THE PORTUGUESE PEOPLE

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 207, 10 December 1910, Page 9

THE PORTUGUESE PEOPLE

BRAZILIAN INFLUENCES. REPUBLICAN IDEAS. It is the custom in the domestic economy of Portuguese families (writes a correspondent to an English newspaper) that one boy shall become a priest and another a Brazilian. As race suicide is not one of the troubles that threaten the little nation, there is no serious obstacle to the observance of this custom. Perhaps it is getting on the wane as regards the priesthood for the youth of the land leans nowadays to the material side, but it holds still good as regards the Brazilian, despite all the fines and hindrances the Government has set up against the emigration of the young. The movement that now disturbs Portugal, and has surprised foreigners into a'sking what can be the matter, has behind it as the prime factor the existence of the returned Brazilian. He is not a protagonist in the political fight, but bin prosperity and the ideas he has brought back with him have captured the fancy of the younger generation. When man) Portuguese believe they are seeing the beginning of the fluctuation of Canning's historical dictum of a hundred ! years ago when South American States emerged politically into the light, namely, that a new world had been called into existence to redress the balance of the old. The hopeful ones are looking to new Brazil to redress old Portugal. A frequent remark of the professional person who is the inspirer of young Republicans is: "We are a Republican people; only a Republic is impossible in Portugal." Most of the other well-to-do middlemen public talk in the same key. "I'm a Republican; all our own intelligent people are; but in Portugal a Republic is impossible." For a small country there is in Portugal a remarkable diversity, even antagonism, of local sentiment. The northern provinces, which look to Oporto as their centre, are still dominated by the Celtic spirit. Their people have the Celtic apti- ■ tude for causing political commotion, some of the Celtic quickness of brain, and more than the Celtic untidiness and want of method. In the south there is a placid population, rather languid and melancholy, and easy to govern. It is mtich more akin to the peasantry of central Spain, with a strain of the Moorish and the African. In appearance the south is surprisingly tropical. It is a land of wide white sandy siverbeds, with a mere rivulet of water trickling through them even in early summer;,,almost no, bird life or game of other sort, for there is no cover; humble, burned-looking dwellings for man and cattle, with low, over-lapping lid roofs to give a little of the shade that the nearly leafless trees refuse. At the end of June the main occupation seemed to be stripping the bark, half a foot thick, of the cork trees, which abound in sparsely planted groves. The men, like their goats and oxen, are small and quiet. The women are rather bigger, mostly built on sturdy lines, and are employed at everything, from signalling trains to breaking stones on the roadside. They go barefoot on all occasions, but, on the fete days, which are frequent even for a thoroughly Catholic country, they make up for it with an overwhelming load of handkerchiefs and earrings.

fn his dress the Portuguese man of leisure keeps to the quaint taste of oldfashioned hacienda melodrama. The pattern of his colored shirt is usually rather overpowering, nor is he afraid to please his untamed fancy when he picks his pattern for a summer suit. And yet withal he is rather a mild, depressed, undecided sort of man. Even Spain, which is still in a rather humble and contrite mood, weighs on him by her greatness. He doesn't think Portugal will do anything startling, because the Spanish Government would not approve. Even the Republican movement is suspected because of the fear that the disappearance of Porugal's separate dynasty would bf the removal of the chief safeguard of her separate national existence.

Still more do the Portuguese cling to the century-old notion that internationally their country is a sort of dependency on England. It was in the memorable Methuen treaty with England that Portugal found herself caught most characteristically asleep. England, then at war with France, pro-, mised in the good olcl port-drinking days that she would take all her red wines from Portugal. There was, in fact, no other place in the wide world where she could get them. In return she asked far and got from Portugal a binding contract not to start any manufacturing industry but to import everything of the kind from England. Portugal is suffering from the Methuen treaty to this day economically, and even politically. It has done her permanent harm by destroying confidence in hei capacity to drive an international bargain. And yet these same Portuguese have an amazing megalomania in the way of arithmetic. It is literally true that thev count horses by their feet, and not by their heads. They tell me that the carriage is waiting, and I ask what sort of carriage. "Eight horses," is the answer; but it is no such sore of circus equipage; simply a two-horse conveyance. They say the crowd was dispersed bv fifty horsemen; that means a dozen. They number every window and door in the house. Suppose it be a hovel store, whose ware are of the kind one sees on push-carts elsewhere, and are here* displayed in niches in the wall, each window and door has its own number; and the entire establishment is described as, say, 71 to 79 such-and-sueh street.