PORTUGAL

§ 1. The Rise and Fall of Portuguese Empire

For European history Portugal is signalised in two aspects: first, as a "made" kingdom, set up by the generating of local patriotism in a medieval population not hereditarily different from that of the rest of the Peninsula; secondly, as a small State which attained and for a time wielded "empire" on a great scale. The beginnings of the local patriotism are not confidently to be gathered from the old chronicles,[942] which reduce the process for the most part to the calculated action of the Queen Theresa (fl. 1114-28), certainly one of the most interesting female figures in history. But the main process of growth is simple enough. A series of warrior kings made good their position on the one hand against Spain, and on the other conquered what is now the southern part of Portugal (the ancient Lusitania) from the Moors. Only in a limited degree did their administration realise the gains conceivable from a differentiation and rivalry of cultures in the Peninsula; but in view of the special need for such variation in a territory open to few foreign culture-contacts, the Portuguese nationality has counted substantially for civilisation. It would have counted for much more if in the militant Catholic period the Portuguese crown had not followed the evil lead of Spain in the three main steps of setting up the Inquisition, expelling the Jews, and expelling the Moriscoes.

On the Portuguese as on the northern European coasts, seafaring commerce arose on a basis of fishing;[943] agriculturally, save as to fruits and wines, Portugal was undeveloped; and the conquered Moorish territory, handed over by the king in vast estates to feudal lords, who gave no intelligent encouragement to cultivation, long remained sparsely populated.[944] The great commercial expansion began soon after King John II, egregiously known as "the Perfect," suddenly and violently broke the power of the feudal nobility (1483-84), a blow which made the king instantly a popular favourite, and which their feudal methods had left the nobles unable to return. In the previous generation Prince Henry the Navigator had set up a great movement of maritime discovery, directed to commercial ends; and from this beginning arose the remarkable but short-lived empire of Portugal in the Indies. That stands out from the later episodes of the Dutch and British empires in that, to begin with, the movement of discovery was systematically fostered and subsidised by the crown, Prince Henry giving the lead; and that in the sequel the whole commercial fruits of the process were the crown's monopoly—a state of things as unfavourable to permanence as could well be conceived. But even under more favourable conditions, though the Portuguese empire might have overborne the Dutch, it could hardly have maintained itself against the British. The economic and military bases, as in the case of Holland, were relatively too narrow for the superstructure.

What is most memorable in the Portuguese evolution is the simple process of discovery, which was scientifically and systematically conducted in the hope of sailing round Africa to India. The list of results is worth detailing. In 1419 Perestrello discovered the island of Porto Santa; in 1420 Zarco and Vaz found Madeira, not before charted; and in the next twenty years the Canary Islands, the Azores, Santa Maria, and St. Miguel swelled the list. In 1434 Cape Bojador was doubled by Gil Eannes, and the Rio d'Ouro was reached in 1436 by Baldaya; in 1441 Nuno Tristan attained Cape Blanco; in 1445 he found the river Senegal; D. Dias reaching Guinea in the same year, and Cape Verde in 1446. From Tristan's voyage of 1441 dates the slave trade, which now gave a sinister stimulus to the process of discovery; every cargo of negroes being eagerly bought for the cheap cultivation of the Moorish lands, still poorly populated under the feudal regimen.[945] The commercial and slave-trading purpose may in part account for the piecemeal nature of the advance;[946] for it was not till 1471 that the islands of Fernando Po were discovered and the Equator crossed; and not till 1484 that Cam reached the Congo.[947] But two years later Bartholomew Dias made the rest of the way to the Cape of Good Hope, a much greater advance than had before been made in thirty years; and after a pause in the chronicles of eleven years, Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon to Calcutta. Meantime the Perfect king, preoccupied with the African route, made in 1488 his great mistake of finally dismissing Columbus from his court as a visionary. Had Portugal added the new hemisphere to her list of discoveries, it would have been stupendous indeed. As it is, this "Celtic" people, sailing in poor little vessels obviously not far developed from the primary fishing-smack, had done more for the navigation and charting of the world than all the rest of Europe besides.

And still the expansion went rapidly on; the reign of Manuel, "the Fortunate," reaping even more glory than that of his predecessor, who in turn had rewards denied to the pioneer promoter, Prince Henry. In the year 1500 Brazil was reached by Cabral, and Labrador by Corte-Real; and in 1501 Castella discovered the islands of St. Helena and Ascension. Amerigo Vespucci, whose name came into the heritage of the discovery of Columbus, explored the Rio Plata and Paraguay in 1501-3; Coutinho did as much for Madagascar and the Mauritius in 1506; Almeida in 1507 found the Maldive Islands; Malacca and Sumatra were attached by Sequiera in 1509; the Moluccas by Serrano in 1512; and the Ile de Bourbon in 1513 by Mascarenhas. In eastern Asia, again, Coelho in 1516 sailed up the coast of Cochin China and explored Siam; Andrade reached Canton in 1517 and Pekin in 1521; and in 1520 the invincible Magellan, entering the service of Spain,[948] achieved his great passage to the Pacific.[949] No such century of navigation had yet been seen; and all this dazzling enlargement of life and knowledge was being accomplished by one of the smallest of the European kingdoms, while England was laggardly passing from the point of Agincourt, by the way of the Wars of the Roses, to that of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, producing at that stage, indeed, More's Utopia, but yielding no fruits meet therefor.

When, however, there followed on the process of discovery the process of commerce, the advantages accruing to the monarchic impulse and control were absent. Always as rigidly restrictive in its pursuit of discovery and commerce as the ancient Carthaginians had been,[950] the Portuguese crown was as much more restrictive than they in its practice as an absolute monarchy is more concentrated than an oligarchy. Whatever progress was achieved by the Portuguese in India was in the way of vigorous conquest and administration by capable governors like Albuquerque (d. 1515) and Da Castro (d. 1548), of whom the first showed not only military but conciliatory capacity, and planned what might have been a triumphant policy of playing off Hindu princes against Mohammedan. But the restrictive home-policy was fatal to successful empire-building where the conditions called for the most constant output of energy. Though the Portuguese race has shown greater viability in India than either the Dutch or the English, it could not but suffer heavily from the climate in the first days of adaptation. The death-rate among the early governors is startling; and the rank and file cannot have fared much better.[951] All the while swarms of the more industrious Portuguese, including many Jews, were passing to Brazil and settling there.[952] To meet this drain there was needed the freest opening in India to private enterprise; whereas the Portuguese crown, keeping in its own hands the whole of the Indian products extorted by its governors, and forcing them to send cargoes of gratis goods for the Crown to sell, limited enterprise in an unparalleled fashion.[953] The original work of discovery and factory-planting, indeed, could not have been accomplished by Portuguese private enterprise as then developed; but the monarchic monopoly prevented its growth. The Jews had been expelled (1496), and with them most of the acquired commercial skill of the nation;[954] the nobles had become as subservient to and dependent on the throne as those of Spain were later to be; and already the curse of empire was impoverishing the land as it was to do in Spain. As was fully realised in the eighteenth century by the great Pombal,[955] the mere possession of gold mines destroyed prosperity, the imaginary wealth driving out the real; but before Portugal was ruined by her Brazilian mines she was enfeebled by the social diseases that afflicted ancient Rome. Slave labour in the Moorish provinces drove out free; the rural population elsewhere thinned rapidly under the increasing drain of the expeditions of discovery, colonisation, and conquest; and only in the rapidly increasing population of Lisbon, which trebled in eighty years, was there any ostensible advance in wealth to show for the era of empire. Even in Lisbon, by the middle of the sixteenth century, the negro slaves outnumbered the free citizens.[956] And over these conditions of economic and political decadence reigned the Inquisition.

In Portugal, as in Spain, the period of incipient political decay is the period of brilliant literature; the explanation being that in both cases middle-class and upper-class incomes were still large and the volume of trade great, there being thus an economic demand for the arts, while the administration was becoming inept and the empire weakening. In both cases, too, there was less waste of energy in war than in the ages preceding. As Lope de Vega and Calderon build up a brilliant drama after the Armada and the loss of half the Netherlands, and Velasquez is sustained by Philip IV, so Camoens writes his epic, Gil Vicente his plays, and Barros his history, in the reign of John III, when Portugal is within a generation of being annexed to Spain, and within two generations of being bereft of her Asiatic empire by the Dutch. At such a stage, when wealth still abounds, and men for lack of science are indifferent to such phenomena as multiplication of slaves and rural depopulation, a large city public can evoke and welcome literature and art. It was so in Augustan Rome. And the sequel is congruous in all cases.

The causes of the decline of the Portuguese empire are very apparent. At the best, with its narrow economic basis in home production, it would have had a hard struggle to beat off the attack of the Dutch and English; but the royal policy, reducing all Portuguese life to dependence on the throne, had withered the national energies before the Dutch attack was made. Hence the easy fall of the crown to Philip of Spain when, the succession failing, he chose to grasp it (1581): the nation had for the time lost the power of self-determination; and under the Spanish dominion the Portuguese possessions in the Indies were defended against the Dutch and English with but a moiety even of the energy that a Portuguese king might have elicited. So the imposing beginnings came well-nigh to naught, the Portuguese empire lasting in its entirety, as a trade monopoly, for just a hundred years. Within the first thirty or forty years of the seventeenth century Dutch and English, Moslems, and even Danes, had captured from Spain-ruled Portugal the Moluccas, Java, most of its Indian territory, its Persian and Chinese settlements, and much of the coast of Brazil; and the two former enemies harried at sea what Oriental trade it had kept. The rest of the Indian settlements were lost in the next generation. "Empire" had run for Portugal the usual course.

It was at this stage that the new life of the nation began. In 1640 came the successful revolt against Spain; and the Dutch power in Brazil, which had seemed decisively established under Prince Maurice of Nassau, was entirely overthrown within ten years after his recall in 1644. In Portugal the revolution was primarily the work of the nobility, exasperated by Spanish arrogance and exclusiveness; but they were effectually supported by the people for the same reason; and the state of Spain, financially decrepit and embroiled in war abroad and rebellion in Catalonia, left the new dynasty of Braganza able to maintain itself, with French help, against the clerical and other elements of pro-Spanish reaction. The overthrow of the Dutch in Brazil was almost against the new king's will, for they had at first supported him against Spain; but the movement there was as spontaneous, and fully as well justified, as the revolt at home against Spain itself.

§ 2. The Colonisation of Brazil

Brazil was and is in fact for Portugal the analogue to the North American colonies of Britain. Where "empire" was sought in the Indies as a means of revenue, savage Brazil, after the gold-seeking rush of 1530 which first raised it above the status of a penal settlement, was a colony, resorted to by men—many of them Jews—seeking freedom from the Inquisition, and men driven from the soil by slave-labour seeking land to till for their own subsistence.[957] All things considered, it has been one of the soundest processes of colonisation in history. The low state of the autochthonous inhabitants is sufficient proof of Buckle's proposition that there the combination of great heat and great moisture made impossible a successful primary civilisation, nature being too unmanageable for the natural or primitive man.[958] The much higher development of pre-European civilisation not only in Mexico and Peru but among the North American Indians[959] can be explained in no other way. But that science may not in time so exploit the natural forces as to turn them to the account of a high tertiary civilisation is an assumption we are not entitled to make, though Buckle apparently inclined to it. When he wrote, the population of Brazil was computed at six millions. To-day it stands at over twenty-three millions;[960] and in Brazil the prospect has never been reckoned otherwise than hopeful. The progress all along, relatively to the obstacles, has been so great that there is no visible ground for anticipating any arrest in the near future.

In Brazil, from the first, individual and collective energy had the chance that the royal monopoly denied to the Asiatic settlements. There was here no exigible revenue to arrange for; and the first colonists, being left to themselves, set up local self-government with elected military magistrates called captains[961]—an evolution more remarkable than any which took place in the first century of English colonisation in North America. The first governor-general sent out, Alfonso de Sousa, had the wisdom to preserve and develop the system of captaincies;[962] and colonisation went steadily on throughout the century. It was first sought, as a matter of course, to enslave the natives; but the attempt led only to a race-war such as grew up later in the New England colonies; and in the Catholic as later in the Protestant colonies resort was had to the importation of negroes, already so common as slaves in Portugal. With a much slower rate of progress, the Brazilians have in the end come much better than the North Americans out of the social diseases thus set up.

In the first place, the Jesuits had a missionary success among the aborigines such as the Puritans never approached in North America, thus eventually arresting the race-struggle and securing the native stock as an element of population—a matter of obvious importance, in view of the factor of climate. And whereas the labours of the Jesuits in India had been turned to naught by the Inquisition which they brought in their train, Brazil was by the wisdom of the early governors saved from that scourge.[963] Thus fortunately restrained by the civil power, the Jesuits did a large part of the work of civilising Brazil. So long as the stage of race-war lasted—and till far on in the seventeenth century it was chronic and murderous[964]—they strove to protect the natives whom they converted.[965] It is noteworthy, too, that just before expelling the Jesuit order from Portugal in 1759, by which time it had become a wealthy and self-seeking trading corporation in Brazil,[966] the Marquis of Pombal secured the emancipation in Brazil[967] of all the Indians who had there been enslaved as a result of the old race-wars, thus giving effect to a law which the Jesuits had got passed in 1680 without being able to enforce it against the slave-owners.[968] And it is apparently due in part to the culture they maintained[969] that, though the emancipation of the negroes was to be delayed till late in the nineteenth century, an energetic plea was made for them by a Portuguese advocate of Batria at the time of the emancipation of the Indians.[970] Their own degeneration into a wealth-amassing corporation was an exact economic duplication of the process that had occurred in Europe among all the monastic and chivalrous orders of the Middle Ages in succession.[971]

In the eighteenth century Brazil, still limited, for its direct trade, to Portugal, so prospered that the loss of empire in Asia was much more than compensated even to the royal revenue of Portugal; the new discoveries of gold bringing for a time as much as £300,000 a year to the treasury under the system by which, the goldfields remaining free to their exploiters, the crown received a fifth of the total export.[972] The trouble was that the influx of gold in Portugal, as in Spain, paralysed industry; and the country became poorer in a double ratio to its bullion revenue;[973] and not till this was scientifically realised could a sound polity be raised. But in Portugal itself, after the advent of the anti-clerical Marquis of Pombal, there went on as striking a regeneration of government (1750-77) as occurred in Spain under Charles III; and though the storms of the French Revolution, and the tyrannous reactions which followed it, fell as heavily on Portugal as on the rest of the peninsula, its lot is to-day hopeful enough. In common with those of Spain and Italy, its literature shows plenty of fresh intellectual life; and, again as in their case, its worst trouble is a heritage of bad finance, rather than any lack of progressive intelligence. With sound government, the large outlet offered by Brazil to emigration should make Portugal a place of plenty—if, that is, its burden of debt be not too great. But herein lies a problem of special importance for the people of Great Britain. Portugal, like Britain, began to accumulate a national debt in the period of chronic European war; but between 1850 and 1890 the sum had actually multiplied tenfold, rising from twenty-five to two hundred and fifty-eight millions of milreis; and at the close of 1910 it stood at over one thousand millions, the interest upon which constitutes two-fifths of the total national expenditure. All the while, the balance of productivity is more and more heavily on the side of Brazil. As a similar evolution may conceivably take place within the next century or two in England, it will be of peculiar interest to note how Portugal handles the problem. When the English coal supply is exhausted, a vast debt, it is to be feared, may be left to a population ill-capable of sustaining it; and the apparently inevitable result will be such a drift of population from Britain to America or Australia as now goes from Portugal to Brazil, leaving the home population all the less able to bear its financial burden. It is difficult to see how any arrangement, save a composition with creditors, can meet the Portuguese case.[974] Yet within the last twenty years Lisbon has been enormously improved; and if but the law of 1844 prescribing compulsory education could be enforced, Portuguese resources might be so developed as to solve the problem progressively. As it is, the nation is still largely illiterate—a heavy handicap.

Meanwhile Brazil, after passing from the status of colony to that of kingdom or so-called "empire," has become a republic, like the other Iberian States of South America; and throughout the nineteenth century its development has been comparatively fortunate. The flight of the Portuguese king[975] thither in 1808 gave it independent standing without its paying the price of war; whence came free trade with the friendly States of Europe; and when on the return of the king it insisted on maintaining its independence under his son, against the jealous effort of the Portuguese Cortes to reduce it to a group of dependent provinces,[976] the tradition of freedom set up by its past prevailed. Thus the Brazilians effected peacefully what the English colonies in North America achieved only by an embittering and exhausting war; and so far as those of us can judge who are not at home in Portuguese literature, the culture evolution in Brazil at the date of the French Revolution had on some lines equalled that of the United States.[977] But where the United States were in educative and enriching contact with the relatively high civilisations of England and France, Brazil could still draw only on the relatively small intellectual and commercial stores of Portugal, with some addition from general commerce with Europe. It was in the latter half of the century, when intellectual influences from France had been prevalent, that Brazilian possibilities began to emphasise themselves.

North American evolution has in the nineteenth century been especially rapid because of several great economic factors: (1) the tobacco and cotton culture of the period before the civil war; (2) the very large immigration from Europe; (3) the rush for gold to California, hastening the development of the West; (4) the abundant yield of coal and iron, quickening every species of manufacture, especially after (5) a large influx of cheap European labour in the last decades of the nineteenth century. No one of these special factors has been potent in Brazil, save for the latterly rapid increase of immigration; there is no great staple of produce that thus far outgoes competition, unless it be caoutchouc; the precious metals are not now abundant; and there is practically no coal, though there is infinite iron. But these are conditions merely of a relatively slow development, not of unprogressiveness; and the presumption is that they will prove beneficent. The rapid commercial development of the United States is excessively capitalistic, in virtue largely of the factor of coal, and the consequent disproportionate stress of manufactures. The outstanding result is a hard-driven competitive life for the mass of the population, with the prospect ahead of industrial convulsions, in addition to the nightmare of the race-hatred between black and white—a desperate problem, from which Brazil seems to have been saved. There the problem of slavery was later faced than in the United States, partly, perhaps, because there the slave was less cruelly treated; but the result of the delay was altogether good. There was no civil war; the process of emancipation was gradual, beginning in 1871 and finishing with a leap in 1885-88; and no race-hatred has been left behind.[978] Those whose political philosophy begins and ends with a belief in the capacities of the "Anglo-Saxon race" would do well to note these facts.

In Brazil the process of emancipation, long favoured as elsewhere by the liberal minds,[979] was peacefully forced on by economic pressure. It was seen that slave labour was a constant check to the immigration of free labour, and therefore to the development of the country.[980] When this had become clear, emancipation was only a question of time. The same development would inevitably have come about in North America; and it is not a proof of any special "Anglo-Saxon" faculty for government that the process there was precipitated by one of the bloodiest wars of the modern world, and has left behind it one of the blackest problems by which any civilisation is faced. The frequent European comments on the revolutions of South America are apt to set up an illusion. All told, those crises represent perhaps less evil than was involved in the North American Civil War; and they are hardly greater moral evils than the peaceful growth of financial corruption in the North. In any case, the only revolution in Brazil since the outbreak of 1848 has been the no less peaceful than remarkable episode of 1889, which dethroned the Emperor Pedro II and made Brazil a republic. There was as much of pathos as of promise in the event, for Pedro had been one of the very best monarchs of the century; but at least the bloodless change was in keeping with his reign and his benign example,[981] and may indeed be reckoned a due result of them.

In fine, Brazil—in common with other parts of South America—has a fair chance of being one day the scene of a civilisation morally and socially higher than that now evolving in North America. What may be termed the coal-civilisations, with their factitious rapidity of exploitation, are in the nature of the case relatively ugly and impermanent. That cannot well be the highest civilisation which multiplies by the myriad its serfs of the mine, and by the million its slaves of the machine. In South America the lack of coal promises escape from the worst developments of capitalism,[982] inasmuch as labour there must be mainly spent on and served by the living processes and forces of nature, there so immeasurable and so inexhaustible of beauty. Fuel enough for sane industry is supplied by the richest woods on the planet; and the Brazilian climate, even now singularly wholesome over immense areas,[983] may become still more generally so by control of vegetation. It is a suggestive fact that there the common bent, though still far short of mastery, is in an exceptional degree towards the high arts of form and sound.[984] It may take centuries to evoke from a population which quietly embraces the coloured types of South America and Africa the Æsthetic progress of which it is capable;[985] but the very fact that these types play their physical and artistic part in the growth is a promise special to the case. And if thus the "Latin" races—for it is Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, and French-speaking Belgians who chiefly make up the immigrants, though there is a German element also—build up a humanly catholic and soundly democratic life in that part of the planet most prodigally served by nature, subduing to their need the vast living forces which overpowered the primitive man, and at the same time escaping the sinister gift of subterranean fuel—if thus they build up life rather than dead wealth, they will have furthered incomparably the general deed of man. But it is part of the hope set up by the slower rate of a progress which overtakes and keeps pace with nature, instead of forestalling the yearly service of the sun, that when it reaches greatness it will have outlived the instincts of racial pride and hate which have been the shame and the stumbling-block of the preceding ages. Should "little" Portugal be the root of such a growth, her part will surely have been sufficient. But in the meantime Portugal and Brazil alike suffer from illiteracy, the bane of the Catholic countries;[986] and that priest-wrought evil must be remedied if their higher life is to be maintained.

Until this vital drawback is removed the possible social gain to Portugal from the revolution of 1910 cannot be realised. A republic is more favourable to progress than a monarchy only in so far as it gives freer play and fuller furtherance to all forms of energy; and in the still priest-ridden Peninsula the resistance of sacerdotalism to democratic rule is a great stumbling-block. The Republic of Portugal needs time to establish itself aright. Citizens of more "advanced" countries are wont to criticise with asperity shortcomings of administration in the "new" States of our time which were fully paralleled in their own in the past. Englishmen who make comparisons between their own political system and that of countries whose constitutions have been reshaped within the present century would do well to consider the state of English government in the latter part of the eighteenth century, after a hundred years of constitutional freedom. Nay, in a country where the great parties in our own time perpetually accuse each other of gross and unscrupulous misgovernment, disparagements of the politics of countries which only recently attained self-government are obviously open to discount. Suffice it that Portugal, albeit by a via dolorosa of violence trodden by other peoples before her, has reaffirmed her part in the movement of civilisation towards a larger and a better life, thus giving the hundredth disproof to the formulas which deny the potentiality of advance to States which have known decadence.

[942] The Story of Portugal, by Mr. H. Morse Stephens, 1891, is the most trustworthy history of Portugal in English, giving as it does the main results of the work of the modern scientific school of Portuguese historians.