THE TRAGEDY IN PORTUGAL.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 111, 3 February 1908, Page 6

THE TRAGEDY IN PORTUGAL.

The horrifying intelligence from' Portugal which we print to-day comes without explanatory details. In the cable messages received since December 20.last, the date of.the latest mail reports, there have been frequent disturbing messages, but so terrible an end to the late; King's .establishment of the temporary dictatorship necessary to cure his country of its political and social diseases .was not thought possible. All that we know at time of writing, is that the King and his son have been assassinated, j We give in another column ample details of the establish; ment of the dictatorship and the acute unrest that has prevailed since June of last year,'and from these. it appears highly probable, that the King's action has proceeded from excellent motives. So long ago as August last a. bomb explosion in Lisbon lead to the discovery of a plot to assassinate the King and Senhor Franco, and, as the.Republicans were the instigators of the. plot, it is probable that they are responsible for the. present tragedy. The. tragedy, wliich will be nowhere more deeply regretted than in England, which has always felt itself attached to Portugal, is a startling reminder that the security of Kings is hot yet. Of late years, especially since King Edward, by his success as a diplomatist, began to teach the peoples to regard the Kings as something - better than mere symbols, the hope . lids been growing up that the Kings are at last- safe ujjoii their thrones. A recent writer, resting upon the weighty: 'fac-t that Monarchy has survived centuries of cataclyseniic changes; deduces that, ".thrones have their uses in the futtire' 1 of _ the great white races of' Europe "—either that, or Providence 1 , does protect an arrangement at which human reason has smiled for centuries, bowing down the next minute before- that in wliich\ it professes to have lost all faith, end for which it fails to make a reasonable de-

fence." The tragedy in Portugal deals a severe blow at this' theory,' and is_ a depressing proof of the continued existence of those evil forces of stealthy passion and animal callousness that are the despair of the optimist.