
Press. Joel Mokyr and Marlous van Waijenburg organized the confer-
ence, and the participants deserve to be named: Hoyt Bleakley, Alan Dye,
Joseph Ferrie, Brodwyn Fischer, Regina Grafe, Stephen Haber, David D.
Haddock, Anne Hanley, Daniel Immerwahr, John Londregan, Noel Mau-
rer, Joel Mokyr, Aldo Musacchio, Nicola Persico, Frank Safford, William
Summerhill, Marlous van Waijenburg, John Wallis, and Sam Williamson.
Sonja Opper kindly organized an earlier book conference at Lund Uni-
versity in November 2013. We thank the discussants— Thomas Brambor,
Christer Gunnarsson, and Carl Hampus- Lytkens— and the participants.
We benefitted greatly from lengthy discussions and correspondence at
critical times of our journey with Alan Dye, Thráinn Eggertsson, Avner
Greif, Murat Iyigun, Douglass North, James Robinson, John Wallis, and
Barry Weingast. We thank William Summerhill for a discussion about
the substance of our afterword. From a variety of people we received
helpful comments on drafts: Eric Alston, Martin Andersson, Andy Baker,
Robert Bates, Michael Bordo, Eric Brousseau, David Brown, Charles Cal-
omiris, Victor Fleischer, Patrick François, Steven Haber, Joseph Jupille,

xvi • Preface
John Londregran, Thomas Mayer, Tomas Nonnenmacher, Sonja Opper,
Samuel Pessoa, Laura Randall, Hugh Rockoff, Jerome Sgard, Kenneth
Shepsle, Richard Sicotte, Stefan Voigt, Steven Webb, and Eugene White.
Throughout the project and for suggestions for a title we thank Rob-
ert Higgs. Presenting seminars and receiving comments at the following
conferences and universities clarified where we were going astray: Getu-
lio Vargas Foundation; a conference at Washington University honoring
Douglass North’s ninetieth birthday; the Economic History Association
Annual Meetings (Boston and Washington, DC); the workshop on Legal
Order, the State, and Economic Development in Florence, Italy; the Inter-
national Society for the New Institutional Economics Annual Meeting;
and seminars at Columbia University, Indiana University, Rutgers Univer-
sity, University of British Columbia, University of Chicago, University of
Colorado (Institutions Program and School of Law), and the University
of Hamburg (Institute of Law and Economics).
We thank our series editor, Joel Mokyr, and our editor at Princeton
University Press, Seth Ditchik, for believing in the project, for their com-
ments, and for their patience. We thank Patty Lezotte at the Ostrom
Workshop at Indiana University for copyediting and cheerfully pulling it
all together during crunch times. Lee Alston thanks the faculty and staff
at the Institute for Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado for
their support from 2002 to 2014 and the staff at the Ostrom Workshop
at Indiana University for helping to finish the project. The material is
based on work by Alston supported by the National Science Foundation
under Grant No. OISE- 1157725. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions
or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s)
and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Founda-
tion. Carlos Pereira is grateful to the National Council for Scientific and
Technological Development (CNPq) for a research fellowship and Fred-
erico Bertholini for research assistance.
Our personal debts know no bounds. Lee Alston thanks his wife,
Mary, who believed in the project and who patiently listened to endless
laments and lectures at dinners. Marcus André Melo thanks his family
for supporting him throughout the entire journey of discussing, writing,
and rewriting the book materials. Bernardo Mueller thanks Suely, Beat-
riz, and Henrique. For encouragement, support, and endless interactions
in what sometimes seemed an interminable process, Carlos Pereira would
like to thank his wife, Ana Paula.

ABBREVIATIONS
ARENA Aliança Renovadora Nacional
BNDES Brazilian Development Bank
BNH National Housing Bank
BRIC Brazil, Russia, India, China
CIESP Center of the Industries of the State of São Paulo
CIP Inter- ministerial Price Council
CNI National Confederation of Industry
CPI Corruption Perceptions Index
FHC Fernando Henrique Cardoso
FIESP Federation of the Industries of the State of São Paulo
FSE Fundo Social de Emergência
GDI gross domestic income
GDP gross domestic product
IA Institutional Act
IDB Inter- American Development Bank
IEDI Instituto para o Estudo do Desenvolvimento Industrial
IMF International Monetary Fund
IPEA Institute for Applied Economic Research
IPF institutional possibility frontiers
ISI Import Substitution Industrialization
MDB Movimento Democrático Brasileiro
MP Ministério Público
MST Landless Peasant Movement
NBER National Bureau of Economic Research
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
PACTI Program of Support to the Improvement of the Technological
Capability of Industry
PAEG Economic Action Program
PBQP Brazilian Program of Quality and Productivity
PCI Program of Industrial Competitiveness

xviii • Abbreviations
PDC Christian Democratic Party
PDS Partido Democrático Social
PFL Liberal Front Party (Partido da Frente Liberal)
PICE Industrial and Foreign Trade Policy
PISA Programme for International Student Assessment
PL Liberal Party
PMDB Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (Partido do Movimento
Democrático Brasileiro)
PND National Development Plan
PR proportional representation
PROES Program of Reduction of the State Participation in Banking
Activity
PSD Social Democratic Party
PSDB Brazilian Social Democracy Party
PSOL Partido Socialismo e Liberdade
PT Workers’ Party
PTB Brazilian Labor Party
SOE state- owned enterprise
SUS Unified Health System
TCU National Audit Tribunal
UDN União Democrática Nacional
URV Unidade Real de Valor
WVS World Values Survey

PART I
An Overview of Brazil in Transition:
Beliefs, Leadership, and Institutional Change

CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Since 1994, Brazil has been on a relatively virtuous path of
economic and political development, though there have been bumps in
the road. Is twenty years long enough to conclude that Brazil is still on
the road to a sustainable developmental path whose hallmarks are social
inclusion with steady economic and political development? Or, were the
past twenty years simply a flash in the pan similar to the short- lived Bra-
zilian miracle of the late 1960s and early 1970s? This time, the miracle is
for real because of a change in beliefs in Brazilian society and consequent
changes in economic and political institutions. Today, the dominant be-
lief held among those in power as well as the majority of the popula-
tion is in “fiscally sound social inclusion.” How did this belief emerge?
And, moreover, what are the forces that will sustain it? To understand the
changes in Brazil over the past fifty years, we wed the concepts of win-
dows of opportunity, beliefs, dominant network, leadership, institutions,
and economic and political outcomes into a framework to understand
the dynamics of institutional change and the beliefs within which they
are nested.
1
Development is contextual; that is, each country must find
its own way. Brazil is no exception, though the concepts developed in
this book have purchase in understanding institutional development or
persistence elsewhere.
Economic Development and Critical Transitions
Our main theme is the process of development in the modern world. The
purpose is to better understand the forces leading some contemporary so-
cieties to achieve economic and political development while most societ-
ies remain in autopilot. “Development” may seem fairly intuitive; yet, all
countries manage to grow during some periods and almost all develop to
1 We build on an expanding literature on institutions, beliefs, and leadership. For books
for the primarily academic audience, see Acemoglu and Robinson (2006); Eggertsson
(2005); Greif (2006); North (2005); North, Wallis, and Weingast (2009); North et al.
(2012); and Schofield (2006). A recent contribution reaching the general audience is
Acemoglu and Robinson (2012). The list of articles dealing with the topic is voluminous
and we will reference them when specifically relevant.

4 • Chapter 1
some extent over time. However, few countries manage to complete what
we call the “critical transition,” which is a more fundamental change in a
country’s circumstance than simply increases in GDP.
To see that the process of development entails a transition from one
state to another, rather than simply an incremental change along a con-
tinuum, note that it is common for analysts— whether growth theorists,
development economists, political scientists, journalists, or others— to
classify countries into two broad groups. There are rich and poor coun-
tries; developed and developing; center and periphery; First World and
Third World (the Second World disappeared with the fall of communism);
industrialized and nonindustrialized; and open- access and limited- access
orders. Although the labels and the associated theoretical approaches dif-
fer, the basic notion is that there are two categories. It is natural then for
the interest to center on trying to understand the determinants of the
transition from one group to the other. It turns out that recent cases of
countries making the transition are quite rare. It is not simply a matter
of time until most countries grow themselves from the bottom to the top
category. In table 1.1, we used the Maddison Project data set to clas-
sify each of the countries for which there was GDP per capita data, as
being in the high income, low income, and middle/transition categories.
2

We did this for three different years spanning the data set— 1900, 1950,
and 2008. In order to classify the countries, the choice of cutoff for the
high group was chosen somewhat arbitrarily to include countries that
are normally accepted as being “developed” at that time, and the cut-
off for the low group was set at two- thirds (66.7 percent) of that level.
Given the propensity to classify all countries into just two groups, the
countries between the low and the high groups are considered as being
in transition from one to the other. As expected, there are fewer coun-
tries in the high GDP per capita group than the low group (note that in
1900, the limited data availability biases upward the proportion of those
in the high group). Strikingly, the number of countries in the transition
group is always relatively small— less than 10 percent. The last row in
the table names the countries in the transition group, which allows one
to see that this group would be even smaller if we reassigned the spe-
cial cases (Puerto Rico, Kuwait, UAE in 2008, and war- torn Europe in
1950). Furthermore, some of the transition countries are transitioning
downward (such as Argentina and Uruguay in 1950), corroborating the
notion that countries making the transition from the bottom to the top
group is a relatively rare occurrence. Although the numbers in table 1.1
depend on the criteria used to classify the countries (see note to table),
the general conclusion that there is a small high- income group and a
2 The Maddison Project data is described in Bolt and van Zanden (2013).

Introduction • 5
large low- income group, with few transitioning countries in between, is
quite robust. This flies in the face of the notion that poor countries will
inexorably grow over time and catch up with richer countries, known as
the convergence hypothesis, which has been a major debate in economics
in the past decades.
3
The evidence in table 1.1 refers solely to GDP per capita. Although
higher levels of income and wealth are necessary for a critical transition,
this concept requires important changes in several other dimensions as
well. Many times, an increase in GDP per capita can take place in cir-
cumstances that are not sustainable or that compromise future growth,
creating a middle- income trap. A critical transition, in contrast, requires
not only economic improvements but also accompanying changes in so-
cial relations (e.g., greater equality) and political institutions (e.g., altera-
tions of power and checks and balances). Therefore, a country that has
achieved a critical transition has done something significantly harder and
more fundamental than simply raising its GDP. Note that according to
3 See Barro and Sala- i- Martin (2004: 16– 21) for a history of the literature.
Table 1.1. Number and Percentage of Countries: High, Low, and
Transition
2008 1950 1900
Stage of
development GDP/P N % GDP/P N % GDP/P N %
High >$18K 27 17 >$5.5K 13 9 >$2.8K 13 30
Low <$12K 121 74 <$3.7K 116 84 <$1.9K 26 60
Transition >$12K 13 9 >$3.7K 10 7 >$2.8K 4 9
and and and
<$18K <$5.5K <$1.9K
Countries in Greece, Portugal, Austria, Belgium, Norway, Sweden,
transition Spain, Czech, Finland, France, Chile, Uruguay
Slovakia, Belarus, Germany, Norway,
Latvia, Lithuania, Argentina, Chile,
Chile, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, Trinidad,
Kuwait, UAE, Tobago
Mauritius
Source: Calculated using data from the Maddison Project (Bolt and van Zanden 2013).
Note: Data: GDP per capita in 1990 Int. GK$. Countries classified by the following crite-
ria: 2008— High (GDP/P > $18,000), Low (GDP/P < $12,000), Transition ($12,000<GDP/
P<$18,000); 1950— High (GDP/P > $5,500), Low (GDP/P < $3,666), Transition
($3,666<GDP/P<$5,500); 1900— High (GDP/P > $2,800), Low (GDP/P < $1,866),
Transition ($1,866<GDP/P<$2,800). Upper bound is 1.5 times the lower bound.

6 • Chapter 1
the classification in table 1.1, Argentina was a high- income country in
1900 (GDP per capita $2,875), in transition in 1950 ($4,987), and in the
low- income group in 2008 ($9,715), suggesting that although incomes
were high at the outset, other conditions were lacking. In the opposite
direction, although Austria, Belgium, France, and Germany are classified
as in the transition group in 1950, this was a temporary setback due to
the two world wars, suggesting that the other fundamental conditions
besides GDP that had promoted the development of these countries in the
nineteenth century were still in place.
The conditions besides GDP growth that are necessary for a critical
transition vary from country to country. By examining those countries
that have achieved sustainable development, we can see that there are
many common features, such as rule of law for all, political openness and
universal participation, free entry and exit for all sorts of organizations
(business, political, religious, and associational), checks and balances,
electoral uncertainty ex ante, and certainty ex post. No country has all
these features, and each has its own set of quirks and dysfunctionalities,
but by and large their institutions share a related set of such characteris-
tics and generally lack other conflicting elements, such as authoritarian-
ism, inequality, segregation, favoritism, and systemic violence.
Brazil is currently poised to make the critical transition. Given that
only a handful of countries have managed to do this in the past decades,
it is incumbent on us to back up this claim with evidence and argumen-
tation. Furthermore, given that Brazil’s performance in terms of GDP
growth has been merely mediocre in past decades, we need to make a
strong case that other fundamental changes are taking place that are set-
ting the stage for economic growth to follow. In chapter 2, we present
a basic framework for understanding how countries develop or fail to
do so. In chapters 3– 6, we provide a detailed analysis of the changes
in Brazil since the 1960s. We show that the country has become eco-
nomically orthodox, politically open, and socially inclusive, with all these
three areas marked by a general respect for the rules. The characteristics,
which are now firmly rooted and less likely to be reverted by eventual
shocks, have never been aligned in such a way in Brazilian history and
contrast markedly with the state of the country just a few decades ago.
Previously, chronic fiscal and monetary indiscipline kept the country in
a perpetual inflationary state with high internal and external indebted-
ness. Misguided and excessive state intervention fostered inefficiencies,
distorted markets, reduced productivity, and left market failures unad-
dressed. Politics was at different times mired in different combinations of
authoritarianism, corruption, clientelism, populism, nepotism, electoral
fraud, gridlock, and exclusion. Socially, the country was highly unequal—
among classes, races, regions, and sectors— with lack of opportunity for

Introduction • 7
the disadvantaged and few effective policies seeking to address these im-
balances through redistribution. Though some of these problems persist,
there have been huge strides.
Brazil: This Time for Real?
Brazil currently boasts the world’s sixth largest economy, and it has been
undergoing a profound transformation toward its critical transition. At
first blush, this is a bold claim because the rates of GDP growth during
the past twenty years, especially at the start of its transition, have been
generally unremarkable and often disappointing. But, as noted earlier, a
critical transition is about more than GDP growth; it also includes eco-
nomic opportunity and distribution as well as genuine political competi-
tion and democratic stability. On these scores, we demonstrate in the
empirical section that Brazil is a different country now than it was twenty
years ago.
We are bullish about the changes in Brazil, but the perception by much
of the media inside and outside of Brazil is that the slowdown in economic
growth is an indication that once again the glory years are lost. This re-
placement of hope and confidence with skepticism and despondency is
not hard to understand. From 1975 to 1994, the country underwent two
decades of unrelenting economic decline during which a crippling process
of hyperinflation wreaked havoc with individuals’, organizations’, and
governments’ attempts to structure their lives and to plan for the future.
To many, the repeated frustrations and failures of this period destroyed
the country’s self- esteem and instilled a sense that perhaps this dysfunc-
tional state of affairs was not a phase to be overcome, but rather a natural
Brazilian characteristic.
Since 1994, things have changed for the better. Inflation has been kept
under control, and several economic indicators have clearly improved,
some of them remarkably so. Poverty and inequality have been falling
for more than ten years; the country’s debt ranks as investment grade;
agriculture and other exports are booming; international reserves are
above US$350 billion; extensive oil reserves have been discovered; and
powerful politicians involved in corruption scandals have faced tremen-
dous reputational costs, and some have been tried and punished by the
Supreme Court. Over this period, Brazil has consolidated a vibrant, com-
petitive, and liberal democracy in a global context in which generalized
elections have often not resulted in guarantees and safeguards to citizens’
civil and individual rights.
And yet, there remains a nagging feeling among analysts and the Bra-
zilian public that these achievements may merely be a temporary good

8 • Chapter 1
spell of the sort the country has often had in the past, but which inevita-
bly ends in tears. Perhaps the most salient argument along these lines is
that all these achievements are a direct consequence of the world’s com-
modity boom since 2003 and now that this has ended, everything will
come crashing down.
Skepticism about Brazil’s achievements as well as its future prospects
is not gratuitous. An examination of several indicators of performance
and prosperity provides sufficient ground to be suspicious of claims that
the country has deeply changed. Figure 1.1 shows Brazilian GDP per
capita growth rates from 1950 to 2010. For the purpose of comparison,
the figure also shows the average GDP per capita among all countries
as well as the boundary for the top 20 percent and bottom 20 percent
countries in each year. The figure differentiates when GDP per capita in
Brazil grew above and below the average. The data show that prior to
1980, Brazil performed overwhelmingly above the world average and
often above the top 20 percent mark. Since then, however, its perfor-
mance has been, more often than not, below average. This is not an
obvious candidate for a study of a country on a successful transition to
sustainable development.
Other indicators are equally ominous. In the United Nations’ Human
Development Index, Brazil was only 85th out of 187 countries in 2011.
In the World Bank’s 2011 Doing Business ranking, which compares the
ease of doing business across countries, Brazil was ranked 126th out of
183. The Legatum Prosperity Index puts Brazil at 42nd out of 110 in
2011. In the Heritage Foundation’s 2012 Index of Economic Freedom,
Brazil was in the “mostly unfree” category, ranking 99th out of 179 coun-
tries. In terms of corruption, Transparency International’s Corruption
Perceptions Index (CPI) places Brazil at 69 out of 174 countries in 2012.
In 2012, Reporters without Borders ranked Brazil at 99 out of 179 coun-
tries in terms of the freedom of press. In the 2009 OECD PISA test for
educational attainment for fifteen- year- olds, Brazil came in 50th, 55th,
and 51st out of 62 countries in reading, math, and science, respectively.
4

These are clearly not the kind of rankings that would make a country
stand out as an example of successful development. In most categories
cited above, Brazil seems woefully distant from the leading group. How
4 The sources of the indexes cited in this paragraph are as follows: Human Development
Index (http://hdr.undp.org/en/humandev/); Doing Business Index (http://www.doing
business.org/rankings/); Legatum Prosperity Index (http://www.prosperity.com/default
.aspx); Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom (http://www.heritage.org/index
/default); Corruption Perceptions Index (http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2011/); Reporters
without Borders Press Freedom Index (http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2011-2012
,1043.html); and OECD Programme for Student Assessment (http://www.oecd.org/pisa
/46643496.pdf).

Introduction • 9
is it then that we justify our choice of Brazil as a country on the road to
prosperity?
Rather than trying to discredit these indexes and the comparisons
they purport to allow, we find that such attempts at measuring different
dimensions of a country’s performance can often be quite useful. It is
naive, however, to expect a successfully developing country to simultane-
ously and monotonically improve all or even most of these dimensions
throughout that process. The process of development is inherently messy
and contextual, and no combination of indicators ever provides a sure
telltale sign of whether a definitive transition is really underway. Many of
the indicators measure performance variables that vary widely over time,
reflecting cyclical rather than deeper determinants. Other indicators are
10
5
0
–5
–10
19511956
lowest 20%
average
top 20%
Brazil above avg.
Brazil below avg.
1961196619711976198119861991199620012006
Growth Rate of Real GDP per Capita (%)
Figure 1.1. Brazilian GDP per capita growth relative to the rest of the world.
Sources: Heston, Summers, and Aten (2009) data for 1950– 2007 in constant
2005 prices; IMF for 2008– 2010 data, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo
/2010/02/weodata/download.aspx.

10 • Chapter 1
built using perceptions by experts, businessmen, and other individuals,
for example, the CPI (Transparency International) and the Worldwide
Governance Indicators (World Bank). Yet, perceptions are often overly
influenced by more salient current information and are often subject to
herd behavior. Tetlock (2006) has shown the weakness of expert opinion
at predicting issues such as which countries will thrive and which will
fall. His twenty- year study with a large and varied sample of experts
from various fields concluded that even those who by definition should
be knowledgeable predict only marginally better than chance.
Furthermore, there are several indicators in which Brazil fares remark-
ably well, for example, 10th out of 133 in “soundness of banks” in 2009;
15th out of 236 in number of documents published in scientific journals
from 1996 to 2010; and first in a ranking of developing countries’ efforts
to fight hunger.
5
Another shortcoming of using any arbitrary assortment
of indexes and indicators to infer the true nature of a country’s process
of development is that they typically measure levels when it is often more
revealing to analyze how a particular society evolves over time. Indeed, a
serious methodological flaw in much research in development is to infer
longitudinal processes from cross- sectional data. Brazil, for example, typi-
cally scores very low in indexes of educational level or attainment. Ana-
lysts rightly hold this as one of the country’s major obstacles if it is to
develop. However, simply looking at the level of the country’s latest PISA
score masks the fact that “average PISA scores for Brazil have improved
in all subjects measured over the last ten years” (OECD 2010). Despite
its still low level, the quality of education has had a distinctive upward
evolution over recent years in Brazil. Even in education— an area where
Brazil’s performance is admittedly dismal— it ranks third in a sample of 49
countries for the annual growth rates in students’ achievements between
1995 and 2009 (Hanushek, Peterson, and Woessmann 2012). What has
caused this change? Investigation into this issue, as done by the OECD
(2010) and the World Bank (Bruns, Evans, and Luque 2012), reveals that
Brazil has implemented coherent and innovative reforms that have started
addressing the underlying causes of poor education in ways that promise
significant long- term changes. The reforms have targeted several differ-
ent dimensions of the educational system and at several different levels—
federal, state, and municipal. Funding, which is constitutionally hardwired,
is high by world standards, but, more importantly, the productivity of the
5 The sources of the indexes mentioned in this paragraph are: “Soundness of Banks”
(World Economic Forum, Executive Opinion Survey 2008, 2009); SCImago Journal and
Country Rank (http://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php); ActionAid (2010); and
“Who’s Really Fighting Hunger?” (The Hague: ActionAid International, http://www
.actionaid.org.uk/doc_lib/hungerfree_scorecard.pdf).

Introduction • 11
expenditures has improved and become more equitable. The government
created several new funds to assure resources for different educational
purposes: they increased teacher salaries, especially in the poorer regions,
and emphasized better training for teachers; government- mandated local
education councils increased community participation; conditional cash
transfers have been extremely successful and have been expanded to cover
more than 11 million families, contributing to reduced absenteeism, rep-
etition, and child labor; and completion rates also improved. With school
attendance now nearly universal, Brazil has directed efforts to increase
the length of the school day and the school year. Brazil also extended the
number of years in the curriculum to twelve. This additional temporal
information not only provides a much more complete and informative
picture than a lone indicator but may temper or even invert an analyst’s
assessment of the state of education in Brazil.
The areas where improvement has been the clearest and most im-
pressive are poverty and inequality reduction. From 1990 to 2009, ap-
proximately 60 percent of Brazilians moved to a higher economic group,
and extreme poverty was practically eliminated. Only 4 percent remain
in poverty in 2013 (Báez et al. 2015). The World Bank report Shared
Prosperity and Poverty Eradication in Latin America and the Caribbean
places Brazil as the country with the greatest improvement in poverty
reduction in the region, home to “one in every two people who escaped
poverty in the Latin America and Caribbean region during the period”
(Báez et al. 2015: 65). Since the mid- 1990s, the Gini coefficient of income
inequality has been steadily declining, leading that index to uncharted
territory in a country that has always been one of the most unequal in
the world. This has taken place during a period in which, worldwide,
inequality within countries has been on the rise. As a result of these im-
provements, the structure of society has changed with a perceptibly larger
middle class and upper class, which has meant greater access to markets
for goods and services, including public services such as education and
health, and greater participation in national affairs, all of which should
work to reinforce these trends. While the World Bank report attributes
the improvements to stable growth since 2001, stronger policy focus on
poverty, and the dynamics of the labor market (Báez et al. 2015: 65– 66),
these are merely proximate causes. The deeper determinants are the be-
liefs that produced the institutions that underlie those proximate causes.
As with the case of education, the level of poverty and inequality in Brazil
is still unsatisfactory, and much improvement is necessary in the future;
nevertheless, the magnitude of change and the concerted way in which it
has been achieved are highly relevant.
Still, identifying development is more difficult than simply looking at
different indicators over time. A profound process of reform may have

12 • Chapter 1
been initiated with no discernible effect yet apparent. The impact of re-
form may materialize with a hard- to- quantify lag during which policies,
programs, and new ways of doing things have been implemented and yet
no results have emerged. In some cases, things might even get worse be-
fore they get better. In other cases, some indicators might never improve
or even get permanently worse, and this might still be accommodated
within a successful process of development. To see this, note that even
highly advanced nations fare badly along some dimensions or others:
Italy was 69th out of 182 in the 2010 CPI (Transparency International);
the United States had the highest prisoner population per 100,000 people
in 2007 and was 29th out of 223 countries in prevalence of diabetes in
2010; the United Kingdom fared fourth lowest in a Privacy Index rank-
ing of 48 countries in 2007; and Belgium was 57th out of 149 in the
Environmental Performance Index.
6
The upshot of this discussion is that
although indexes and rankings may be useful to categorize highly dys-
functional or highly successful countries, they may be less precise to dis-
tinguish between countries that are transitioning to development from
those that are going through a cyclical good or a bad period.
If not indexes, what evidence can we provide to support the choice
of Brazil to illustrate our approach to development? A large literature
consolidated in the past two decades argues that institutions, rather than
geography, culture, policies, or luck, are the fundamental cause of long-
term growth (North 1990, 2005; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006, 2012;
Engerman and Sokoloff 2000; Eggertsson 2005; Greif 2006; North, Wal-
lis, and Weingast 2009; and Rodrik, Subramanian, and Trebbi 2004,
among many others). If we are correct that Brazil is on the path to a more
prosperous level of economic and political development, then we should
be able to provide an argument where changing institutions must play a
central role. It is necessary that we show that a dramatic transformation
has taken place in the country’s institutions between the previous history
of boom and busts to the current period that we identify as a transition
to a new order.
Further, we go beyond simply chronicling the change in institutions,
and propose (chapter 2) a framework to understand the changes that
transpired. We give a general interpretation of the changes in Brazil
(chapter 2) and a detailed analysis of recent Brazilian history, also based
6 The sources of the indexes mentioned in this paragraph are: Corruption Perceptions
Index (http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2011/); Prison Population (International Center for
Policy Studies, cited in http://www.allcountries.org/ranks/prison_incarceration_rates_of
_countries_2007.html); Diabetes Atlas (International Diabetes Federation, http://www.idf
.org/diabetesatlas/); Privacy Index (Privacy International, https://www.privacyinternational
.org/); and Environmental Performance Index (Yale University, cited in http://www.photius
.com/rankings/environmental_performance_index_2008.html).

Introduction • 13
on the framework (chapters 3– 6). Here, our goal is to convince the reader
that something truly remarkable is taking place in Brazil.
While it might seem obvious that things have improved since the
1980s in Brazil, our claim is much bolder. Not only have outcomes
changed— for example, inflation is under control, and the external debt
is lower than international reserves, inter alia— but more importantly,
institutions, beliefs, and those in power have also changed because the
process of development has changed. This is a much more controversial
position. Despite occasional glowing endorsements, like pieces on Brazil
in the Economist (2009), the New Yorker (Lemann 2011), and Spiegel
(Follath and Gluesing 2012), the more typical position is of sharp skepti-
cism about the Brazilian economy’s prospects. An emblematic example of
this point of view is the book Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next
Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma of Morgan Stanley:
While in recent years Brazil has been widely touted as a rising regional
superpower, on the relevant fundamentals Brazil is the anti- China, a
nation that invested in the premature construction of a welfare state
rather than the roads and wireless networks of a modern industrial
economy. Nations that have grown dependent on booming prices for
raw materials such as oil and precious metals— namely, Russia and
Brazil— face a hard decade ahead. (Sharma 2012: 10)
Sharma (2012: 64) predicts that countries like India, South Korea, and
Thailand “are the real or potential breakout nations, while Brazil is not.”
Like Sharma, the Economist (2013) now casts a gloomier forecast
consistent with our view that much of the content of the media is noise
based on assessments of recent policies and outcomes rather than the
deeper and more stable fundamental determinants, the changes in be-
liefs and institutions. Sharma (2012), for example, puts much weight on
the overvalued exchange rate in Brazil and on the poor state of infra-
structure as part of his argument for why Brazil will not be a “breakout
nation.” Admittedly, these are important variables that seriously impact
Brazilian development. Yet they are outcomes that, to a large extent, are
deliberate consequences of policies. Analysts frequently act as if coun-
tries did not face budget or political constraints. For example, there has
been considerable criticism that Brazil neglected to sufficiently invest
in infrastructure. But, what is the opportunity cost? Which will yield a
higher rate of return: infrastructure or education? Brazil chose education
as noted above.
Without a clear understanding of why Brazil took decisions and ac-
tions that led to outcomes, one does not have the full picture of the trade-
offs. To have this understanding, it is necessary to posit the constraints
and incentives faced by all the relevant players. The major determinants

14 • Chapter 1
of the incentives and constraints are beliefs and institutions, which is why
these concepts are central to our framework in chapters 2 and 7.
This means that to show that Brazil is in the midst of a dramatic trans-
formation, we cannot rely on a list of outcomes or policies. Instead, we
need to show evidence that both institutions and beliefs have changed in
such a way that the content and timing of their change coincides with
the switch from dysfunctional policies and poor outcomes of the past to
improved, albeit still imperfect, policies and outcomes of the present. The
advantage of analyzing a single country in great detail, as opposed to a
sample of countries with more generality, is that we can be very explicit
about the specific institutions and beliefs and how they change. More-
over, Brazil is an important world economic and political player.
We focus on the beliefs— the mental constructs mapping institutions
onto outcomes— that motivated the choice of institutions. There are two
sets of beliefs that have been the driving force of the process of change
in Brazil since 1985. The first is a belief in social inclusion that arose as a
reaction to the oppressive experience under military dictatorship and the
inequalities and injustice inherited from the country’s history. The sec-
ond is an aversion to inflation born from the traumatic experience under
hyperinflationary years of 1985 to 1994. Together, these two separate
strands form a belief in fiscally sound social inclusion that constrains and
influences the choice of institutions by the dominant coalition, thereby
crucially affecting the selection of policies and the incentives influenc-
ing outcomes. It might seem that the beliefs we identified for Brazil are
arbitrary and unfounded. After all, many countries had traumatic expe-
riences with authoritarianism and monetary instability, and there is no
indication that such experience inevitably leads to the sort of beliefs we
attribute to Brazil. These beliefs are mental models about how the world
works and are not reducible to preferences or values. In chapter 2, we
elaborate on the beliefs and provide evidence that there has been a sharp
change in beliefs in Brazil in the past three decades.
A Sketch of the Conceptual Framework
Institutions matter for economic development. This statement has now
become part of mainstream economics. Alone, understanding the impor-
tance of institutions is insufficient for understanding economic and po-
litical development because there is no recipe for institutional change.
Institutional change is highly contextual to time and place. All coun-
tries have to find their own way to develop. Most countries are more or
less in an autopilot mode where institutions change on the margin, but
there are generally not fundamental changes in institutions followed by

Introduction • 15
institutional deepening. Why? Typically, those in power structure the for-
mal rules of the game in a manner to produce outcomes that are in their
economic and political interests. For those in power, there are rents from
a stable status quo where not much changes. Citizens, as well, become
accustomed to the status quo, and there are few gains and, at times, high
costs to rocking the boat.
Yet, there are some countries that break away from their autopilot
mode and move toward a more virtuous trajectory, implementing institu-
tional changes that lead to sustained economic and political development.
We seek to better understand what undergirds institutional change. To do
so, we need to better understand the role of beliefs and tie them to in-
stitutional change (Eggertsson 2005; North 2005; Greif 2006). If beliefs
are the key to understanding institutional change, we need to understand
what leads to changes in beliefs, especially among those in the dominant
network of power that structures institutions. Beliefs are generally quite
stable because most economic and political outcomes are at the mar-
gin. But, at times, economic and political outcomes diverge considerably
from what those in the dominant network expected. When this happens,
we call it a window of opportunity for institutional change because the
power ful actors may have changed, bringing with them different beliefs,
or the beliefs of those in power change. During windows of opportunity,
the beliefs of those in power as well as among the citizens become mal-
leable. “Outcomes are not normal, what is going on?”
During windows of opportunity, beliefs are up for grabs to some ex-
tent, but often not much happens because no one seizes the opportu-
nity. During these times, we see leadership playing a role to circumvent
the free- rider problem. We are not proposing a “great men make his-
tory” view of beliefs and institutional change but, rather, that leaders
are shaped by the context of the situation. A leader senses and acts on
the major anxiety facing a society. Leaders take the pulse of citizens and
act on it. Leadership entails cognition (understanding the problem fac-
ing society), coordination (getting others in power to “give it a go”), and
moral authority (citizens trusting in leaders’ motives to try to do the right
thing).
7
In Brazil, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso came to power
with some moral authority because of his political exile during the mili-
tary regime in Brazil. In addition, Cardoso, both as an academic profes-
sor as well as a political figure (he was a former senator and played a
key role during the Constituent Assembly), developed a reputation for
knowledge and leadership. Naturally, leaders can and do act selfishly,
but we are interested in leaders who act for the betterment of society and
how they will be viewed historically.
7 See Riker (1996) on leadership and coordination, and Greif (2012) on moral authority.

16 • Chapter 1
Windows of opportunity are seemingly quite frequent, but the com-
bination of windows of opportunity with the right leaders with beliefs
that foster institutions that increase economic and political development
is rare. This is why most countries remain in a cycle of more or less the
status quo, where people see only marginal changes during their lifetimes.
Our framework— only sketched out here in general terms, but developed
more thoroughly in chapters 2 and 7— helps us to better understand both
institutional persistence and institutional change. It allows us to better
understand transitions from one relatively stable process of institutional
change on the margin to a new set of beliefs with a similar dynamic,
but with a significantly different set of institutions and outcomes. Un-
derstanding the concepts behind transitions is the key to understanding
why some countries make the “critical transition.” In our analysis, we
stress the process of economic and political development more so than
the short- run variations in economic growth or seemingly political com-
petition. Achieving a truly open society takes decades (North, Wallis, and
Weingast 2009).
Analytical Narratives and Economic Development
This book is about understanding the developmental path of Brazil,
which we hold up as a country that has embarked toward a critical tran-
sition. This claim derives not from a mechanical extrapolation of the past
but rather is based on a framework that stresses windows of opportunity,
beliefs, and leadership. This section discusses some epistemological is-
sues related to the kind of evidence that we present. Because there will
always be ambiguities whether a given country is making a transition or
is merely experiencing a transient period of growth, no use of the data
can make a definitive case one way or the other. Any judgment will neces-
sarily be inductive rather than deductive.
This difficulty of judging the evidence is not exclusive to the setting
being considered here; rather, it is common to a broad set of scientific in-
quiries. Whenever direct evidence is not available to test a given hypoth-
esis, it is still possible to rely on circumstantial evidence. This involves
showing that certain events or circumstances that are often associated
with that hypothesis have taken place so that one can then infer, with a
given probability, that the hypothesis should not be rejected. The quality
of that inference will depend of course on the strength of the link between
the circumstantial evidence and the hypothesis. The greater the amount
of circumstantial evidence and the stronger the link between each strand
of that evidence and the hypothesis, the stronger will be the case that is
being made. Fogel (1982) argues that areas like economic history, like

Introduction • 17
many court cases, often have no choice but to rely on circumstantial
evidence.
Brazil has been going through a remarkable transformation in which
the fundamental roles of windows of opportunity, beliefs, institutions,
and leadership can be clearly identified. The transformation will eventu-
ally lead to a critical transition for Brazil across the gap to join the select
group of developed nations. It is important to make it as clear as possible
what we are and what we are not saying. In particular, it is important
to distinguish what we claim from what we predict. The claims involve
things that have already happened, can be expressed in greater detail, and
can be confronted with evidence. The predictions, on the other hand, are
of a very different nature. Inevitably, they are a guess of what we think
will happen in the future. All predictions have an element of hubris, yet
the level of epistemological arrogance depends on various elements of the
prediction (Taleb 2010). The first is the time span and the level of detail
of the prediction. The further into the future and the more specific the
prediction, the less reliable it will be. The second is the underlying process
on which the prediction was based.
So, what exactly are our claims and predictions about Brazilian de-
velopment, and how can they be assessed? Consider first the claims. In
the last three decades, new beliefs have taken hold that wed social inclu-
sion to fiscal and monetary orthodoxy. The beliefs affected formal and
informal institutions that in turn have led to many positive outcomes.
We are not saying that the transformation is all encompassing, that it is
complete, or that it has not in the process also produced distortions and
waste. It is not enough to produce evidence of inefficiencies and dysfunc-
tional behavior to refute our claims. The access to economic and political
markets has made Brazil a fundamentally more inclusive society than
it has ever been. The unprecedented recent fall in inequality and pov-
erty and the growth of the middle class are evidence for our claims. The
changes are also extending to more inclusion in education, less tolerance
for corruption, and greater respect for the rule of law.
Simply put, we predict that Brazil will establish institutions that lead
to stable economic rates of growth and increasingly less dysfunctional
politics and corruption. Sustaining this path will enable Brazil to transi-
tion from the lower- growth to the higher- growth groups of countries in
the world. This prediction is based on the framework we present in chap-
ters 2 and 7. The framework emphasizes the role of beliefs and institu-
tions in determining economic and political outcomes (as well as the role
of windows of opportunity and leadership in determining which beliefs
and institutions emerge). The beliefs foster institutions pushing Brazil
in the direction of outcomes such as lower inequality, lower poverty, a
bigger middle class, more competitive economic and political markets,

18 • Chapter 1
impersonality, and rule of law. Myriad distortions, inequalities, and in-
efficiencies accompany the process of what we term “dissipative inclu-
sion.” But, dissipation does not cancel out the transformative nature of
the changes.
Much of the recent literature on redistribution and growth has come
to accept that redistribution, and thus inclusion, often have a positive
effect on growth (P. Lindert 2003; Perotti 1995; Bénabou 2002; East-
erly and Rebelo 1993; Sala- i- Martin 1997; Saint Paul and Verdier 1996;
Aghion and Bolton 1997; Galor, Moav, and Vollrath 2009; Engerman
and Sokoloff 2000; Galor 2011; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006, 2012;
North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009). If the predictions fail to materialize,
we can then assess whether they failed because the inclusion did not re-
ally take place in Brazil or because the notion that inclusion translates
into growth is wrong.
Our prediction has relatively large confidence intervals (low episte-
mological arrogance), as we are vague on timing and details. We are not
venturing to predict exactly how the transition will happen, except that
it will be driven by the beliefs in fiscally sound social inclusion. We are
not predicting which sectors/areas/domains will improve and which will
remain mired in inefficiencies, nor how fast or smoothly the transition
proceeds. We do not predict these details because neither the framework
nor the literature provides a basis for making such inferences. The lack of
detail does not make the prediction less striking or controversial.
Finally, our analysis is in no way an endorsement of whatever party
or president was, is, or may come to be in power. Similarly, we do not
endorse or criticize any specific current policy or program, as our justi-
fication for expecting Brazil to thrive is not based on the analysis at this
level. Instead, in our framework the main determinant of outcomes are
institutions, which in turn are determined by beliefs. Although we are
very explicit about which beliefs and institutions are responsible for the
fundamental changes in Brazil, we understand that there is an infinite
number of specific policies, programs, and other manifestations through
which these beliefs and institutions can lead to change. We have no way
of telling whether the specific set of government efforts that have mate-
rialized are the best path to economic growth. In fact, given the messy
nature of politics and the complexity of the task, it is quite likely that
the observed policies are probably not the best that could be done and
may often be counterproductive. What we do expect, however, is that
the beliefs and institutions are such that there will be forces that push
for those policies and programs to be eventually revised as they prove
to be mistaken. Whereas in many countries institutions are such that in-
efficiencies may be there by design, as they suit the ruling elite, we see
Brazilian institutions as providing the incentives and the means for the

Introduction • 19
inefficiencies to be continually, though imperfectly, transacted away in
political markets. Like cointegrated variables that may stray apart but
are always eventually pulled back together, our view does not require
that government policy be always efficient and in line with the beliefs in
fiscally sound inclusion. We do expect, however, that there will be forces
to pull them back toward those beliefs.
A careful reading of our application of the framework makes it clear
that our analysis is not a stamp of approval (or disapproval) of current
governments or policies. We identify the period during and closely after
the Real Plan in 1994 as a window of opportunity in which a crucial
role was played by leadership, which initiated institutional changes
and sustained institutional deepening, moving Brazil toward a critical
transition. This was an occasion where individuals mattered. But since
then— including the second term of Cardoso, the two terms of Luiz Iná-
cio “Lula” da Silva, and the first term of Dilma Rousseff— we see less of
a role for leadership. The framework is such that except during windows
of opportunity, there is little scope for leadership, and the country is on
autopilot. Of course, each specific dominant network is able to affect the
details and imprint its own style, but the essence and general direction are
ultimately determined by beliefs and institutions.
Road Map for the Book
A large part of the evidence consists of analytical narratives in which we
use both quantitative and qualitative evidence to provide support for the
application of our concepts to historical periods in the last fifty years of
Brazilian history. Analytical narratives are much more nuanced than run-
ning a regression from which the scholar interprets causation because of
a “significant” coefficient.
8
With analytical narratives, there are not sig-
nificant coefficients, but there is considerable evidence, much of which is
independent and as a result can be very convincing. As in courts of law or
in medical diagnoses, the plethora of circumstantial evidence can make a
compelling case for guilt or innocence, or for the course of medical treat-
ments. In chapter 2, we lay out a brief conceptual dynamic to interpret
the past fifty years in Brazil. We developed the framework to understand
Brazilian development, though we believe it can also aid the understand-
ing of development elsewhere, particularly in Latin America. Our frame-
work rests on tying together the key concepts of windows of opportunity,
8 We recognize that not all scholars use regression analysis so naively, and indeed, regres-
sion results are useful evidence when viewed along with qualitative evidence, making the
results more convincing.

20 • Chapter 1
beliefs, dominant network, leadership, institutions, and outcomes. It is
the dynamics of the concepts that led to institutional change in Brazil and
in turn a new trajectory. We then discuss the important dominant net-
works in power, along with their beliefs, in four periods: 1964– 1984 (the
military years); 1985– 1993 (the early years back to democracy); 1993–
2002 (Cardoso years); and 2002– 2014 (the Lula and Dilma years). Here
we give an overview of the fifty years.
We delve into the details of the development of Brazil over fifty years
starting, in chapter 3, with the military government. The belief in “devel-
opmentalism” motivated the institutions put in place by the military re-
gime. Developmentalism rested on top- down technocratic planning and
was a coalition between the military and the business community, both
domestic and foreign. Import substitution policies along with state- led
industrialization brought economic growth in the late 1960s and into
the mid- 1970s. Economic growth resulted essentially because the military
regime solved a coordination problem for business. Given the low level of
GDP in Brazil at the time, there was low- hanging fruit to be reaped with
planning. But, the Brazilian miracle of the late 1960s and early 1970s
began to sputter out, and, moreover, political rights became more con-
strained. The threat of torture was present; censorship was dominant;
and a considerable number of people left the country. The years of cen-
sorship and a closed political system sowed the seeds for a more open po-
litical order. Above all, the failure of the expansionist strategy of growth
through import substitution accompanied by inflation and external debt
became self- evident. Citizens also began to blame the government for
not reducing economic and social inequality. The dominant belief that
economic growth should precede social inclusion started losing political
support.
In chapter 4, we discuss the factors, especially changing beliefs, that
led to redemocratization and the subsequent institutional changes during
the years 1985– 1993. After the military government, the middle class
demanded more inclusion in the political arena. To a certain extent, this
happened with multiple parties, and only one claiming to be a right- wing
party. Unexpectedly, the franchise was given to illiterates seemingly be-
cause the belief in social inclusion warranted it; the illiterates were not in
the streets clamoring for the vote. The granting of the franchise to illiter-
ates had few short- term, but many long- run, consequences. The business
sector was less open than the political sector, with the initial maintenance
of import substitution programs. Business was still in the hands of elites
with lots of regulations as well as ways to avoid regulations— for a price.
We explore the role of the Constitution of 1988 in the critical transi-
tion process. We make four points about what we call a decade- long
“constitutional moment.” The first is that the constitution embraced

Introduction • 21
the set of beliefs in Brazilian democracy, which evolved out of the fight
against military rule. We view the constitution as both a crystallization of
beliefs and a focal point for policy. By playing these roles, it legitimized
procedure over substance, which is an essential part of democratic life.
The “constitutional moment” created a consensus by Brazilian “elites”
on the importance of social inclusion with fiscal sustainability, on the one
hand, and powerful presidents operating in a constrained institutional
environment, on the other.
Second, the Constitution of 1988 redesigned in fundamental ways
the country’s social contract. Reflecting the change in beliefs, the con-
stitution stipulated new foundations for public policies to incorporate
inclusion and redistribution. Third, the constitution vested the presidency
with great powers while also strengthening the judicial and the legislative
branches. Fortifying the presidency reflected a deep- rooted concern of
the elites; these enhanced executive powers, in turn, were to operate in a
constrained institutional space. The constitutional process was markedly
erratic, underscoring the uncertainties surrounding a transition period.
The consensus around the rights constitution— the provisions pertaining
to social rights, individual liberties, and rule of law— persisted through-
out the constitutional process. Nonetheless, the economic and fiscal con-
stitution was subsequently extensively amended. A core set of beliefs,
however, has not changed, and they relate to rights, checks and balances,
and a powerful presidency. It took years of experimentation for the rec-
ognition that changes to the constitution and policy had to be made, but
ultimately it became apparent that unbounded inclusion was not fiscally
sustainable.
The period 1985– 1993 witnessed several hyperinflations akin to those
in Germany during the 1920s. It presented the right leader with a window
of opportunity to put Brazil on a new trajectory, at least fiscally. Cardoso
seized the window of opportunity (chapter 5), first as the finance minister
and later as president. His leadership was not solely top- down; rather, the
Cardoso team coordinated other organizations and citizens to buy into
the Plano Real. In chapter 5, we make three fundamental points. First,
Brazil entered into a virtuous path toward a critical transition, which was
not inevitable. The outcome was a contingent process shaped by an array
of factors. Many alternative coalitions could have emerged with very dif-
ferent outcomes. Actors faced high uncertainty and looked backward in
a problem- solving fashion, but also looked forward toward the necessary
institutional deepening.
Second, to quell inflation entailed up- front costs and coordination
problems that required leadership. Later, at the end of the second term
of President Cardoso, Brazilian society had adopted a belief in strong
inflation aversion, maintaining the belief in inclusion. That is, social

22 • Chapter 1
inclusion would still be given priority as long as it was fiscally sound.
Once society internalized the new beliefs, leadership was no longer criti-
cal, and the institutional dynamics and deepening entered an autopilot
mode. Third, new economic and political actors developed a stake in
the reform process and formed a constituency that did not exist before:
firms redeployed their assets in new profitable ways (as opposed to rent
seeking) and politicians increasingly voted for public goods. In addition,
citizens as consumers updated their beliefs in the benefits of liberalization
and price stability.
In chapter 6, we discuss institutional deepening and the subsequent
economic and political outcomes in the two terms of Lula and first term
of Dilma. We also advance three main arguments. First, markets, as evi-
denced by exchange rate movements, did not anticipate the smooth po-
litical transition process from Cardoso to Lula. High uncertainty about a
Lula presidency was the norm. After the initial shock resulting from the
electoral results, Lula drastically reduced uncertainty by providing credible
evidence that his administration would not abandon fiscal and monetary
orthodoxy. Second, the new beliefs and institutions (e.g., constitutional
constraints that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s) effectively constrained
political and economic elites in their interaction, thereby enabling com-
petitive processes in the political and economic arenas. The established
political institutions locked- in and reinforced the direction of change by
affecting the incentives facing individuals, organizations, and politicians.
The functioning of these economic and political institutions largely
explains policy continuity in key areas such as macroeconomic manage-
ment. But they ultimately reflected the new beliefs emerging out of the
transition process and the Cardoso era. Unlike the Cardoso years, how-
ever, developments in the economic and social realms entered an autopi-
lot mode. Indeed, there was no necessity for the exercise of leadership:
institutional change took place essentially at the margin and within the
prevailing bands of the new status quo of beliefs. In other words, out-
comes matched expectations, and rents started to move toward a “nor-
mal” form— that is, away from the prevailing mechanisms based on con-
trol of political property- rights mechanisms.
Lula was a highly charismatic figure who exercised strong personal
leadership in the conventional meaning of the expression, but not a leader
as defined in chapter 2. Not only did he come from the largest opposition
party— the Workers’ Party (PT)— he was also the first nonelite politician
to hold the chief executive post in the country, and one of the few ever to
do so in Latin America. At the most general level, this was highly signifi-
cant for the new era of inclusive politics.
Third, social redistribution was intensified in the wake of the new so-
cial contract that emerged from the change in beliefs in the 1980s and

Introduction • 23
1990s. However, there was no discontinuity in social policy: old pro-
grams were scaled up rather than dismantled or created ex nihilo. Unlike
the 1985– 1993 period of populist inclusion, the new redistribution was
to occur within the constraints of macroeconomic policy.
The continuity of beliefs, institutions, and even policies does not mean
that the process was smooth nor that the new government did not seek to
imprint its own vision of where the country should go. Rather, the extant
beliefs and institutions contain forces that pull policies and behaviors
back to a set of bounds compatible with beliefs. Although Lula and Dilma
continually tested the bounds and even crossed them on occasions, the
country stayed on track. It makes development markedly messy and often
disordered. We call the process “dissipative inclusion.” Because inclusion-
ary policies naturally redistribute, there will almost always be losers who
will resist and oppose those policies. This resistance may or may not be
sufficient to stop the redistribution, but in either case, it means that many
of the rents dissipate and obvious inefficiencies emerge. The upshot is
that the push for greater social inclusion is full of distortions.
In chapter 7, we flesh out an inductive framework for understanding
stasis and critical transitions. We developed the framework with a lens
on Brazil, but it has more general applicability that we illustrate with a
brief application to Argentina. In the final concluding chapter, we offer
some conjectures about the future of Brazil, especially in light of recent
declarations that the Brazilian miracle has vanished once again.

CHAPTER 2
A Conceptual Dynamic for
Understanding Development
Beliefs, Leadership, Dominant Network,
and Windows of Opportunity
Brazil is well on the way to transitioning to a society whose hallmarks
consist of four pillars: (1) powerful organizations in society agree to play
by the rules (e.g., the constitution and other formal laws), (2) politics
are competitive and transparent, (3) those in power and citizens have
a strong preference for macroeconomic stability, and (4) economic out-
comes should be “fair”; that is, a critical role of the state is to assist inclu-
sion through redistribution and quotas. In the subsequent chapters, we
chronicle the transition with evidence. But, evidence needs interpretation.
The tools of interpretation for analytical narratives are a set of concepts
that yield a dynamic framework. We developed our framework induc-
tively by studying the Brazilian historical experience. In this section, we
sketch the concepts of the framework along with the dynamic that we use
to interpret the narrative in chapters 3– 6.
No society starts a transition in a historical vacuum. At any time, there
are a group of organizations that, collectively, have political power and
influence over changing the formal laws in a society.
1
We call the orga-
nizations in power the dominant network, which stresses the multitude
of relationships among those in power.
2
Those in the network have a
stake in sustaining it in order to maintain their rents, which can be eco-
nomic, political, or reputational. The dominant network in Brazil always
includes the executive branch and certain business organizations. Other
organizations have exited and entered at various times.
Actors in organizations in the dominant network have a subjective
view of the way institutions will affect outcomes (North 2005). Institu-
tions include rules and norms along with their enforcement mechanisms
and, as such, provide an incentive for behavior (Alston, Mueller, and
1 By organization, we mean a collection of individuals who share a goal or set of goals.
These include business corporations, whether state- owned, private, or a mix; trade unions;
the Catholic Church; the judiciary; the legislature; and numerous other groups.
2 We borrow the term “dominant network” from Wallis (2014).

Understanding Development • 25
Nonnenmacher forthcoming). We label the set of perceived impacts of
formal laws (a subset of institutions) on outcomes as core beliefs (Greif
2006; Schofield 2006).
3
The beliefs about how the world works guide the
choices of the dominant network over which institutions to put in place
to most likely get their desired outcomes. In equilibrium, institutions
must be consistent with the beliefs of those in the dominant network
and in representative democracies with the majority of citizens. Different
organizations have differing interests and preferences, but most of the
time their beliefs about the impact of laws on outcomes are relatively
consistent. Which laws will be chosen depends on the relative bargaining
power of the organizations and side payments that they make among
the network. But, when shocks hit a society, beliefs of some of the actors
become malleable.
To understand the transition of Brazil, we need to understand which
shocks called into question the core beliefs of some in the dominant net-
work. Shocks can also cause exit or entry from the dominant network.
Shocks shake core beliefs when outcomes differ dramatically from expec-
tations. We call such moments windows of opportunity. Beliefs become
malleable, and there is a coordination problem among those in the domi-
nant network about which new laws to pass/impose. Windows of oppor-
tunity present a role for leadership.
4
By leadership, we mean that certain
individuals at certain moments in a country’s history make a difference
because of their actions. The fact that history is replete with the mention
of individuals lends considerable anecdotal weight and circumstantial
evidence to the argument that certain individuals did make a difference.
Leadership comprises several concepts that are not mutually exclusive:
(1) cognition; (2) heresthetics or coordination (strategic manipulation);
and (3) moral authority.
5
First, leaders must be aware that a window of
opportunity exists. In addition, they must know how to take advantage
of the window of opportunity. Cognition entails being able to address
two questions: What is the problem or opportunity that we face? How
can we solve the problem or take advantage of the situation? Leaders
never act alone; it is the orchestration or coordination of other powerful
3 Greif (2006) has analyzed the role of beliefs and institutions in detail in a deductive
game- theoretic fashion. Similarly, Schofield (2006) argues that most of the time, societies
operate on a “core” set of beliefs, but during “constitutional quandaries” core beliefs
become fragile. It is the fragile moments that enable societies to change their trajectories.
4 We thank Avner Greif, Patrick François, and Barry Weingast for discussions on the roles
of leadership and beliefs. For an excellent analytical survey of recent contributions to lit-
erature on leadership, see Ahlquist and Levi (2011). In chapter 7, we elaborate on the role
of leadership, and contributions of others on influencing our framework.
5 We elaborate in chapter 7. See Greif (2012, esp. chap. 3) for the leadership roles of cog-
nition, moral authority, and coordination. See Riker (1986) on heresthetics.

26 • Chapter 2
organizations in the network that allows initial change to take place.
Some leaders have moral authority either because of their past or because
they earned it. Moral authority gives leaders more influence, which in
turn induces others in the dominant network (as well as the public) to
trust their motives, which may lead more readily to accepting new be-
liefs during windows of opportunity. Belief changes lead to institutional
changes, but it is equally important for the initial institutional changes
to be followed by institutional deepening. Through iterative changes in
outcomes, institutional deepening solidifies core beliefs. It also solidifies
the dominant network because when institutional changes produce out-
comes that benefit extant organizations or create new organizations that
win, the beneficiary organizations now have a stake in sustaining and
deepening the new institutions and play by the rules established by the
institutions.
When outcomes match expectations, we will see only marginal changes
in laws. Societies are more or less on autopilot, as depicted at the bottom
of figure 2.1 (and in greater detail in chapter 7).
6
This does not mean that
laws do not change, but rather that they change on the margin, which
reflects marginal changes in the dominant network. An exogenous or
endogenous shock to the economic and political autopilot can open a
window of opportunity for significant changes in underlying beliefs and
institutions. A shock, indicated by the box at the bottom left of figure
2.1, occurs when observed outcomes diverge dramatically from expected
outcomes. The shock emanates from a host of factors (e.g., the threat of
invasion by another country, or an economic or natural disaster).
7
Dur-
ing such moments, there is a role for leaders, who take advantage of the
shock to shape underlying beliefs and constitutional- level institutions. By
constitutional- level institutions, we mean both constitutions but also cer-
tain laws that fundamentally change incentives. In the United States, we
consider the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) as
constitutional- level institutions in that they were not marginal changes in
legislation. However, in the event that leaders do not step forward to take
advantage of the windows of opportunity, the moment can pass without
any change in beliefs or fundamental institutions. Members of the domi-
nant network regroup and make marginal placating changes.
6 We acknowledge the input of Tomas Nonnenmacher in composing figure 2.1, a variant
of which is contained in Alston, Mueller, and Nonnenmacher (forthcoming).
7 In chapter 7, we consider “tipping points” that result from long endogenous changes.
Tipping points still require leadership to coordinate beliefs among the dominant network.
Street protests in the twenty- first century have not led to dramatic changes in the domi-
nant network in part because no leader embraced them, for example, both the “Arab
Spring” and the “Occupy Wall Street” movements lacked leadership to coordinate actions.

Understanding Development • 27
In chapter 5, we analyze Brazil’s “constitutional moment” as a specific
example of a window of opportunity and the interplay among leader-
ship, belief structures, and the changing organizations in the dominant
network. At constitutional moments, the organizations revamp the rules
under which political and economic organizations interact and contract.
This process begins with the autopilot at the bottom of figure 2.1, which
is instigated by a shock to the system that creates a window of opportu-
nity, which prompts a leader (at times) to shape beliefs of the dominant
network in such a way as to generate constitutional change. As such, the
process can be thought of as a single loop beginning with the “business as
usual” and ending with a constitutional- level institutional change.
One loop is not sufficient to change societies. Deep changes in eco-
nomic and political trajectories entail more than a single “constitutional
moment.” They require reinforcing institutional changes to alter and
solidify core beliefs. The institutional deepening requires multiple loops
around the circuit to shape and solidify beliefs among the dominant net-
work. Institutional deepening is an endogenous interactive process entail-
ing legislation that supports and deepens the belief change set in motion
Figure 2.1. Autopilot and critical transitions
BELIEFS
Dominant Network
Constitutional-
Level Institutions
Laws and
Enforcement
Incremental Change
Economic and
Political
Outcomes
Leadership?
Window of
Opportunity
Shock to
System
Auto-
pilot

28 • Chapter 2
by the constitutional moment. The process ends in a “new autopilot,”
in which core beliefs are again in alignment with the outcomes of the
economic and political systems. During the process, citizens also update
their beliefs as the new institutions produce new outcomes that change
the beliefs of citizens about the actions of the dominant network.
Difference in Difference in Changing Beliefs
The key force pushing Brazil toward making the critical transition are the
beliefs that led it to adopt the enabling institutions and policies. We first
show evidence that beliefs have changed over the period considered. A
problem with basing a theory on beliefs is that they cannot be measured
or quantified in any perfectly rigorous way. Nevertheless, we provide here
some quantitative evidence that beliefs have changed considerably over
the relevant period of time.
A Brazilian who entered into a coma in the early 1980s and awoke
today would be massively surprised at the changes the country has been
through. Some of the most surprising changes would involve problems
that had previously seemed insurmountable and out of hand, but were
now under control, such as inflation and the dreaded external debt. Even
if the end of the dictatorship could have been surmised in the early 1980s,
the extent to which democracy, openness, and participation have taken
root would certainly cause an impression. Perhaps the most surprising
development would be the unprecedented fall in inequality that has in-
corporated previously excluded masses into markets for all sorts of goods
and services, such as durable goods and air travel. Events that no longer
stir surprise in the citizenry today would be hard to believe at first, such
as a common worker becoming president, and politicians serving time in
jail. Many more subtle changes would be comprehended in time, such as
the larger involvement in world trade and the smaller direct participation
of the state in the economy. But all these changes would soon be assimi-
lated as they are easy to perceive. Some other changes, however, would
not be that salient, as they are behavioral, including perceptions, atti-
tudes, and ultimately beliefs. Eventually, the former coma patient would
realize the greater adherence to rules. Even today, Brazil sees itself as a
place where many laws stay only on paper, but we suspect that a seri-
ous attempt to quantify this would find renewed levels of deference and
conformity. Similarly, the notion of the jeitinho brasiliero— the Brazil-
ian way of doing things by circumventing rules and conventions— would
probably be found to crop up less and less in daily life and discourse. As
would the need for despachantes— hired intermediaries and bureaucratic
fixers— to obtain official documents. Certainly, it has become very rare

Understanding Development • 29
to see the old habit of authorities and their relatives gaining access by
stating “Do you know who you are talking to?” (DaMatta 1991). If you
asked a Brazilian if any of these changes had taken place, we suspect that
the answer would be no, but the former coma patient through his or her
unique before- and- after perspective would perceive the differences.
Confronted with such a remarkable transformative process, the ques-
tion that naturally arises is: what put Brazil on the critical transition?
The choice of appropriate institutions is clearly the direct cause that led
to the policies and actions that produced the changes. But that still leaves
unanswered why the country got those institutions right this time. A cen-
tral contribution of our book is our emphasis on the role of beliefs in
modulating the choice of institutions and the interactive process involv-
ing beliefs, institutions, and outcomes. Beliefs emanate from the domi-
nant network and represent the networks’ expectation of the impact of
institutions on outcomes.
Many of the changes described for Brazil could be argued to be merely
following global trends that have affected many other countries simulta-
neously, such as a greater emphasis on redistribution. Alternatively, they
could be conceived as the expected consequence from the universaliza-
tion of the franchise that took place in Brazil in the mid- 1980s. As the
median voter’s income is below average, it would be natural to expect
politicians to redistribute and promote inclusion for purely electoral rea-
sons. So why appeal to something as ethereal and hard to measure as
beliefs when the more standard arguments seem to explain the facts suf-
ficiently well? We make the case that beliefs are the key factor underpin-
ning change rather than other more proximate transformative processes,
such as universal franchise.
We present evidence that a change in beliefs has occurred and that
the change is a crucial factor in the broader institutional change that the
country has undergone. The evidence shows that the changes in beliefs
are exceptional to Brazil and not general to many other countries simul-
taneously. And, in particular, it differs from other Latin American coun-
tries. Because the entire region tends to move in synch in many aspects,
as seen by the proximate synchronicity of independence, import substitu-
tion, dictatorship, redemocratization, and privatization, it is natural to
expect the same general forces to operate across these countries. In terms
of beliefs, this synchrony can be seen in the greater focus on redistributive
policies in the past decade as the countries embraced more inclusive poli-
cies, stances, and rhetoric. Changes in Brazil due to the “treatment” of its
own specific history, experiences, and other factors that formed beliefs
led to beliefs that are significantly different from those in other (control)
countries that underwent their own distinct formative processes, even if
the resulting beliefs might have superficial similarities.

30 • Chapter 2
Beliefs are admittedly hard to pin down and even harder to quantify.
Whereas institutions, which are also often elusive concepts, have been
proxied and instrumented in a variety of creative ways, there has been less
progress measuring beliefs. Yet, there has been much recent research on
beliefs using data from surveys such as the World Values Survey (WVS),
which surveys individuals across a group of countries in different waves
over time.
8
In particular, scholars use two specific responses in the WVS
for comparative analysis of beliefs on the appropriate level of inequality
and redistribution. In the first response, respondents place their views on
a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is the position that “People should take more
responsibility to provide for themselves,” and 10 is the position that “The
government should take more responsibility to ensure that everyone is
provided for.” In the second response, the choices are (1)“In the long run,
hard work usually brings a better life,” and (10) “Hard work doesn’t
generally bring success— it’s more a matter of luck and connections.” The
understanding behind the use of the results is that they bring out beliefs
related to the social contract, that is, inequality, redistribution, and fair-
ness. Averaging across the sample of respondents in each country gives
us a proxy for each country’s prevailing belief. We interpret the view
that luck and connections are mostly responsible for success in life, and
that government should actively redress the resulting inequality through
redistributive policies as indicating beliefs that social inclusion is a neces-
sary condition for a country to develop. We do not compare the different
levels of measured beliefs across countries at any point in time, but rather
we compare how much they changed over time.
In figures 2.2 and 2.3, we plot the averaged proxied belief for all the
countries that were included in both the 1989– 1993 and the 2010– 2014
waves of the WVS for each of the respective questions about attitudes to-
ward work and redistribution. The 45- degree line shows where the belief
would be in the second wave if there had been no change over time. In
figure 2.2, Chile, South Africa, Nigeria, Peru, and Turkey have practically
not budged their position, as measured by the question on government
vs. individual responsibility, in more than two decades. On the other ex-
treme, Russia, South Korea, India, and Brazil had a major change of be-
liefs, with all four dramatically moving toward the view that government
rather than individuals should be responsible for providing for its citizens’
8 The extensive literature on beliefs, social contracts, and the use of survey data to mea-
sure beliefs includes Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote (2001); Alesina and Glaeser (2004);
Alesina and Giuliano (2009); Alesina and La Ferrara (2005); Alesina, Cozzi, and Manto-
van (2012); Alesina and Angeletos (2005); Bénabou and Tirole (2006); Bénabou (2000,
2005); Fong (2001); Giuliano and Spilimbergo (2009); Jusko (2011); and Handler (2003).
For the WVS, see http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp.

Understanding Development • 31
welfare. In figure 2.3, most countries exhibit little change in terms of their
view whether success in life is due to luck or hard work. Yet Brazil, South
Africa, and China deviate significantly from their positions two decades
earlier. The exceptional shift in Brazil from luck toward hard work as a
determinant of success is a consequence of the demise in the later period
of the hyperinflation that scourged the country at the time of the first sur-
vey. It is natural to despair at the value of hard work when the relentless
Figure 2.2. Comparative change in beliefs: government vs. individual responsibil-
ity, 1989– 1993 and 2010– 2014. Sources: World Values Survey, fifth wave WVS
2005– 2008 for 2005 data and Four Wave Aggregate for 1991 data. The data
refer to the mean percent in each country positioning themselves in relation to the
following issue: “V118.– Right— People should take more responsibility to pro-
vide for themselves; Left— The government should take more responsibility to en-
sure that everyone is provided for.” http://www.wvsevsdb.com/wvs/WVSAnalize
Question.jsp.
80
75
70
65
60
55
50
45
40
35
35 40
45°
45 50 55
Government/people should
take more responsibility — 1989–1993
Individual Gov.
60 65 70 75 80
Gov.
S. Korea
Russia
Brazil
Belarus
Japan
Chile
Turkey
Spain
Poland
Mexico
China
Peru
S. Africa
Argentina
India
US
Uruguay
Nigeria
Government/people should
take more responsibility — 2010–2014

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passed on to where St German knelt. There were two bright angels
in the chariot; they lifted the persecuted saint from the ground, and
placing him between them, ascended into the air.
“Curse your persecutors,” said the angels. The saint cursed them;
and from that time all holiness left the church he had built. The saint
was borne to other lands, and lived to effect great good. On the
rocks the burnt tracks of the chariot wheels were long to be seen,
and the Well of Tears still flows.
HOW ST PIRAN REACHED CORNWALL.
Good men are frequently persecuted by those whom they have
benefited the most. The righteous Piran had, by virtue of his
sanctity, been enabled to feed ten Irish kings and their armies for
ten days together with three cows. He brought to life by his prayers
the dogs which had been killed while hunting the elk and the boar,
and even restored to existence many of the warriors who had fallen
on the battlefield. Notwithstanding this, and his incomparable
goodness, some of these kings condemned him to be cast off a
precipice into the sea, with a millstone around his neck.
On a boisterous day, a crowd of the lawless Irish assembled on
the brow of a beetling cliff, with Piran in chains. By great labour they
had rolled a huge millstone to the top of the hill, and Piran was
chained to it. At a signal from one of the kings, the stone and the
saint were rolled to the edge of, and suddenly over, the cliff into the
Atlantic. The winds were blowing tempestuously, the heavens were
dark with clouds, and the waves white with crested foam. No sooner
was Piran and the millstone launched into space, than the sun shone
out brightly, casting the full lustre of its beams on the holy man, who
sat tranquilly on the descending stone. The winds died away, and
the waves became smooth as a mirror. The moment the millstone
touched the water, hundreds were converted to Christianity who saw
this miracle. St Piran floated on safely to Cornwall; he landed on the

5th of March on the sands which bear his name. He lived amongst
the Cornish men until he attained the age of 206 years.
[6]
ST PERRAN, THE MINERS’ SAINT.
St Piran, or St Perran, has sometimes gained the credit of
discovering tin in Cornwall; yet Usher places the date of his birth
about the year 352; and the merchants of Tyre are said to have
traded with Cornwall for tin as early as the days of King Solomon.
There are three places in Cornwall to which the name of Perran is
given:—
Perran-Aworthall—i.e., Perran on the noted River.
Perran-Uthno—i.e., Perran the Little.
Perran-Zabuloe—i.e., Perran in the Sands.
This sufficiently proves that the saint, or some one bearing that
name, was eminently popular amongst the people; and in St Perran
we have an example—of which several instances are given—of the
manner in which a very ancient event is shifted forward, as it were,
for the purpose of investing some popular hero with additional
reasons for securing the devotion of the people, and of drawing
them to his shrine.
[7]
Picrous, or Piecras, is another name which has been floated by
tradition, down the stream of time, in connexion with the discovery
of tin; and in the eastern portion of Cornwall, Picrous-day, the
second Thursday before Christmas-day, is kept as the tinners’
holiday.
The popular story of the discovery of tin is, however, given, with
all its anachronisms.
THE DISCOVERY OF TIN.

St Piran, or St Perran, leading his lonely life on the plains which
now bear his name, devoted himself to the study of the objects
which presented themselves to his notice. The good saint decorated
the altar in his church with the choicest flowers, and his cell was
adorned with the crystals which he could collect from the
neighbouring rocks. In his wanderings on the sea-shore, St Perran
could not but observe the numerous mineral veins running through
the slate rocks forming the beautiful cliffs on this coast. Examples of
every kind he collected; and on one occasion, when preparing his
humble meal, a heavy black stone was employed to form a part of
the fireplace. The fire was more intense than usual, and a stream of
beautiful white metal flowed out of the fire. Great was the joy of the
saint; he perceived that God, in His goodness, had discovered to him
something which would be useful to man. St Perran communicated
his discovery to St Chiwidden. They examined the shores together,
and Chiwidden, who was learned in the learning of the East, soon
devised a process for producing this metal in large quantities. The
two saints called the Cornish men together. They told them of their
treasures, and they taught them how to dig the ore from the earth,
and how, by the agency of fire, to obtain the metal. Great was the
joy in Cornwall, and many days of feasting followed the
announcement. Mead and metheglin, with other drinks, flowed in
abundance; and vile rumour says the saints and their people were
rendered equally unstable thereby. “Drunk as a Perraner,” has
certainly passed into a proverb from that day.
The riot of joy at length came to an end, and steadily, seriously,
the tribes of Perran and St Agnes set to work. They soon
accumulated a vast quantity of this precious metal; and when they
carried it to the southern coasts, the merchants from Gaul eagerly
purchased it of them. The noise of the discovery, even in those days,
rapidly extended itself; and even the cities of Tyre learned that a
metal precious to them, was to be obtained in a country far to the
west. The Phœnician navigators were not long in finding out the Tin
Islands; and great was the alarm amidst the Cornish Britons lest the
source of their treasure should be discovered. Then it was they

intrenched the whole of St Agnes beacon; then it was they built the
numerous hill castles, which have puzzled the antiquarian; then it
was that they constructed the Rounds,—amongst which the Perran
Round remains as a remarkable example,—all of them to protect
their tin ground. So resolved were the whole of the population of the
district to preserve the tin workings, that they prevented any
foreigner from landing on the mainland, and they established tin
markets on the islands on the coast. On these islands were hoisted
the standard of Cornwall, a white cross on a black ground, which
was the device of St Perran and St Chiwidden, symbolising the black
tin ore and the white metal.
[8]
ST NEOT, THE PIGMY.
Whence came the saint, or hermit, who has given his name to two
churches in England, is not known.
Tradition, however, informs us that he was remarkably small in
stature, though exquisitely formed. He could not, according to all
accounts, have been more than fifteen inches high. Yet, though so
diminutive a man, he possessed a soul which was giant-like in the
power of his faith. The Church of St Neot, which has been built on
the ancient site of the hermit’s cell, is situated in a secluded valley,
watered by a branch of the river Fowey. The surrounding country is,
even now, but very partially cultivated, and it must have been, a few
centuries since, a desert waste; but the valley is, and no doubt ever
has been, beautifully wooded. Not far from the church is the holy
well, in which the pious anchorite would stand immersed to his neck,
whilst he repeated the whole Book of Psalms. Great was the reward
for such an exercise of devotion and faith. Out of numerous miracles
we select only a few, which have some especial character about
them.
ST NEOT AND THE FOX.

One day the holy hermit was standing in his bath chanting the
Psalms, when he heard the sound of huntsmen approaching.
Whether the saint feared ridicule or ill-treatment, we know not; but
certainly he left some psalms unsung that day, and hastily gathering
up his clothes, he fled to his cell.
In his haste the goodman lost his shoe, and a hungry fox having
escaped the hunters, came to the spring to drink. Having quenched
the fever of thirst, and being hungry, he spied the saint’s shoe, and
presently ate it. The hermit despatched his servant to look for his
shoe; and, lo, he found the fox cast into a deep sleep, and the
thongs of the shoe hanging out of his vile mouth. Of course the shoe
was pulled out of his stomach, and restored to the saint.
ST NEOT AND THE DOE.
Again, on another day, when the hermit was in his fountain, a
lovely doe, flying from the huntsmen, fell down on the edge of the
well, imploring, with tearful eyes and anxious pantings, the aid of St
Neot. The dogs followed in full chase, ready to pounce on the
trembling doe, and eager to tear her in pieces. They saw the saint,
and one look from his holy eyes sent them flying back into the
woods, more speedily, if possible, than they rushed out of it.
The huntsman too came on, ready to discharge his arrow into the
heart of the doe; but, impressed with the sight he saw, he fell on his
knees, cast away his quiver, and became from that day a follower of
the saint’s, giving him his horn to hang, as a memorial, in the
church, where it was long to be seen. The huntsman became
eventually one of the monks of the neighbouring house of St
Petroch.
ST NEOT AND THE THIEVES.
When St Neot was abbot, some thieves came by night and stole
the oxen belonging to the farm of the monastery. The weather was

most uncertain,—the seed-time was passing away,—and a fine
morning rendered it imperative that the ploughs should be quickly
employed. There were no oxen. Great was the difficulty, and earnest
were the abbot’s prayers. In answer to them, the wild stags came in
from the forests, and tamely offered their necks to the yoke. When
unyoked in the evening, they resorted to their favourite pastures,
but voluntarily returned each morning to their work. The report of
this event reached the ears of the thieves. They became penitent,
and restored the oxen to the monastery. Not only so, but they
consecrated their days to devotional exercises. The oxen being
restored, the stags were dismissed; but they bore for ever a white
ring, like a yoke, about their necks, and they held a charmed life,
safe from the shafts of the hunters.
ST NEOT AND THE FISHES.
On one occasion, when the saint was at his devotions, an angel
appeared unto him, and shewing him three fishes in the well, he
said, “These are for thee; take one each day for thy daily food, and
the number shall never grow less: the choice of one of three fishes
shall be thine all the days of thy life.” Long time passed by, and daily
a fish was taken from the well, and three awaited his coming every
morning. At length the saint, who shared in human suffering
notwithstanding his piety, fell ill; and being confined to his bed, St
Neot sent his servant Barius to fetch him a fish for his dinner. Barius
being desirous of pleasing, if possible, the sick man’s taste, went to
the well and caught two fishes. One of these he broiled, and the
other he boiled. Nicely cooked, Barius took them on a dish to his
master’s bedside, who started up alarmed for the consequences of
the act of his servant, in disobedience to the injunctions of the
angel. So good a man could not allow wrath to get the mastery of
him; so he sat up in his bed, and, instead of eating, he prayed with
great earnestness over the cooked fish. At last the spirit of holiness
exerted its full power. St Neot commanded Barius to return at once
and cast the fish into the well. Barius went and did as his master

had told him to do; and, lo, the moment the fishes fell into the water
they recovered life, and swam away with the third fish, as if nothing
had happened to them.
All these things and more are recorded in the windows of St Neot’s
Church.
[9]
PROBUS AND GRACE.
Every one is acquainted with the beautiful tower of Probus
Church. If they are not, they should lose no time in visiting it.
Various are the stories in connexion with those two saints, who are
curiously connected with the church, and one of the fairs held in the
church-town. A safe tradition tells us that St Probus built the church,
and failing in the means of adding a tower to his building, he
petitioned St Grace to aid him. Grace was a wealthy lady, and she
resolved at her own cost to build a tower, the like of which should
not be seen in the “West Countrie.” Regardless of the expense,
sculptured stone was worked by the most skilful masons, and the
whole put together in the happiest of proportions. When the tower
was finished, St Probus opened his church with every becoming
solemnity, and took to himself all the praise which was lavished on
the tower, although he had built only a plain church. When, however,
the praise of Probus was at the highest, a voice was heard slowly
and distinctly exclaiming,
“Saint Probus and Grace,
Not the first, but the last;”
and thus for ever have Probus and Grace been united as patron
saints of this church.
Mr Davies Gilbert remarks, however, in his “Parochial History:”
“Few gentlemen’s houses in the west of Cornwall were without the
honour of receiving Prince Charles during his residence in the county

about the middle part of the civil wars; and he is said to have
remained for a time longer than usual with Mr Williams, who, after
the Restoration, waited on the king with congratulations from the
parish; and, on being complimented by him with the question
whether he could do anything for his friends, answered that the
parish would esteem themselves highly honoured and distinguished
by the grant of a fair, which was accordingly done for the 17th
September. This fair coming the last in succession after three others,
has acquired for itself a curious appellation, derived from the two
patron saints, and from the peculiar pronunciation in that
neighbourhood of the word last, somewhat like laest,—
‘Saint Probus and Grace,
Not the first, but the last,’—
and from this distinction it is usually called Probus and Grace Fair.”
We are obliged, therefore, to lean on the original tradition for the
true meaning of this couplet.
ST NECTAN’S KIEVE AND THE LONELY
SISTERS.
Far up the deep and rocky vale of Trevillet, in the parish of
Tintagel,
[10]
stands on a pile of rocks the little chapel of the good St
Nectan. No holy man ever selected a more secluded, or a more
lovely spot in which to pass a religious life. From the chapel rock you
look over the deep valley full of trees. You see here and there the
lovely trout-stream, running rapidly towards the sea; and, opening in
the distance, there rolls the mighty ocean itself. Although this
oratory is shut in amongst the woods, so as to be invisible to any
one approaching it by land, until they are close upon it, it is plainly
seen by the fishermen or by the sailor far off at sea; and in olden

time the prayers of St Nectan were sought by all whose business
was in the “deep waters.”
The river runs steadily along within a short distance of St Nectan’s
Chapel, and then it suddenly leaps over the rock—a beautiful fall of
water—into St Nectan’s Kieve. This deep rock-basin, brimming with
the clearest water, overflows, and another waterfall carries the river
to the lower level of the valley. Standing here within a circular wall of
rocks, you see how the falling fluid has worked back the softer slate-
rock until it has reached the harder masses, which are beautifully
polished by the same agent. Mosses, ferns, and grasses decorate the
fall, fringing every rock with a native drapery of the most exquisite
beauty. Here is one of the wildest, one of the most untrained, and,
at the same time, one of the most beautiful spots in Cornwall, full of
poetry, and coloured by legend. Yet here comes prosaic man, and by
one stroke of his everyday genius, he adds, indeed, a colour to the
violet. You walk along the valley, through paths trodden out of the
undergrowth, deviously wandering up hill, or down hill, as rock or
tree has interposed. Many a spot of quiet beauty solicits you to loiter,
and loitering, you feel that there are places from which the winds
appear to gather poetry. You break the spell, or the ear, catching the
murmur of the waters, dispels the illusions which have been created
by the eye, and you wander forward anxious to reach the holy
“Kieve,”—to visit the saint’s hermitage. Here, say you, is the place to
hold “commune with Nature’s works, and view her charms unrolled,”
when, lo, a well-made door painted lead colour, with a real
substantial lock, bars your way, and Fancy, with everything that is
holy, flies away before the terrible words which inform you that
trespassers will be punished, and that the key can be obtained at
——. Well was it that Mr Wilkie Collins gave “up the attempt to
discover Nighton’s Kieve;”
[11]
for had he, when he had found it,
discovered this evidence of man’s greedy soul, it would have
convinced him that the “evil genius of fairy mythology,” who so
cautiously hid “the nymph of the waterfall,” was no other than the
farmer, who, as he told me, “owns the fee,” and one who is resolved
also, to pocket the fee, before any pilgrim can see the oratory and

the waterfall of St Nectan. Of course this would have turned the
placid current of the thoughts of “the Rambler beyond Railways,”
which now flow so pleasantly, into a troubled stream of biliary
bitterness.
St Nectan placed in the little bell-tower of his secluded chapel a
silver bell, the notes of which were so clear and penetrating that
they could be heard far off at sea. When the notes came through
the air, and fell on the ears of the seamen, they knew that St Nectan
was about to pray for them, and they prostrated themselves before
Heaven for a few minutes, and thus endeavoured to win the
blessing.
St Nectan was on the bed of death. There was strife in the land. A
severe struggle was going on between the Churchmen, and
endeavours were being made to introduce a new faith.
The sunset of life gave to the saint the spirit of prophecy, and he
told his weeping followers that the light of their religion would grow
dim in the land; but that a spark would for ever live amidst the
ashes, and that in due time it would kindle into a flame, and burn
more brightly than ever. His silver bell, he said, should never ring for
others than the true believer. He would enclose it in the rock of the
Kieve; but when again the true faith revived, it should be recovered,
and rung, to cheer once more the land.
One lovely summer evening, while the sun was slowly sinking
towards the golden sea, St Nectan desired his attendants to carry
him to the bank which overhung the “Kieve,” and requested them to
take the bell from the tower and bring it to him.
There he lay for some time in silent prayer, waiting as if for a sign,
then slowly raising himself from the bed on which he had been
placed, he grasped the silver bell. He rang it sharply and clearly
three times, and then he dropped it into the transparent waters of
the Kieve. He watched it disappear, and then he closed his eyes in
death. On receiving the bell the waters were troubled, but they soon
became clear as before, and the bell was nowhere to be seen. St

Nectan died, and two strange ladies from a foreign land came and
took possession of his oratory, and all that belonged unto the holy
man. They placed—acting, as it was believed, on the wishes of the
saint himself—his body, all the sacramental plate, and other sacred
treasures, in a large oak chest. They turned the waters of the fall
aside, and dug a grave in the river bed, below the Kieve, in which
they placed this precious chest. The waters were then returned to
their natural course, and they murmur ever above the grave of him
who loved them. The silver bell was concealed in the Kieve, and the
saint with all that belonged to his holy office rested beneath the river
bed. The oratory was dismantled, and the two ladies, women
evidently of high birth, chose it for their dwelling. Their seclusion
was perfect. “Both appeared to be about the same age, and both
were inflexibly taciturn. One was never seen without the other. If
they ever left the house, they only left it to walk in the more
unfrequented parts of the wood; they kept no servant; they never
had a visitor; no living soul but themselves ever crossed the door of
their cottage.”
[12]
The berries of the wood, a few roots which they
cultivated, with snails gathered from the rocks and walls, and fish
caught in the stream, served them for food. Curiosity was excited,
the mystery which hung around this solitary pair became deepened
by the obstinate silence which they observed in everything relating
to themselves. The result of all this was an anxious endeavour, on
the part of the superstitious and ignorant peasantry, to learn their
secret. All was now conjecture, and the imagination commonly
enough filled in a wild picture: devils or angels, as the case might
be, were seen ministering to the solitary ones. Prying eyes were
upon them, but the spies could glean no knowledge. Week, month,
year passed by, and ungratified curiosity was dying through want of
food, when it was discovered that one of the ladies had died. The
peasantry went in a body to the chapel; no one forbade their
entering it now. There sat a silent mourner leaning over the placid
face of her dead sister. Hers was, indeed, a silent sorrow—no tear
was in her eye, no sigh hove her chest, but the face told all that a
remediless woe had fallen on her heart. The dead body was

eventually removed, the living sister making no sign, and they left
her in her solitude alone. Days passed on; no one heard of, no one
probably inquired after, the lonely one. At last a wandering child,
curious as children are, clambered to the window of the cell and
looked in. There sat the lady; her handkerchief was on the floor, and
one hand hung strangely, as if endeavouring to pick it up, but
powerless to do so. The child told its story—the people again flocked
to the chapel, and they found one sister had followed the other. The
people buried the last beside the first, and they left no mark to tell
us where, unless the large flat stone which lies in the valley, a short
distance from the foot of the fall, and beneath which, I was told,
“some great person was buried,” may be the covering of their tomb.
No traces of the history of these solitary women have ever been
discovered.
Centuries have passed away, and still the legends of the buried
bell and treasure are preserved. Some long time since a party of
men resolved to blast the “Kieve,” and examine it for the silver bell.
They were miners, and their engineering knowledge, though rude,
was sufficient to enable them to divert the course of the river above
the falls, and thus to leave the “Kieve” dry for them to work on when
they had emptied it, which was an easy task. The “borer” now rung
upon the rock, holes were pierced, and, being charged, they were
blasted. The result was, however, anything but satisfactory, for the
rock remained intact. Still they persevered, until at length a voice
was heard amidst the ring of the iron tools in the holes of the rock.
Every hand was stayed, every face was aghast, as they heard
distinctly the ring of the silver bell, followed by a clear solemn voice
proclaiming, “The child is not yet born who shall recover this
treasure.”
The work was stopped, and the river restored to its old channel,
over which it will run undisturbed until the day of which St Nectan
prophesied shall arrive.

When, in the autumn of 1863, I visited this lovely
spot, my guide, the proprietor, informed me that very
recently a gentleman residing, I believe, in London,
dreamed that an angel stood on a little bank of
pebbles, forming a petty island, at the foot of a
waterfall, and, pointing to a certain spot, told him to
search there and he would find gold and a mummy.
This gentleman told his dream to a friend, who at once
declared the place indicated to be St Nectan’s
waterfall. Upon this, the dreamer visited the West,
and, upon being led by the owner of the property to
the fall, he at once recognised the spot on which the
angel stood.
A plan was then and there arranged by which a
search might be again commenced, it being thought
that, as an angel had indicated the spot, the time for
the recovery of the treasure had arrived.
Let us hope that the search may be deferred, lest
the natural beauties of the spot should be destroyed
by the meddling of men, who can threaten
trespassers,—fearing to lose a sixpence,—and who
have already endeavoured to improve on nature, by
cutting down some of the rock and planting
rhododendrons.
The Rev. R. S. Hawker, of Morwenstow, has
published in his “Echoes of Old Cornwall” a poem on
this tradition, which, as it is but little known, and as it
has the true poetic ring, I transcribe to adorn the
pages of my Appendix.
[13]
THEODORE, KING OF CORNWALL.

Riviere, near Hayle, now called Rovier, was the palace of
Theodore, the king, to whom Cornwall appears to have been
indebted for many of its saints. This Christian king, when the pagan
people sought to destroy the first missionaries, gave the saints
shelter in his palace. St Breca, St Iva, St Burianna, and many others,
are said to have made Riviere their residence. It is not a little curious
to find traditions existing, as it were, in a state of suspension
between opinions. I have heard it said that there was a church at
Rovier—that there was once a great palace there; and again, that
Castle Cayle was one vast fortified place, and Rovier another. Mr
Davies Gilbert quotes Whitaker on this point:—
“Mr Whitaker, who captivates every reader by the
brilliancy of his style, and astonishes by the extent of
his multifarious reading, draws, however, without
reserve, on his fertile imagination, for whatever facts
may be requisite to construct the fabric of a theory. He
has made Riviere the palace and residence of
Theodore, a sovereign prince of Cornwall, and
conducts St Breca, St Iva, with several companions,
not only into Hayle and to this palace, after their
voyage from Ireland, but fixes the time of their arrival
so exactly, as to make it take place in the night. In
recent times the name of Riviere, which had been lost
in the common pronunciation, Rovier, has revived in a
very excellent house built by Mr Edwards on the farm,
which he completed in 1791.”
[14]

HOLY WELLS.
“A well there is in the west country,
And a clearer one never was seen.”
Robert Southey .

SUPERSTITIONS OF THE WELLS.
WELL-WORSHIP.
“One meek cell,
Built by the fathers o’er a lonely well,
Still breathes the Baptist’s sweet remembrance round
A spring of silent waters.”
Echoes from Old Cornwall—R. S. Hawker.
spring of water has always something about it which
gives rise to holy feelings. From the dark earth there
wells up a pellucid fluid, which in its apparent tranquil
joyousness gives gladness to all around. The velvet
mosses, the sword-like grasses, and the feathery ferns,
grow with more of that light and vigorous nature which indicates a
fulness of life, within the charmed influence of a spring of water,
than they do elsewhere.
The purity of the fluid impresses itself, through the eye, upon the
mind, and its power of removing all impurity is felt to the soul.
“Wash and be clean,” is the murmuring call of the waters, as they
overflow their rocky basins, or grassy vases, and deeply sunk in
depravity must that man be who could put to unholy uses one of
nature’s fountains. The inner life of a well of waters, bursting from
its grave in the earth, may be religiously said to form a type of the
soul purified by death, rising into a glorified existence and the
fulness of light. The tranquil beauty of the rising waters, whispering
the softest music, like the healthful breathing of a sleeping infant,
sends a feeling of happiness through the soul of the thoughtful

observer, and the inner man is purified by its influence, as the outer
man is cleansed by ablution.
Water cannot be regarded as having an inanimate existence. Its
all-pervading character and its active nature, flowing on for ever,
resting never, removes it from the torpid elements, and places it, like
the air, amongst those higher creations which belong to the vital
powers of the earth. The spring of water rises from the cold dark
earth, it runs, a silver cord glistening in the sunshine, down the
mountainside. The rill (prettily called by Drayton “a rillet”) gathers
rejoicingly other waters unto itself, and it grows into a brooklet in its
course. At length, flowing onward and increasing in size, the brook
state of being is fairly won; and then, by the gathering together of
some more dewdrops, the full dignity of a stream is acquired.
Onwards the waters flow, still gleaning from every side, and wooing
new runlets to its bosom, eager as it were to assume the state
which, in America, would be called a “run” of water. Stream gathers
on stream, and run on run; the union of waters becomes a river;
rolling in its maturity, swelling in its pride, it seeks the ocean, and
there is absorbed in the eternity of waters. Has ever poet yet
penned a line which in any way conveys to the mind a sense of the
grandeur, the immensity of the sea? I do not remember a verse
which does not prove the incapacity of the human mind to embrace
in its vastness the gathering together of the waters in the mighty
sea. Man’s mind is tempered, and his pride subdued, as he stands
on the sea-side and looks on the undulating expanse to which, to
him, there is no end. A material eternity of rain-drops gathered into
a mass which is from Omnipotence and is omnipotent. The
influences of heaven falling on the sheeted waters, they rise at their
bidding and float in air, making the skies more beautiful or more
sublime, according to the spirit of the hour. Whether the clouds float
over the earth, illumined by sun-rays, like the cars of loving angels;
or rush wildly onward, as if bearing demons of vengeance, they are
subdued by the mountains, and fall reluctantly as mists around the
rocks, condense solemnly as dews upon the sleeping flowers, sink to
earth resignedly as tranquil rains, or splash in tempestuous anger on

its surface. The draught, in whatever form it comes, is drunk with
avidity, and, circulating through the subterranean recesses of the
globe, it does its work of re-creation, and eventually reappears a
bubbling spring, again to run its round of wonder-working tasks.
Those minds which saw a God in light, and worshipped a Creator
in the sun, felt the power of the universal solvent, and saw in the
diffusive nature of that fluid which is everywhere, something more
than a type of the regenerating Spirit, which all, in their holier hours,
feel necessary to clear off the earthiness of life. Man has ever sought
to discover the spiritual in the material, and, from the imperfections
of human reason, he has too frequently reposed on the material,
and given to it the attributes which are purely spiritual. Through all
ages the fountains of the hills and valleys have claimed the
reverence of men; and waters presenting themselves, under aspects
of beauty, or of terror, have been regarded with religious feelings of
hope or of awe.
As it was of old, so is it to-day. It was but yesterday that I stood
near the font of Royston Church, and heard the minister read with
emphasis, “None can enter into the kingdom of God except he be
regenerate and born anew of water.” Surely the simple faith of the
peasant mother who, on a spring morning, takes her weakly infant
to some holy well, and three times dipping it in its clear waters,
uttering an earnest prayer at each immersion, is but another form of
the prescribed faith of the educated churchman.
Surely the practice of consulting the waters of a sacred spring, by
young men and maidens, is but a traditional faith derived from the
early creeds of Greece—a continuance of the Hydromancy which
sought in the Castalian fountain the divination of the future.
THE WELL OF ST CONSTANTINE.
In the parish of St Merran, or Meryn, near Padstow, are the
remains of the Church of St Constantine, and the holy well of that
saint. It had been an unusually hot and dry summer, and all the

crops were perishing through want of water. The people inhabiting
the parish had grown irreligious, and many of them sadly profane.
The drought was a curse upon them for their wickedness. Their
church was falling into ruin, their well was foul, and the arches over
it were decayed and broken. In their distress, the wicked people who
had reviled the Word of God, went to their priest for aid.
“There is no help for thee, unless thou cleansest the holy well.”
They laughed him to scorn.
The drought continued, and they suffered want.
To the priest they went again.
“Cleanse the well,” was his command, “and see the power of the
blessing of the first Christian emperor.” That cleansing a dirty well
should bring them rain they did not believe. The drought continued,
the rivers were dry, the people suffered thirst.
“Cleanse the well—wash, and drink,” said the priest, when they
again went to him.
Hunger and thirst made the people obedient. They went to the
task. Mosses and weeds were removed, and the filth cleansed. To
the surprise of all, beautifully clear water welled forth. They drank
the water and prayed, and then washed themselves, and were
refreshed. As they bathed their bodies, parched with heat, in the
cool stream which flowed from the well, the heavens clouded over,
and presently rain fell, turning all hearts to the true faith.
THE WELL OF ST LUDGVAN.
St Ludgvan, an Irish missionary, had finished his work. On the hill-
top, looking over the most beautiful of bays, the church stood with
all its blessings. Yet the saint, knowing human nature, determined
on associating with it some object of a miraculous character, which
should draw people from all parts of the world to Ludgvan. The saint
prayed over the dry earth, which was beneath him, as he knelt on

the church stile. His prayer was for water, and presently a most
beautiful crystal stream welled up from below. The holy man prayed
on, and then, to try the virtues of the water, he washed his eyes.
They were rendered at once more powerful, so penetrating, indeed,
as to enable him to see microscopic objects. The saint prayed again,
and then he drank of the water. He discovered that his powers of
utterance were greatly improved, his tongue formed words with
scarcely any effort of his will. The saint now prayed, that all children
baptized in the waters of this well might be protected against the
hangman and his hempen cord; and an angel from heaven came
down into the water, and promised the saint that his prayers should
be granted. Not long after this, a good farmer and his wife brought
their babe to the saint, that it might derive all the blessings
belonging to this holy well. The priest stood at the baptismal font,
the parents, with their friends around. The saint proceeded with the
baptismal ceremonial, and at length the time arrived when he took
the tender babe into his holy arms. He signed the sign of the cross
over the child, and when he sprinkled water on the face of the infant
its face glowed with a divine intelligence. The priest then proceeded
with the prayer; but, to the astonishment of all, whenever he used
the name of Jesus, the child, who had received the miraculous
power of speech, from the water, pronounced distinctly the name of
the devil, much to the consternation of all present. The saint knew
that an evil spirit had taken possession of the child, and he
endeavoured to cast him out; but the devil proved stronger than the
saint for some time. St Ludgvan was not to be beaten; he knew that
the spirit was a restless soul, which had been exorcised from
Treassow, and he exerted all his energies in prayer. At length the
spirit became obedient, and left the child. He was now commanded
by the saint to take his flight to the Red Sea. He rose, before the
terrified spectators, into a gigantic size, he then spat into the well;
he laid hold of the pinnacles of the tower, and shook the church until
they thought it would fall. The saint was alone unmoved. He prayed
on, until, like a flash of lightning, the demon vanished, shaking down
a pinnacle in his flight. The demon, by spitting in the water

destroyed the spells of the water upon the eyes
[15]
and the tongue
too; but it fortunately retains its virtue of preventing any child
baptized in it from being hanged with a cord of hemp. Upon a cord
of silk it is stated to have no power.
This well had nearly lost its reputation once—a Ludgvan woman
was hanged, under the circumstances told in the following narrative:
—
A small farmer, living in one of the most western districts of the
county, died some years back of what was supposed at that time to
be “English cholera.” A few weeks after his decease his wife married
again. This circumstance excited some attention in the
neighbourhood. It was remembered that the woman had lived on
very bad terms with her late husband, that she had on many
occasions exhibited strong symptoms of possessing a very vindictive
temper, and that during the farmer’s lifetime she had openly
manifested rather more than a Platonic preference for the man
whom she subsequently married. Suspicion was generally excited;
people began to doubt whether the first husband had died fairly. At
length the proper order was applied for, and his body was
disinterred. On examination, enough arsenic to have poisoned three
men was found in the stomach. The wife was accused of murdering
her husband, was tried, convicted on the clearest evidence, and
hanged. Very shortly after she had suffered capital punishment
horrible stories of a ghost were widely circulated. Certain people
declared that they had seen a ghastly resemblance of the
murderess, robed in her winding-sheet, with the black mark of the
rope round her swollen neck, standing on stormy nights upon her
husband’s grave, and digging there with a spade, in hideous
imitation of the actions of the men who had disinterred the corpse
for medical examination. This was fearful enough; nobody dared go
near the place after nightfall. But soon another circumstance was
talked of in connexion with the poisoner, which affected the
tranquillity of people’s minds in the village where she had lived, and
where it was believed she had been born, more seriously than even

the ghost story itself. The well of St Ludgvan, celebrated among the
peasantry of the district for its one remarkable property, that every
child baptized in its water (with which the church was duly supplied
on christening occasions) was secure from ever being hanged.
No one doubted that all the babies fortunate enough to be born
and baptized in the parish, though they might live to the age of
Methuselah, and might during that period commit all the capital
crimes recorded in the “Newgate Calendar,” were still destined to
keep quite clear of the summary jurisdiction of Jack Ketch. No one
doubted this until the story of the apparition of the murderess began
to be spread abroad, then awful misgivings arose in the popular
mind.
A woman who had been born close by the magical well, and who
had therefore in all probability been baptized in its water, like her
neighbours of the parish, had nevertheless been publicly and
unquestionably hanged. However, probability is not always the truth.
Every parishioner determined that the baptismal register of the
poisoner should be sought for, and that it should be thus officially
ascertained whether she had been christened with the well water or
not. After much trouble, the important document was discovered—
not where it was at first looked after, but in a neighbouring parish. A
mistake had been made about the woman’s birthplace; she had not
been baptized in St Ludgvan church, and had therefore not been
protected by the marvellous virtue of the local water. Unutterable
was the joy and triumph of this discovery. The wonderful character
of the parish well was wonderfully vindicated; its celebrity
immediately spread wider than ever. The peasantry of the
neighbouring districts began to send for the renowned water before
christenings; and many of them actually continue, to this day, to
bring it corked up in bottles to their churches, and to beg particularly
that it may be used whenever they present their children to be
baptized.
[16]
GULVAL WELL.

A young woman, with a child in her arms, stands by the side of
Gulval Well, in Fosses Moor. There is an expression of extreme
anxiety in her interesting face, which exhibits a considerable amount
of intelligence. She appears to doubt, and yet be disposed to believe
in, the virtues of this remarkable well. She pauses, looks at her
babe, and sighs. She is longing to know something of the absent,
but she fears the well may indicate the extreme of human sorrow.
While she is hesitating, an old woman advances towards her, upon
whom the weight of eighty years was pressing, but not over heavily;
and she at once asked the young mother if she wished to ask the
well after the health of her husband.
“Yes, Aunt Alcie,” she replied; “I am so anxious. I have not heard
of John for six long months. I could not sleep last night, so I rose
with the light, and came here, determined to ask the well; but I am
afraid. O Aunt Alcie, suppose the well should not speak, I should die
on the spot!”
“Nonsense, cheeld,” said the old woman; “thy man is well enough;
and the well will boil, if thee’lt ask it in a proper spirit.”
“But, Aunt Alcie, if it sends up puddled water, or if it remains
quiet, what would become of me?”
“Never be foreboding, cheeld; troubles come quick without
running to meet ’em. Take my word for it, the fayther of thy little un
will soon be home again. Ask the well! ask the well!”
“Has it told any death or sickness lately?” asked the young mother.
“On St Peter’s eve Mary Curnew questioned the water about poor
Willy.”
“And the water never moved?”
“The well was quiet; and verily I guess it was about that time he
died.”
“Any sickness, Aunt Alcie?”

“Jenny Kelinach was told, by a burst of mud, how ill her old
mother was; but do not be feard, all is well with Johnny Thomas.”
Still the woman hesitated; desire, fear, hope, doubt, superstition,
and intelligence struggled within her heart and brain.
The old creature, who was a sort of guardian to the well, used all
her rude eloquence to persuade Jane Thomas to put her question,
and at length she consented. Obeying the old woman’s directions,
she knelt on the mat of bright green grass which grew around, and
leaning over the well so as to see her face in the water, she repeated
after her instructor,
“Water, water, tell me truly,
Is the man I love duly
On the earth, or under the sod,
Sick or well,—in the name of God?”
Some minutes passed in perfect silence, and anxiety was rapidly
turning cheeks and lips pale, when the colour rapidly returned.
There was a gush of clear water from below, bubble rapidly followed
bubble, sparkling brightly in the morning sunshine. Full of joy, the
young mother rose from her knees, kissed her child, and exclaimed,
“I am happy now!”
[17]
THE WELL OF ST KEYNE.
St Keyne came to this well about five hundred years before the
Norman Conquest, and imparted a strange virtue to its waters—
namely, that whichever of a newly-married couple should first drink
thereof, was to enjoy the sweetness of domestic sovereignty ever
after.
Situated in a thickly-wooded district, the well of St Keyne presents
a singularly picturesque appearance. “Four trees of divers kinds,”

grow over the well, imparting a delightful shade, and its clear waters
spread an emerald luxuriance around. Once, and once only, have I
paid a visit to this sacred spot. Then and there I found a lady
drinking of the waters from her thimble, and eagerly contending with
her husband, that the right to rule was hers. The man, however,
mildly insisted upon it that he had had the first drink, as he had
rushed before his wife, and dipping his fingers into the waters, had
sucked them. This the lady contended was not drinking, and she, I
have no doubt, through life had the best of the argument.
Tonkin says, in his “History of Cornwall,” “Did it retain this
wondrous quality, as it does to this day the shape, I believe there
would be to it a greater resort of both sexes than either to Bath or
Tunbridge; for who would not be fond of attaining this longed-for
sovereignty?” He then adds, “Since the writing of this, the trees
were blown down by a violent storm, and in their place Mr
Rashleigh, in whose land it is, has planted two oaks, an ash, and an
elm, which thrive well; but the wonderful arch is destroyed.” The
author can add to this that (as he supposes, owing to the alteration
made in the trees) the sovereign virtues of the waters have
perished.
Southey’s ballad will be remembered by most readers:—
“A well there is in the west country,
And a clearer one never was seen;
There is not a wife in the west country
But has heard of the Well of St Keyne.
“An oak and an elm-tree stand beside,
And behind doth an ash-tree grow,
And a willow from the bank above
Droops to the water below.”
It has been already stated that, sitting in St Michael’s Chair, on the
tower of the church of St Michael’s Mount, has the same virtue as

the waters of this well; and that this remarkable power was the gift
of the same St Keyne who imparted such wonderful properties to
this well.
MADDERN OR MADRON WELL.
“Plunge thy right hand in St Madron’s spring,
If true to its troth be the palm you bring;
But if a false digit thy fingers bear,
Lay them at once on the burning share.”
Of the holy well at St Maddern, Carne
[18]
writes thus:—
“It has been contended that a virgin was the patroness of this
church—that she was buried at Minster—and that many miracles
were performed at her grave. A learned commentator, however, is
satisfied that it was St Motran, who was one of the large company
that did come from Ireland with St Buriana, and he was slain at the
mouth of the Hayle; the body was begged, and afterwards buried
here. Near by was the miraculous Well of St Maddern, over which a
chapel was built, so sacred was it held. (This chapel was destroyed
by the fanaticism of Major Ceely in the days of Cromwell.) It stood at
no great distance on the moor, and the soil around it was black and
boggy, mingled with a gray moorstone....
“The votaries bent awfully and tremblingly over its sedgy bank,
and gazed on its clear bosom for a few minutes ere they proved the
fatal ordeal; then an imploring look was cast towards the figure of St
Motran, many a crossing was repeated, and at last the pin or pebble
held aloof was dropped into the depth beneath. Often did the rustic
beauty fix her eye intently on the bubbles that rose, and broke, and
disappeared; for in that moment the lover was lost, or the faithful
husband gained. It was only on particular days, however, according

to the increase or decrease of the moon, that the hidden virtues of
the well were consulted.”
[19]
MADRON WELL.
Of this well we have the following notice by William
Scawen, Esq., Vice-Warden of the Stannaries. The
paper from which we extract it, was first printed by
Davies Gilbert, Esq., F.R.S., as an appendix to his
“Parochial History of Cornwall.” Its complete title is,
“Observations on an Ancient Manuscript, entitled
‘Passio Christo,’ written in the Cornish Language, and
now preserved in the Bodleian Library; with an
Account of the Language, Manners, and Customs of
the People of Cornwall, (from a Manuscript in the
Library of Thomas Artle, Esq., 1777)”:—
“Of St Mardren’s Well, (which is a parish west to the
Mount,) a fresh true story of two persons, both of
them lame and decrepit, thus recovered from their
infirmity. These two persons, after they had applied
themselves to divers physicians and chirurgeons, for
cure, and finding no success by them, they resorted to
St Mardren’s Well, and according to the ancient custom
which they had heard of, the same which was once in
a year—to wit, on Corpus Christi evening, to lay some
small offering on the altar there, and to lie on the
ground all night, drink of the water there, and in the
morning after to take a good draught more, and to
take and carry away some of the water, each of them
in a bottle, at their departure. This course these two
men followed, and within three weeks they found the
effect of it, and, by degrees their strength increasing,
were able to move themselves on crutches. The year
following they took the same course again, after which
they were able to go with the help of a stick; and at

length one of them, John Thomas, being a fisherman,
was, and is at this day, able to follow his fishing craft.
The other, whose name was William Cork, was a
soldier under the command of my kinsman, Colonel
William Godolphin, (as he has often told me,) was able
to perform his duty, and died in the service of his
majesty King Charles. But herewith take also this:—
“One Mr Hutchens, a person well known in those
parts, and now lately dead, being parson of Ludgvan, a
near neighbouring parish to St Mardren’s Well, he
observed that many of his parishioners often
frequented this well superstitiously, for which he
reproved them privately, and sometimes publicly, in his
sermons; but afterwards he, the said Mr Hutchens,
meeting with a woman coming from the well with a
bottle in her hand, desired her earnestly that he might
drink thereof, being then troubled with cholical pains,
which accordingly he did, and was eased of his
infirmity.” The latter story is a full confutation of the
former; for, if the taking the water accidentally thus
prevailed upon the party to his cure, as it is likely it
did, then the miracle which was intended to be by the
ceremony of lying on the ground and offering is wholly
fled, and it leaves the virtue of the water to be the
true cause of the cure. And we have here, as in many
places of the land, great variety of salutary springs,
which have diversity of operations, which by natural
reason have been found to be productive of good
effects, and not by miracle, as the vain fancies of
monks and friars have been exercised in heretofore.
Bishop Hale, of Exeter, in his “Great Mystery of
Godliness,” says:—“Of which kind was that noe less
than miraculous cure, which, at St Maddern’s Well, in
Cornwall, was wrought upon a poore cripple; whereof,
besides the attestation of many hundreds of the

neighbours, I tooke a strict and impartial examination
in my last triennial visitation there. This man, for
sixteen years, was forced to walke upon his hands, by
reason of the sinews of his leggs were soe contracted
that he cold not goe or walke on his feet, who upon
monition in a dream to wash in that well, which
accordingly he did, was suddainly restored to the use
of his limbs; and I sawe him both able to walk and gett
his owne maintenance. I found here was neither art or
collusion,—the cure done, the author our invisible
God,” &c.
In Madron Well—and, I have no doubt, in many
others—may be found frequently the pins which have
been dropped by maidens desirous of knowing “when
they were to be married.” I once witnessed the whole
ceremony performed by a group of beautiful girls, who
had walked on a May morning from Penzance. Two
pieces of straw, about an inch long each, were crossed
and the pin run through them. This cross was then
dropped into the water, and the rising bubbles carefully
counted, as they marked the number of years which
would pass ere the arrival of the happy day. This
practice also prevailed amongst the visitors to the well
at the foot of Monacuddle Grove, near St Austell.
On approaching the waters, each visitor is expected
to throw in a crooked pin; and, if you are lucky, you
may possibly see the other pins rising from the bottom
to meet the most recent offering. Rags and votive
offerings to the genius of the waters are hung around
many of the wells. Mr Couch says:—“At Madron Well,
near Penzance, I observed the custom of hanging rags
on the thorns which grew in the enclosure.”
Crofton Croker tells us the same custom prevails in
Ireland; and Dr O’Connor, in his “Travels in Persia,”

describes the prevalence of this custom.
Mr Campbell,
[20]
on this subject, writes:—“Holy
healing wells are common all over the Highlands, and
people still leave offerings of pins and nails, and bits of
rag, though few would confess it. There is a well in
Islay where I myself have, after drinking, deposited
copper caps amongst a hoard of pins and buttons, and
similar gear, placed in chinks in the rocks and trees at
the edge of the ‘Witches’ Well.’ There is another well
with similar offerings freshly placed beside it, in an
island in Loch Maree, in Ross-shire, and many similar
wells are to be found in other places in Scotland. For
example, I learn from Sutherland that ‘a well in the
Black Isle of Cromarty, near Rosehaugh, has
miraculous healing powers. A country woman tells me,
that about forty years ago, she remembers it being
surrounded by a crowd of people every first Tuesday in
June, who bathed and drank of it before sunrise. Each
patient tied a string or rag to one of the trees that
overhung it before leaving. It was sovereign for
headaches. Mr —— remembers to have seen a well,
here called Mary’s Well, hung round with votive rags.’”
Well-worship is mentioned by Martin. The custom, in
his day, in the Hebrides, was to walk south round
about the well.
Sir William Betham, in his “Gael and Cymbri,”
(Dublin: W. Curry, Jun., & Co., 1834,) says, at page
235:—“The Celtæ were much addicted to the worship
of fountains and rivers as divinities. They had a deity
called Divona, or the river-god.”
THE WELL AT ALTAR-NUN. CURE OF
INSANITY.

Amongst the numerous holy wells which exist in Cornwall, that of
Alternon, or Altar-Nun, is the only one, as far as I can learn, which
possessed the virtue of curing the insane.
We are told that Saint Nunne or Nuanita was the daughter of an
Earl of Cornwall, and the mother of St David; that the holy well,
which is situated about a mile from the cathedral of St David, was
dedicated to her; and that she bestowed on the waters of the
Cornish well those remarkable powers, which were not given to the
Welsh one, from her fondness for the county of her birth.
Carew, in his “Survey of Cornwall,” thus describes the practice:—
“The water running from St Nun’s well fell into a square and
enclosed walled plot, which might be filled at what depth they listed.
Upon this wall was the frantic person put to stand, his back towards
the pool, and from thence, with a sudden blow in the breast,
tumbled headlong into the pond; where a strong fellow, provided for
the nonce, took him, and tossed him up and down, alongst and
athwart the water, till the patient, by foregoing his strength, had
somewhat forgot his fury. Then was he conveyed to the church, and
certain masses said over him: upon which handling, if his right wits
returned, St Nun had the thanks; but if there appeared small
amendment, he was bowssened again and again, while there
remained in him any hope of life or recovery.”
The 2d of March is dedicated to St Nun, and the influence of the
water is greatly exalted on that day.
Although St Nun’s well has been long famous, and the celebrity of
its waters extended far, yet there was a belief prevailing amidst the
uneducated, that the sudden shock produced by suddenly plunging
an insane person into water was most effective in producing a return
to reason.
On one occasion, a woman of weak mind, who was suffering
under the influence of a religious monomania, consulted me on the
benefit she might hope to receive from electricity. The burden of her
ever-melancholy tale was, that “she had lost her God;” and she told

me, with a strange mixture of incoherence and reason, that her
conviction was that a sudden shock would cure her. She had herself
proposed to her husband and friends that they should take her to a
certain rock on St Michael’s Mount, stand her on it, with her back to
the sea, when “the waters were the strongest, at the flowing of the
tide;” and after having prayed with her, give her the necessary blow
on the chest, and thus plunge her into the waters below. I know not
that the experiment was ever made in the case of this poor woman,
but I have heard of several instances where this sudden plunge had
been tried as a cure for insanity.
Mr T. Q. Couch thus describes the present condition of this well in
a paper on “Well-Worship:”—
[21]
“On the western side of the beautiful valley through which flows
the Trelawney River, and near Hobb’s Park, in the parish of Pelynt,
Cornwall, is St Nun’s, or St Ninnie’s Well. Its position was, until lately,
to be discovered by the oak-tree matted with ivy, and the thicket of
willow and bramble which grew upon its roof. The front of the well is
of a pointed form, and has a rude entrance about four feet high, and
spanned above by a single flat stone, which leads into a grotto with
arched roof. The walls on the interior are draped with luxuriant
fronds of spleenwort, hart’s tongue, and a rich undercovering of
liverwort. At the further end of the floor is a round granite basin,
with a deeply moulded brim, and ornamented on its circumference
with a series of rings, each enclosing a cross or a ball. The water
weeps into it from an opening at the back, and escapes again by a
hole in the bottom. This interesting piece of antiquity has been
protected by a tradition which we could wish to attach to some of
our cromlechs and circles in danger of spoliation.”
According to the narrative given by Mr Bond in his “History of
Looe,” the sacred protection given must have been limited in time,
as the following story will prove:—

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Brazil In Transition Beliefs Leadership And Institutional Change Lee J Alston

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