Portugal of the Portuguese

by Aubrey F. G. Bell

The Financial Situation.

The statement made to Parliament by the new Finance Minister, Snr. Antonio Vicente Ferreira in November, concerning the financial situation did not mend matters. He admitted that the finances were in a most serious state, and that the deficit would be enormous. “As there can be no doubt,” said O Seculo (4th December, 1912), “that waste is going on, and indeed increasing precisely when it seemed that it should have disappeared, the logical and irrefutable conclusion is: The politicians of the Republic are personally as honest as may be, but as administrators of the public finances they rank with what was bad in the administration under the Monarchy. Is this due to discreditable concessions? to weakness or cowardice? We do not know.”

Dr. Costa in Power.

The Government was demissionario before the end of the year, and after a fortnight of attempts to constitute a moderate Government, Dr. Affonso Costa was sent for by the President and on the 9th of January formed, with a ministry of nonentities, the fifth government of the Republic.[69] This Democrat Ministry maintained itself in office for a little over a year, and during that time some of the worst elements of the Republic were in clover. O Mundo, under the editorship of Snr. França Borges, now became an official organ, and made full use of its new opportunities. In its inquisitorial ardour it spared not even the impartial and moderate Diario de Noticias nor the distinguished poet who was serving the Republic as its Minister in Berne, Snr. Guerra Junqueiro, nor the President of the Republic, nor any moderate person. The Carbonarios, moreover, knew that whatever they did would be supported by the Government, and the Government, by organising new groups of Carbonarios in its special service, saw to it that whatever they did should benefit the Democrat party. The Democrats, the Carbonarios and the Mundo formed a trinity which came very near to being as disastrous to the Republic as, according to the Democrats, the “august trinity of Braganças, Jesuits and English” had been disastrous to Portugal. Dr. Costa, when Premier, declared that he agreed with every word written in O Mundo. It is the creed of the Democrats that outside the Republic there are no Portuguese, and outside the Democrat party there are no Republicans. Those who do not belong to the Democrat party can, therefore, scarcely be good Republicans.

Bombs and Risings.

Yet it became impossible in 1913 to continue to ascribe all disturbances to the Royalists. The movements of April and July of that year and the bomb thrown at the procession in honour of Camões on the 10th of June, killing and wounding several persons, were the work of Anarchist and Radical Republican elements. Yellow badges inscribed with the letters R.R. (Republica Radical) were freely distributed, and the number of bombs manufactured in Lisbon was so great that even the Republicans who had exalted the bomb as the instrument of liberty, began to like it less when it was directed against themselves. Well-intentioned Republicans were exhorted to give up the bombs in their possession, and after July hundreds of bombs were thus daily delivered voluntarily or discovered by the police in Lisbon. The Mundo, which continued to harp on the time-honoured theme that the bomb-throwers were Jesuits, must have failed to convince even the most enthusiastic of its readers. Obviously from the point of view of the Republic, Royalist conspiracies were far preferable to these plots and disturbances within the very bosom of the Republic.

Crowded Prisons.

As early as February, 1913, on the day after Snr. Machado Santos’ Amnesty Bill had been discussed in Parliament, the Alta Venda of the Carbonarios had posted up a notice in the streets of Lisbon, warning citizens that the Royalists were actively conspiring. Rigorous vigilance, said the notice, is needed; all Portuguese worthy of the name must be at their posts to destroy the miserable plots of the reactionaries. The warning, subsequently explained Snr. Luz Almeida, head of the Carbonarios, was dictated by fear of “the wave of false generosity which was invading the spirit of sincere Republicans.” In other words, there had been serious talk of an amnesty for the political prisoners with which the prisons throughout the country had been crowded since the proclamation of the Republic. In December, 1912, the President addressed a letter to the Government in favour of an amnesty for the prisoners and the recall of the bishops. The Government did not see its way to grant either, but in the following October, on the third anniversary of the Republic, a pardon (indulto) was given to some three hundred among the uneducated prisoners of the Penitenciarias, who sought it as a favour. The injustice was manifest, especially as it was not among the uneducated classes that persons were most likely to have been arrested and imprisoned merely for their Royalist opinions. The “defenders of the Republic” did not intend the cells thus vacant in the Penitenciarias to be left long unoccupied, and they were to be filled by persons of higher social importance than the released peasants.

Movement of October, 1913.

The “Royalist movement” of October, 1913, was prepared by means of agents provocateurs, with the object of making a clean sweep of all those suspected of being unfriendly to the Republic who were not yet in prison. The most celebrated of these agents, Homero de Lencastre, succeeded in securing the arrest of the Conde de Mangualde and other Royalists, and the movement thus organised became a pretext for arresting Royalists by the score. The proof of the existence of the Royalist movement consisted chiefly in these arrests. The first and last items on the programme of the “White Ants” and Carbonarios were—arrests. The Lisbon police had not been taken into the confidence of these unofficial defenders of the Republic. In the words of the head of the Lisbon police himself: “Neither the Minister of the Interior nor the Civil Governor ever gave the Lisbon police any definite information concerning the ‘conspiracy,’ with which the Oporto police, it was said, was acquainted in all its details. Only vague words: ‘A great affair,’ ‘we are on a volcano,’ ‘the men are working bravely,’ and so forth. Certain indications were received from the police at Oporto, but these indications were very vague: ‘Many people compromised,’ ‘over four hundred officers have signed documents with their own blood,’ and so forth.” Muita gente compromettida: there in three words is the raison d’être of the October “Royalist conspiracy” which succeeded in overcrowding the prisons throughout the country till the Amnesty Bill was passed in the following February. Snr. Azevedo Coutinho almost alone succeeded in escaping, on board an English boat, to the extreme mortification of the Carbonarios.