ANARCHY IN LISBON.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 989, 2 December 1910, Page 5

ANARCHY IN LISBON.

... tf —-T—-' .. ■. GOVERNMENT POWERLESS; STRIKES OCCUR DAILY. By Tekera'ph—Press AESOciation-Ooryrinat Lisbon,. November 30. The city is rapidly, approaching a state of. anarchy. The most potent force is labour, which U dictating to Government and employers. Strikes' are of daily occurrence,, and. the Government is 'powerless to intervene. Recruiting of Angola'natives, for tho cocoa plantation? of the Island of San Thome will henceforth be entrusted to the Government administration, instead of to private'agents, as' heretofore. ■ Lisbon, November 30. 'A party of sailors landed from a Portuguese gunboat at , Macao, tho Portuguese .settlement'on the Canton Rivor, China, and, joined by soldiers, marched to Government House and demanded increased pay, the expulsion of the religious orders, and tho suppressing of a local newspaper.. The two latter demands were complied with. . , :" No one (writes a "Diplomatic Correspondent" of tho "Daily Mail," apropos of the situation in Portugal). has yet fully assessed the evil which has flowed from Great Britain's success in administering the constitutional, and parliamentary syEtem. From about .1780 to 1870 Europe was obsessed with an admiration for tho British Constitution. The most diverse countries—countries just emerging from political slavery, countries that had never known and never'. cared to know anything but the . direct,' rulership of a single head—copied the British system, not because it suited their temperament but simply because it was the fashion and stood for "progress," and was supposed to be the last word in the art and science of politics. In. Portugal especially the indispensable condition o£ democracy is wanting—tho people are abjectly ignorant and illiterate. Put tho most delicate and complex instrument of government that has yet been dcfised in tho hands of a nation threefourths, perhaps four-fifths, of which can neither rea"d nor write, whose history during the. past three centuries has been, one of political coma,- absolutism, and military revolutions, and which has tried to bridge in a single'day the enormous gulf between autocracy and self-govern-' ment—and the result cannot be anything but catastrophic. It is really the abandonment o£ all rational use of language to speak of constitutionalism as having ever existed in Portugal.'. Democracy, there as in Spain, has proved woiso thnn a farce; it has developed into an olaborato and well-nigh impenetrable conspiracy against the commonweal. ,