Portugal of the Portuguese

by Aubrey F. G. Bell

Internal Floating Debt.

A writer in 1908 remarked that “If only the Government could cease to have recourse to the floating debt agriculture in Portugal would be able to obtain the cheap capital which it needs.” But the Republic has added thousands of contos yearly to the internal floating debt, and capital has greater inducement than ever to flee from agriculture in order to provide State loans. Here a radical change was required. Nor will Dr. Costa’s property-tax benefit agriculture. It is more likely to increase emigration. The docile peasants of Portugal, if they find the conditions of their life becoming harder and more precarious, do not think of protesting. A few conflicts have occurred between peasants and the Republican Guard, and the villagers have armed themselves with scythes and pitchforks to protect their churches in the North. But mostly they emigrate, leaving the political parties at Lisbon to devise and squabble over intricate and theoretical measures of legislation.

Facts of Twofold Import.

But there is a reverse and more promising side to all this. That Lisbon politics are Lisbon politics, and are not genuinely Portuguese politics, but a foreign froth on the surface of the sleeping nation, that the majority of Portuguese cannot read or write, that many of those who can read and write are perfectly indifferent to politics, are all facts of twofold import, since, however deplorable in themselves, they imply that the Portuguese people has not yet had fair trial, and that it may well have a future before it. The character of the peasants outside the immediate influence of Lisbon has many sterling qualities. The problem consists in educating them without depriving them of their qualities, in civilisation without the demoralising effect of great cities; and indeed in the coming age of rapid communications city life will no doubt be largely a thing of the past. The educated Portuguese of Lisbon, far gone in introspective analysis and pessimism, is inclined readily to believe that the Portuguese are a dying and decadent race; but the truer view is that the Portuguese nation is still unborn. It may make its mark on history in future centuries as a few individual Portuguese did in the fifteenth and sixteenth. The future of the nation is, perhaps fortunately, not bound up with that of the Democrats, as the Democrats would have us believe, for the Portuguese nation with a future is precisely all that part of the population which has remained indifferent to the Republican creed, and has not been affected by Republican promises.

A STUDY IN COSTUMES

Natural Reaction.

It appears even that the educated youth (as at Coimbra), in a natural reaction, is now more inclined to turn to religious and other serious questions than it was a generation ago, and it is thus doubtful whether the Republic will be able to renovate itself and whether new politicians will come forward to take the place of the three or four now in evidence.

“Un Petit Moyen.”

Talleyrand would say in a serious political crisis that there was still “un petit moyen,” meaning Talleyrand. Under the Portuguese Republic the “petit moyen” in exactly the same way has been Dr. Affonso Costa, who has Talleyrand’s presumption although he lacks his ability. Dr. Almeida and Dr. Camacho have never had the strength to take office, nor the good sense permanently to unite their parties. But since Dr. Costa has not the will or has not the courage or has not the power to do without, and indeed to crush Snr. França Borges and his Mundo, and the Carbonario satellites organised by the Democrat party since the Revolution, the outlook for the Republic is not very promising.