O Seculo in a leading article said (5th November, 1911): “We must confess that the transformation of the old methods has not attained the required extent. There seems to be a wish to continue a life of personal politics.” The famous rotativism of the Monarchy, by which parties succeeded one another to power without any reference to the country, and with but little reference to its nominal representatives in Parliament, did not cease with the Revolution. “Nefarious rotativism is still with us,” said O Seculo a year later.
Sincere Republicans.
A Republica, a year later again (18th October, 1912) remarked in a leading article: “The truth is that, in two years of Republic, political cabals, persecutions, the boldness of the incompetent, the unscrupulousness of the ambitious, the indiscipline of nearly everyone, and the cowardice of the greater number, have prevented the Republic from entering frankly upon a system of careful administration.... We are continuing the system of mere words which was our glory in opposition but is our disgrace in power.” And a little later (24th March, 1913): “The country is tired. It is tired especially of the enormous lie that we have given it, as it looks upon a Republic which taxes arbitrarily, arrests and persecutes arbitrarily, governs and administers arbitrarily.” “We are living in anarchy as regards administration,” said Dr. Brito Canacho in A Lucta a month later. And Senhor Machado Santos, one of the founders of the Republic, soon found that the Republic did not answer to his dreams, and was not slow to say so in his newspaper, O Intransigente: “The Republic is very different from what the people had imagined, and as a result the majority has relapsed into indifference, while others, passing the limits of all reason, beat the record of petty and passionate politics” (3rd November, 1911). “Politics under the Monarchy brought the Portuguese nation to ruin, and politics under the Republic instead of being completely different, has adopted the old methods,” and “in fourteen months has done more harm than fourteen years of politics during the Monarchy” (13th December, 1911).
Disillusion.
The peasants had remained indifferent from the first, where they were not secretly hostile to the Republic, but the workmen of the towns, or more accurately, of Lisbon, were bitterly disappointed. They noted “the enormous difference” between the words and deeds of the Republicans and that “everything is now sacrificed to the creeping politics of the bourgeois, who above the interests of the country set the ambitions of their politicians” (A Voz do Operario, 1st December, 1912). The Socialists reserved for themselves the right to “adopt the revolutionary methods so freely advocated formerly by the Republicans.”
GENERAL VIEW, VILLA REAL
Remedies.
It will be seen from the above quotations that Republicans have acknowledged that politics before the Revolution and politics after the Revolution were as much alike as the names of Muppim and Huppim, those sons of Benjamin. Sincere Republicans admit it; it is more difficult to find a remedy. When education has done its work these party groups may possibly, no doubt, broaden out into political parties with real root in the country, but it will be a process of centuries. And meanwhile, unfortunately, the Republicans, dissatisfied with the results of the Revolution, have recourse to a different remedy—more revolution—and try to cure themselves with a hair of the dog that has bitten them. Decentralisation, of course, is incompatible with the government by personal groups at Lisbon in the name of the nation. The new administrative code, if it is willing to take power from the mayors, is not willing to give it to the municipal bodies. Whatever authority is taken from the mayors is given not to locally elected corporations, but to other officials, mere instruments and offshoots of the central power. And indeed Portugal is scarcely ready yet for local autonomy. It is not ready for the parliamentary system, and the scrupulous care with which it and all constitutional forms are observed sometimes increases instead of diminishes the difficulty of a situation. The hope is that by maintaining the forms strictly, they will gradually become a living system instead of an empty framework, but that hope is indefinitely deferred owing to the number of political groups and the virulence of their personal animosities and ambitions.