Soft Wax.
Certainly foreign influences and a half-education are extremely dangerous in Portugal. In many parts of the country the people is still unspoilt, and the demagogue and politician appear like a bull in a china shop, with vast possibilities of damage and destruction. Portugal is but a little wax, wrote the novelist Eça de Queiroz (1843-1900). The Portuguese people is “soft wax” repeated Snr. Guerra Junqueiro in 1896: “What we need is a great sculptor.” The history of Portugal has been the history of a few great men who have passed on the torch of her glories from century to century, a Nun’ Alvares, the soldier-saint, or the splendid Affonso d’Albuquerque, who often found it as difficult to cope with his own followers as with the enemy in the East. But for all that Portugal is a land of strongly-rooted and noble traditions, and these the required sculptor must take into account if he is to be successful in his task. It would be wrong to infer that the anonymous mass that forms the background to those great figures of the past is characterless. For, beneath the apathy, the docility, the contradictions of the Portuguese people remains something perhaps not very easy to define, but which has an intimate peculiar flavour, something pliant, adaptable, insinuating but with a real will and persistency of its own. Potential, it may be, rather than actual, but certainly a sound and promising basis for growth and development, if properly directed.
“What is urgent,” to quote again Snr. Guerra Junqueiro, “is not a social or a political but a moral revolution.” “Quant à la moralité,” wrote M. Léon Poinsard later, in 1910, “elle semble plutôt en voie de diminuer” (Le Portugal Inconnu). A few years earlier a Lisbon newspaper, O Diario de Noticias, in a leading article (16th September, 1902) deplored the podridão moral of Portuguese society, the “perversão de caracteres e desbragamento dos costumes politicos.” Such remarks apply usually to Lisbon rather than to Portugal as a whole. In village life, considering the circumstances, the absolute lack of direction, the landed gentry absentee, the authority of the priest undermined, morality may be said to stand remarkably high. And the great mass of the Portuguese people is, emphatically, désorienté rather than degenerate. They would answer readily—yes, even Beckford’s Lisbon canaille—to a leader capable of leading something more than a pack of yelping political parasites.
The Portuguese at Home.
It must always be remembered that the foreigner often views the Portuguese at his worst, in an artificial atmosphere, rarely in his natural life and surroundings. He seldom has occasion to see him in his home life, in which the real affectionateness of his nature is evident, nor to realise the nobility and delicacy of his dreams and ideals which are so often shattered by harsh reality, and the genuine kindliness which proves that his politeness and courtesy are not merely superficial. If they have not the immediate attraction of some other nations, they prove, on longer acquaintance, to be a people not only pleasant but of a real good-nature, of a child-like simplicity beneath their vanity, and with a certain strength and determination for all their apparent pliancy. Intensely susceptible and easily driven by rudeness and violence into furtive, hypocritical and vindictive tactics, they answer with extreme goodwill to any show of friendliness and respect. If they are capable rather of occasional heroic actions than of securing a gradual prosperity, they are nevertheless a people peculiarly gifted, under proper guidance, to achieve what, presumably, is the end to which modern civilisation aspires—a state of peace and culture with ever-widening and deepening international relations. Only, of course, such relations can never be set on a satisfactory basis by sacrificing anything that is genuinely Portuguese. For a nation can hardly look for respect which has nothing of its own to offer, and prides itself exclusively on its foreign imitations. And the Portuguese of all peoples will find their best models in their own past history and literature. Voltaire, not a bad judge in the matter of wit, called the Portuguese “une nation spirituelle,” and, in spite of all their national misfortunes, a witty nation they remain. It will be well if their wit be directed not to pull down national customs and institutions, but—as by many writers of the sixteenth century—against those who ape foreign manners.
CHAPTER II
POPULATION AND EMPLOYMENT
Census of 1911.
The latest census of the population, that is, the returns at the end of the year 1911,[1] presents some interesting figures. This is the fifth census taken in Portugal. The first, in 1864, gave the population as 4,118,410, in the census of 1878 it was 4,698,984, of 1890 5,049,729, and of 1900 5,423,132. That of 1911 gives a population of 5,960,056. Thus, in fifty years the population of Portugal has increased by nearly a third, and, although something must be allowed for the more accurate returns in recent years, is evidently in no danger of diminishing, in spite of increasing emigration. Moreover, there are no less than 211,813 families (over a seventh of the whole number, 1,411,327) of seven or more persons.
Increasing Population.