1.3.24
For several weeks just recently I was cut off from Britain and America and most of the things that interest me in the world by a postal strike in Portugal. It was an original sort of strike. The little dears went to their offices and so forth, and just did nothing until the Government kept a promise to raise salaries. Telegrams and letters coagulated in masses that are still incompletely dissolved. Some of the more humorous of the strikers mixed up the letters, and delivered considerable numbers at the wrong addresses, where many perished miserably. Meanwhile I read the Lisbon Diario de Noticias, which has about as much foreign news as the West Sussex Gazette, and meditated on Portugal. To which country I had come, by the by, because it was within three days’ post of England and a most convenient cable centre.
Portugal has a climate that is always interesting and generally delightful. It has its wild phases of sea-wind and passionate rain, and then the only thing to do here at Estoril—except work—is to go to the western headlands and see the green Atlantic waves hit the cliffs and explode into vast mountains of sunlit foam. And to get caught and drenched by a rainstorm, and so home. Or the north wind blows, and usually it is the north wind that blows, and then the air is as keen and sweet as Alpine air and the sky is blazing blue. The flowers are astonishing. There is purple iris in all the water courses; the banks are alive with periwinkle and tall spikes of antirrhinum; in the woods are endless scillas and rock roses. The other day I walked over a shrubby moorland and there I came upon a great multitude of upstanding clumps of a sort of white heather, rather big and round with the tips and shadows just tinged with pink, and everywhere among these clumps there crept a gentian-blue flower—lithospermum I think it is. And not a soul was there to appreciate this lavish loveliness except myself and another chance wanderer from the beaten track.
Wet or fine, the air of Portugal has a natural happiness in it, and the people of the country should be as happy and prosperous as any people in the world. The country has a magnificent position, and great overseas possessions. Lisbon is the natural port of Europe for South America and West Africa. The olive and the orange and such-like things can be grown here under the best conditions. The very various and great, though largely undeveloped, mineral wealth includes radioactive deposits of world-wide importance. And so forth. There is indeed all the material here for great prosperity. As a matter of fact, I have never seen a less prosperous-looking nation. Great poverty prevails throughout this land. I have never seen anywhere, not even in Russia, working people so ill-clad, so patched and ragged, so manifestly neglected and under-nourished. And there is also a vast amount of preventable disease. The women are old at thirty, bearing children to die; the men are bent at fifty. The poorer houses are hovels, and half the population is illiterate. And yet it is not a low-grade population. It is varied in type and complexion, but there is a conspicuously high proportion of intelligent and interesting faces, and the manners of the people have much of that geniality of the air they breathe.
Why is this country so conspicuously poor? Why are its roads so abominable that even between this prosperous pleasure resort of Estoril and Lisbon, a dozen miles away, an automobile journey is a dangerous adventure? Why are my letters and cables decaying in the Lisbon post-office, and why does everyone say that things are going from bad to worse, and hope for such violent remedies as a dictatorship? In no part of Europe is the riddle of European decay posed so plainly as it is here in this setting of windy sunshine and gay colour and natural wealth.
The full answer to that riddle so far as it concerns Portugal would involve a long history. But certain broad operating causes may be noted. All Europe suffers from division, but it is in the smaller countries that the evils of division are most apparent. The smaller the country the nearer the Custom House and the more hampered the trade. Lisbon might be one of the greatest ports of Europe as Beira in Portuguese Africa might be the chief port of South Africa, but for this, that a little way behind each is a national frontier with a strangulating Custom House. No goods or passengers will endure the present railway journey through Spain and Portugal if they can find another way to the high seas. The railways are necessarily short little railways and they are inefficient. And every sort of transport, and indeed every concern depending upon organised labour, is further troubled by another consequence of the sub-division of Europe. The money is unstable. Portugal, like every proud little sovereign State, must, of course, have its own currency. Anything else would be unthinkable to the patriotic Portuguese. But the currency of so small a country is at the mercy of big speculative interests abroad. The recent postal strike turned entirely upon the readjustment of wages to rising prices. That is the common issue in nearly all European labour struggles now, but it produces its acutest conflicts in the weaker countries.
The railways of Portugal are in a very bad condition and the roads are frightful. Everywhere there are the visible evidences of incompetent or corrupt administration. A little country like this, with an unstable currency, cannot keep its popular education up to date; there is not a sufficient reading public therefore to sustain an authoritative Press and literature of political criticism. Ministers are not sufficiently watched. And as to the things that happen in the overseas possessions of Portugal one can hardly learn anything at all from the Portuguese Press. No “public opinion” seems to be watching them at all. There is a distraction of interest to other centres. Portuguese who grow rich in the Portuguese possessions bank and invest their money abroad, chiefly in London; there is a perpetual outgoing of this tribute from the Portuguese empire to the stabler, greater States. Nowhere else in Europe has one so strong a feeling of a country in pawn to capital held abroad.
It seems to me that the full exercise of national sovereignty in Portugal lies at the root of all its present troubles. It is a convenient specimen, so to speak, of the universal European disease: the attempt to treat what are now only parts of a system as though they were still complete wholes. Its absolute independence, instead of securing its people the full benefits of freedom and all the material possibilities of the land, is the very thing that keeps the country dependent upon big international financial and business interests. If Portugal, instead of standing alone with its colonies to fight the financial and economic forces of the world, were part of a combine of States, acting together politically, financially, and economically, it would be in a far better case than it is at the present time. I have no doubt in my own mind that if Portugal were a free State in a larger union in which sovereignty was sufficiently merged to ensure a common currency, a common inter-State traffic control, free trade at least within the union, common labour conditions, and a common front to the speculative forces that are destroying Europe, her outlook would be vastly different from what it is to-day. She would very speedily cease to be a land of slovenly and increasingly inaccessible loveliness, and her people would no longer be the most lamentably wasted nation in Europe.
And I do not see that such a union is a very remote or improbable thing. A congress of Latin Pressmen has recently been held in Lisbon, and beneath a turbid flow of compliments and flatteries there were many signs of a real and practical recognition of the possibility of, and the enormous material advantages of, a federation of Latin Europe and Latin America. There seems to be a growing recognition in Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, and Latin America of the essential similarity of the Latin civilisation in all this wide patchwork of States. It may lead sooner than English-speaking people expect to practical political co-operation. From the point of view of world civilisation all such agglomerations of States, that will gradually relax the intensity of nationalist concentration, are desirable and welcome developments.