CHAPTER I

PORTUGAL

The motherland of Brazil is Portugal. Profound as were the changes incident to transplanting a people to a virgin continent; notwithstanding Spanish dominion and Dutch conquests; large as were the admixtures of negro, Indian, and alien blood; in spite of independence and Republicanism; the language, customs, religion, and laws of Brazil are to-day substantially like those of Portugal.

The parallel between the United States and Britain is not closer. Brazil has diverged even less than her model. Her population may have a larger admixture of non-Portuguese blood than the North Americans have of non-British, but politically there was less opportunity for divergence, for Brazil was kept under much closer subordination. The discovery of Brazil coincided with the destruction of popular liberties in the mother-country. Thereafter, the Portuguese government was a centralised despotism, and its hand lay heavy on the Brazilian provinces. They were forbidden intercourse with the rest of the world; functionaries of every kind were continually imported; the provinces never dreamed of asserting any right to self-government; from the beginning the system was centralising and stifling. The North American colonies of England were left to grow up by themselves; they were never under a colonial government properly so called; a revolt followed the first serious attempt to subject them to a real colonial régime. But the independence of Brazil came because liberties were finally granted, not because they were threatened to be taken away. The country remained under a tutelage, growing continually more rigorous, and which ceased only after the Portuguese monarch had fled from Lisbon and the colony had become greater than the mother-country.

OUTLINE MAP OF BRAZIL

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It is, therefore, in the little peninsular kingdom, during the centuries before Cabral caught sight of the South American coast, that we must look for the beginnings of Brazil. Rome gave to Portugal laws, language, religion, and architecture; the forests of Germany modified her political institutions; the Saracens gave her the arts, navigation, and material civilisation. Her happy geographical position near the Straits of Gibraltar made her the meeting-place for the Mohammedan and Christian religions—of Levantine civilisation with Teutonic barbarism and liberty. That position also enabled the qualities of daring and enterprise and the scientific knowledge acquired in centuries of long conflicts and intercourse with the Moors to be turned to immediate advantage when the Renaissance came. Portugal was the pioneer of Europe in discovery and colonisation, though Spain followed close after. Together they led in making Western European civilisation dominant beyond seas. The nations who followed in their track have long since passed them, but Portugal had once the opportunity of spreading her influence and institutions over half the planet. In Brazil she mixed success with the failure that was her fate elsewhere. Brazil is to-day the nation which has inherited Roman civilisation in the least modified form, and is the country where the genuine Latin spirit has the best opportunity for growth and survival.

The study of Portugal takes on a new dignity and importance when we reflect that she has given language, institutions, and laws to half of South America and to a population that already outnumbers her own four to one. She is entitled to the interest of the world if only because she has placed her indelible imprint on a region which is as large as Europe and as fertile as Java, and which is destined within the next two centuries to support the largest population of any of the great political divisions of the globe.

In the twelfth century, the coalescence of a fragment of the kingdom of Leon with the Moorish territory near the mouth of the Tagus originated Portugal as a separate country. The race was very mixed. Its principal elements were the Leonese and the Mosarabes—the latter being the Christians of Moorish Portugal left undisturbed from Visigothic times by their tolerant Mohammedan conquerors. Each of these elements was, in its turn, of mixed origin. To the original Iberian population, which had occupied the Peninsula two thousand years before the Christian era, had been successively added Phenicians, Greeks, Celts, Ligurians, Carthaginians, Latins,—and in Roman times,—officials, soldiers, and slaves from all over the empire, including many Jews. The long Roman dominion welded all these together into a homogeneous mass. Later, the Visigothic conquest added a large Teutonic contingent, which is especially evident in northern and Leonese Portugal. Still later, the Saracens intermarried in considerable numbers with the Mosarabes of southern Portugal. After the formation of the modern kingdom, another element was added in the French, Provençals, Flemings, and English who came in large numbers to aid in the final expulsion of the Moors. By the end of the fourteenth century, the Portuguese had become a distinct nation. Racial and religious tolerance were more advanced than in the rest of Europe; self-governing municipalities covered the greatest part of the country, each privileged within a definite territory. The nobles, prelates, and monastic and military orders were still privileged, and their property was not subject to tribute, but their power was not predominant. The king was chief of the army and the proprietor of a very considerable proportion of the land, but he was under constant pressure to grant it to the religious orders and to the nobles. The people were everywhere heavily taxed—in the municipalities and Crown lands by the king, and on the estates of the privileged orders for the benefit of their great proprietors. The nobles were under no enforceable obligation to perform military service. A great general deliberative and representative assembly—the Cortes—had come into being when the monarchy was founded. It included representatives of the municipalities as well as nobles and clergy, and its importance and vitality are shown by the fact that from 1250 to 1376 it met twenty-five times. By the latter date, jurisprudence had become generalised and its administration had fallen into the hands of the Crown. The nation had developed out of local and class privilege a reasonably consistent and uniform administration. The municipalities were the basis of the governmental structure, and a rude but effective local self-government existed through their instrumentality. The norm for the centralisation and organisation had not been, as in nearly all the rest of Europe, the feudal system, but the surviving fragments of the Roman structure. To the municipalities was largely due the astonishing vigour shown by the Portuguese people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The norm even survived the destruction of liberty, and its influence can be seen in every step of the subsequent development of Portugal and also of Brazil.