I have said that the ideas of the United States and Portugal are similar. But the pressing needs of Portugal are a competent administration, public order and social discipline, which Germany possesses to a remarkable degree, and admiration of these has laid Portuguese Conservatives open to the charge of being pro-German. Many of them judge from experience that the desiderata I refer to cannot be secured in a democracy, while a few of them have gone so far as to desire a German triumph, because they foolishly thought that the Kaiser would restore the monarchy. None of them, I think, sympathize with German methods; but they have suffered from a century of revolutions, dating from 1820, and attribute these disasters to the anti-Christian ideas of the French Revolution. In America that great movement had beneficent results, as I understand, which only shows that one man's drink is another's poison.
Divergent ideals and other considerations led Portuguese Conservatives to throw their influence into the scale in favor of neutrality, but now that their country is at war they have accepted the fact and can be trusted to do their duty. At the front political and other differences are forgotten and the soldiers, whatever their creed, are honoring the warlike traditions of their race and reminding us of the days when Wellington spoke of Portuguese troops as the "fighting-cocks" of his army.
By organizing with great efforts and sending a properly trained and equipped expeditionary force to France, the Government of the Republic has deserved well of the country and the Allies, and I believe that it has unconsciously been the agent of Divine Providence. The men, when they return will bring with them a firmer religious faith, the foundation of national well-being, and a higher standard of conduct than prevails here at present; they may well prove the regenerators of a land which all who know it learn to love, a land, the past achievements of whose sons in the cause of Christianity and civilization are inscribed on the ample page of history. Portugal which produced so many saints and heroes, which founded the sea road to India and discovered and colonized Brazil, cannot be allowed longer to vegetate, for this in the case of a country means to die.
[signed] Edgar Prestage
Roumania
An Interpretation
A Serbian politician, conversing with a traveler from Western Europe, mentioned the words "a nice national balance;" and when the other, bored to death with the everlasting wrangle of the turbulent Balkans, tried to lead the conversation to Shakespeare and the Musical Glasses, away from Macedonia and Albania and "komitadjis" and Kotzo-Vlachs, the Serbian remarked with a laugh that the nice national balance of which he was speaking was not political, but economic and social.
"You see," he said, "we Serbians are born peasants, born agriculturists, men of the glebe and the plow. The Roumanian, on the other hand, is a born financier. Gold comes to his hand like fish to bait. He comes to Serbia to make money—and he makes it."
"But," said the Western European, "isn't that rather hard on the
Serbian?"
"No! Not a bit! For it is the young Serbian who marries the
Roumanian's daughter, and the young Serbian girl who marries the
Roumanian's son. Thus the Serbian money, earned by the Roumanian,
is still kept in the country. You know," he added musingly, "the
Roumanians are a singularly handsome, a singularly engaging people.
I myself married a Roumanian."