THE CONDITION OF PORTUGAL

New Zealand Tablet, 6 March 1913, Page 51

THE CONDITION OF PORTUGAL

People in Portugal have been asking themselves whether there is anything possibly worse that political, vicissitudes can bring about in Portugal. It would certainly be hard to imagine anything more detrimental to the country than the formation of a Government with Affonso Costa as Premier (writes the special correspondent of the Catholic Times). He will, it is quite safe to say, create more trouble. Costa has helped to bring about most of the country's recent misfortunes. He is a revolutionist and has great influence over the carbonariosthat society of cowards and ruffians. It was he who engineered the ' law' separating Church and State, and his hatred of Christianity is most bitter. Of course his Government will only last for a very short time, but during that period he will do much mischief if he can. Imitating the French Revolutionists. The Portuguese Republic has officially abolished Christmas, instituting in its stead the Feast of the Family, that basis of society which by its legislation it has done its best to disintegrate. By way of celebrating the day and emulating the other Chiefs of the State, the President Arriaga, in order, as he naively expressed it, that people might see that the Republic is not as black as it is painted, intended to exercise the prerogative allowed him by the Constitution and to pardon the Bishops as well as to modify the system of punishment to which the political prisoners have been condemned, the greater part on no stronger proofs than the assertions of their private enemies. He would have dispensed with the infamous hood and the solitary confinement, commuting their punishment to simple imprisonment. His intentions in this respect were certainly good, but at the same time as Chief of the State he insulted the beliefs of the enormous majority of the citizens and perpetrated The Most Ridiculous Errors in matters of historical fact, as, for instance, when he asserted that the monarch-"- and the ' privileged classes now abolished ' never did" 7 anything for The relief of the common people whom the republic has taken under its protection. (A somewhat ironical commentary on this assertion is furnished by the suicide of five of

the old people whom formerly the Little Sisters looked after in a huge house near Lisbon, an institution which was built and kept up by the alms of rich and poor alike, and which now costs the State some hundreds a year, though the chaplain has been dismissed and no priest is allowed to visit the dying). The Bishops he would allow to return to their dioceses. But the late Premier declined to approve of such a step, and it is not likely to commend itself to Affonso Costa. The Power of the President. Truly a presidential chair has its thorns. But Dr. Arriaga is allowed some authority. Thus lately there appeared under his signature the famous ' law ' upon rats which, owing to the clause in the Constitution which provides that any measure not discussed during a certain space of time by the deputies (of late often engaged in fisticuffs) may be approved of by the Senate alone, was so approved of and has become law. By this masterpiece of the scientific mind devoted to legislature, every taxpayer upon a given day is to deliver up to the municipal authorities a number of rats or the equivalent in tails in proportion to the taxes he pays. How the harassed householder is to keep the ancient corpses fresh, or whence they are to come if he has been careful to exterminate all vermin, the law omits to state, but the fines and imprisonment which are the penalty of neglect have been carefully fixed. The courtmartials continue. Some hundreds of prisoners, men and women, are Waiting for Trial t'll the one officer and his secretary charged with the investigations have finished their work. This is in the Lisbon district. In Coimbra, where 'several prisoners were acquitted, an appeal was made against the sentence by the Public Prosecutor, as the Mundq asked for it, and they are to be re-tried in Lisbon. One old lady of seventy suffering from advanced heart disease, is shut up in a tiny cell in Braga. Churches are being closed and priests forbidden by local tyrants to say Mass even in private. Soon they will be few to hear it, for ninety thousand emigrants, by official Computation, have left the country this year. - The Palayra suspended two years ago, after an attack on the offices which did not succeed, was to reappear on the : first of January, but the police have forbidden it in the interests of public order! Royalist papers from abroad are seized, and those who have dared to subscribe summoned to the police station to explain the motives of the crime. One wonders what will come next.