“To persecute is to propagate,” said one of the greatest modern Portuguese, Alexandre Herculano, and a Lisbon newspaper, O Diario de Noticias (22nd March, 1901), could declare that “toleration in matters of religion has with us been almost unbroken.” The anti-clerical agitation in Portugal in the year 1901 was for the most part an artificial echo of the agitation in Spain (the year of Pérez Galdós’ Electra), encouraged for political purposes. Popular demonstrations were organised and cheers raised for Liberty, Democracy, and Snr. Manoel da Arriaga (subsequently the first President of the Republic). On the 10th of March the Civil Governors were ordered to inquire whether any religious houses existed under illegal conditions, that is, contrary to the Concordat between Portugal and the Vatican. Properly, in view of the law of May, 1834, only the religious orders concerned with education, charity, nursing, and foreign missions had the right to exist. On the 11th of March fresh disturbances occurred, and on the 13th a decree was published ordering the inspection of those religious houses which could show their title to exist and the closure of all others. But there was in reality no “religious question” in Portugal, no comparison with the situation in France and Spain.

The religious congregations took no part in industry nor did they evade the taxes (these are the two chief popular charges against them in Spain). On the other hand, they did much good work among the poor, and performed useful service in education. To many their sudden expulsion may seem a foolish and brutal measure. But France had banished the congregations, and those Portuguese politicians who model their actions on those of France must follow suit without inquiring whether the action of France in this respect had been wise or its results beneficial, or whether the conditions in France and Portugal were identical. Henry VIII of England abolished the monasteries because they were rich, and the fabulous wealth attributed to the religious houses no doubt largely inspired the modern cry of anti-clericalism. What must have been the disappointment when the wealth of some of the Portuguese congregations was found to consist of nothing but a few musty and worm-eaten volumes. Had the same arbitrary measures been adopted against a literary or industrial association, there would have been an outcry throughout the world at the tyranny or injustice: but these were only poor religious, men and women who had deliberately chosen to lead that kind of life, in many ways an ideal life in Portugal. Why happiness thus attained by a few should be so obnoxious to the modern politician is one of the mysteries of progress.

But the religious orders will return to Portugal, and those beautifully situated and beautifully built convents once more fulfil their proper purpose. Or, if they do not return, almost certainly in the course of time groups of men and women will separate themselves from society and live a philosophical life apart—religious orders under another name. If they can combine philosophy, literature, and art with manual labour the expulsion of the original orders will not have been in vain. We shall have the Order of Carpenters and Musicians at Belem, of Cobblers and Sculptors at Alcobaça, of Philosophers and Tailors at Batalha, of Painters and Ploughmen at Thomar, of Poets and Foresters at Bussaco, and so on. It was easy for demagogues to persuade the people, in whose eyes omne ignotum pro—malefico, that dreadful crimes were committed behind convent walls, just as the uneducated Russian believes that the Jews sacrifice Christian children, and the expulsion of the religious orders figured as the most prominent item on the programme of the Republicans, and was put into practice immediately after the Revolution of 1910.

Considering the great services of monks and nuns in education, in nursing, and in the Portuguese possessions overseas, the only fair course in Portugal would have been at the most to banish the Jesuits, if their action was thought to be political, and any congregations that had emigrated to Portugal after their expulsion from France. For the rest, they could be undermined slowly by education: obviously if no new members were found willing to profess they would come to an end of their own accord. The Jesuits, whom half-educated Republicans, knowing very little about them, believe to be peculiarly maleficent and satanic, were not very numerous in Portugal. In the beginning of 1909 there were only 355 as compared with 3,002 in Spain. In the beginning of 1910 there were in Portugal 387 (161 priests, 123 coadjutors, and 103 students). It may or may not have been expedient to expel them, but in any case they stood upon a different footing from that of the other religious houses, whose sudden expulsion brought consternation and misery to many a village. But the action of the reformers did not stop here: it was extended to the secular clergy, and seemed to be directed against the very existence of religion. The precept of O Seculo a few years earlier (11th March, 1901) was forgotten: “It is necessary not to confuse the religion of the State with Jesuitism, our regular clergy with the Jesuits.”

Portugal had been fortunate in possessing an enlightened clergy. Many priests were liberal in politics, and only a few of them—in some remote parts of the country—were fanatics. The mass of the people is equally unfanatic. But only a section of the population of a single city—Lisbon—is non-Catholic. Indeed, according to one computation, there are only six thousand non-Catholics in Portugal, or one in every thousand inhabitants. To the mass of the people religion is a pleasant show, and a refuge from the grinding reality of their lives, the Church ceremonies, the processions and pilgrimages are the notes of holiday and gaiety in the villages.[29] To the educated it was part of the glorious traditions of Portugal’s past, ever intimately connected with religion (fé e imperio. Camões, Lusiads, I, 2), so that the extreme anti-clerical who carries his creed to the length of striking at the root and existence of religion will, if he is logical, look askance at those Portuguese heroes who fought in Portugal and in India in the name of Santiago, and at the most magnificent old buildings in Portugal. The cry of anti-clericalism in Portugal has proved itself in the Spanish phrase a necedad de siete capas—seven times foolishness. It is not in any sense national, but has been imported bodily from abroad. Senhor Teixeira de Sousa, the last Premier of the Monarchy, said in an interview to a correspondent of Le Matin: “La question cléricale ne se pose pas ici comme en Espagne, car le peuple portugais n’est pas clérical.” So the Republican Intransigente could say later (31st December, 1911): “There was no religious question in the country, and now the religious question, provoked by certain measures of a secondary character and by the so-called Law of Separation between Church and State, rises over the country like a menace of civil war.” And the anti-clerical Mundo itself admitted (9th March, 1914) that the religious question in Portugal “has never had the serious aspect which it has had in other nations.... If recently the religious question has begun to make itself felt that is due to the deference of certain persons who call themselves Republicans to clerical pretensions.” Thus the religious question, having been provoked by anti-clericalism, was to receive a homoeopathic remedy—more anti-clericalism. Gambetta had exclaimed, “Le Cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi,” and Portuguese politicians had adopted this cry from Paris. In the public schools religion has been forbidden by law, in the private it has only been given at the expense of denunciation and persecution. When it is remembered that in many parishes the priests have been deprived of all authority, it will be seen how little chance there is of the children receiving any religious instruction. Portuguese Democrats if they have ever heard of Cecil Rhodes probably know that he was no reactionary. It is worth quoting his words: “Their school years are the years in which to tell the children that there is one thing better than material instruction, and that is religious belief.” But in Portugal now thousands of children are being brought up to regard material prosperity as the only good. There is no God but Gold, and the Republic is its prophet. The new narrow system of education may turn out shrewd, materialistic, tram-and-asphalt citizens, but in a larger sense and in the long run Portugal is likely to suffer. It may be found when it is too late that the cera branda has been moulded to ill purpose.

The Law of Separation between Church and State was drawn up by Dr. Affonso Costa as Minister of Justice (20th April, 1911). It is a long document of 196 clauses, closely following French models or modifying them in a still more anti-clerical direction. Yet there were many considerations which should have given extreme anti-clericalism pause in Portugal. With a clergy not in principle opposed to the Republic, it might have been possible to come to an excellent working compromise. Many of the priests even acquiesce in the principle of separation between Church and State, but Dr. Costa’s law, they complain, while pretending to separate Church from State, in reality subjugates the Church to a hostile State. And it is not the priests only who say it. “The decree of 20th April, 1911,” says A Republica (13th March, 1914), “affected to separate the Churches from the State, but did nothing but subject the Catholic Church to the intervention of the Republic.” These are the words of an extremely Republican paper. The priests by this Law must either receive State pensions or starve; their authority has been replaced by that of the public worship associations, often organised by persons hostile to religion. They are deprived of the possession of the churches, and even of the bishops’ and priests’ houses, even of the libraries carefully added to by successive bishops. They are not allowed to wear clerical dress. The authority of the higher ecclesiastics is carefully undermined, and the bishops are not permitted even to issue a pastoral letter without previous censorship of the Government.

These and other real grievances as well as many petty restrictions, such as the prohibition of processions, of services and ringing of bells between sunrise and sunset, mark a narrow spirit which has made it impossible for the whole of the North of Portugal to sympathise with the Republic. Dr. Costa has been the Royalists’ great asset. “Oh, but there is no such prohibition,” say the Democrats; “the law does not forbid processions.” It contents itself with rendering them impossible. Clause 57 runs: “Ceremonies, processions, and other external manifestations of religion will only be permitted where and in so far as they are an inveterate custom of the majority of the citizens of a district, and must be immediately and definitely forbidden in places where the faithful or other persons without a protest on their part make the processions an occasion for provoking tumults and disturbances of public order.” Thus the procedure is simple. You have only to throw a stone at a priest or other person in a procession. If the faithful protest there is a tumult, if they fail to protest there has been a disturbance of public order. The procession is henceforth forbidden. Yet to deprive the people of these simple pleasures is a kind of sacrilege. In the remote villages they have few others. Those who know to what an extent in Latin countries these ceremonies partake of a secular as well as a religious character realise the sadness which descends upon a village when docked of its processions. They are the villager’s theatre as well as his prayer book. The men, it is true, can substitute the tavern, and the women do not count. Let them stay in their black kitchens, often as dirty and airless as the taverns, and mind their pots and their pans.

That the Republic could be so blind to its own interests as to adopt these Jacobin courses would be strange indeed, were it not that evidently the interests of a party had been preferred to those of the Republic. Recently (i.e., before 14th May, 1915) a far more moderate attitude and methods more conciliatory have been adopted, but in the question of religion fresh legislation, as well as a new spirit, will be required. All men of sense, from the President, Dr. Arriaga, downwards, recognise that the Law of Separation will have to be altered in a more moderate direction. In this connection A Republica (6th March, 1914) used the following words, in connection with the Amnesty of 1914: “To grant an amnesty to priests who have acted illegally because their religious conscience bade them oppose certain clauses in the Law of Separation is merely to say to these priests, ‘You leave prison to-day in order to come back to it to-morrow.’” When Dr. Affonso Costa became Prime Minister in 1913 revision of this law was promised, but during his year of office it was not revised. Under his successor, Dr. Bernardino Machado, discussion of the Law began, but still it was not revised. Its revision would, however, be assured, were it realised that the Republic by violent anti-clericalism is defeating its own objects. For—not to mention the wholesome discipline of the Roman Catholic Church and its democratic tendency—such anti-clericalism is in danger of driving moderate Roman Catholics into something like fanaticism and of creating a religious revival.

The census of 1911 gives the number of illiterates in Portugal as 75·1 per cent. of the entire population (men, 68·4 per cent.; women, 81·2), and this at least is not the fault of the priests, since religion was taken out of their hands in 1834. This extraordinary figure of 75·1 includes small children; excluding children under seven the figures are 69·7 (men, 60·8; women, 77·4). The progress has been slow in the last twenty years. In 1890 the total percentage of illiterates was 79·2 per cent. (1,762,842 men and 2,238,115 women). In 1900 it was 78·6 (1,855,091 men and 2,406,245 women). In 1911 the number of men who cannot read or write was 1,936,131, and of women 2,541,947; or, excluding children under seven, 1,370,571 men, 1,989,906 women. The Republic was ushered in with pompous phrases concerning education. In a few years there were to be no more illiterates, in a few years there was to be a school to every two kilomètres throughout the country. But there has been danger of more attention being given to the show than to the substance of reform, and of education becoming more and more a whited sepulchre. Yet apart from mistakes made and hollow promises put forward for foreign consumption, but quite meaningless in Portugal, one must admit that the Republicans realise the importance of education and have a sincere desire to diminish the number of illiterates (as though that in itself were a great gain!), and may hope that their efforts in the matter of education will be more successful in future than they have been in the past. The institution of night schools and itinerant masters is no doubt a step in the right direction.

The method adopted has been to draw up ideally excellent decrees, and the hope is presumably that they will gradually work down into touch with the facts of Portuguese life. Meanwhile they tend to remain mere pieces of paper. The decree of 29th March, 1911, reforming primary education is little more. Primary education was transferred from the control of the State to that of the local authorities, which tend to neglect it altogether. The failure of the municipios to pay the schoolmasters had been already manifest when primary instruction was entrusted to them in 1881, and they were empowered to levy a special tax for the purpose. The law of 1911 made education compulsory and neutral in the matter of religion. It had been compulsory since 1878, with the results already described. The Republicans boast that they have created a large number of schools, over 900 primary schools in three years, but in reality it would have been better to see to an improvement in the condition of the 6,000 existing schools, and to the payment of the schoolmasters’ salaries. The foundation of a school in Portugal is a very simple affair, almost as simple as the issuing of a decree. It consists in fixing on a room or a house in a village which might be used for that purpose and—there the matter generally ends. Neither books nor furniture nor masters are provided, and that not from any carelessness or indifference but because there is no money to pay for them. Thus, Snr. Antonio Macieira, Minister for Foreign Affairs in Dr. Costa’s Government, declared in a speech made on 28th March, 1913, that to replace the 115 schools of the expelled religious congregations the Republic had created 991 new schools. Of these 991, he continued blandly to state, 556 were non-existent. The Monarchy had not neglected education, even though it cannot claim to have founded schools at the rate of half-a-dozen a week. In 1772 the number of primary schools was 526, and rose to 720 fifty years later. Between 1839 and 1868 new schools were created to the number of 1,422, and in the next thirteen years 965, so that in 1881 the total stood at 4,472, with some 200,000 school-children.[30] In 1900 the schools were 4,520; at the end of 1906 there were 5,226, or about one per thousand inhabitants. The pity was that they were for the most part in hired unhealthy buildings, and that the ill-paid or unpaid schoolmasters taught as badly as they were paid. Other decrees concerning education were more practical, as that of 1905 insisting on physical drill in the schools, or that of 1907 assigning a hundred contos a year to send students abroad. As to the condition of the school-buildings, even in Lisbon, says a Republican paper (A Republica, 17th April, 1914), “there are State schools in small flats in the midst of the deafening noise of the street, without light, without air, without hygiene, without anything to attract the miserable children who attend them.”

The Republic has founded a Department of Public Instruction with a new Minister and all the subordinate officials. Dr. Theophilo Braga at the time gave it as his opinion that it would only serve to provide posts for half-a-dozen political friends of the Government—anichar meia duzia de amigos politicos. The department existed in 1870 and again in 1890. In both cases it proved expensive and unsatisfactory, and was chiefly notable for giving further scope to empregomania and bureaucracy, more than 600 candidates applying for posts in 1890.[31] Snr. Machado notes the despesas de installação of the new department and its esperança a toda a gente, i.e., it spread hope far and wide not of an improvement in education but of a new chance of becoming a Government official.[32] It is true that in the past sums contributed by local administrative bodies to the State for the purpose of education, sent by them to the Department of the Interior which embraced that of Education, were not infrequently diverted to the more pressing needs of the Government and spent on something quite unconnected with education. In future, at least, they will be spent on maintaining the new Department of Education.

Education in Portugal is of three kinds: primary, secondary (in lycées, in the capital of each district, with two at Oporto and three at Lisbon), and the University education of Coimbra. Primary education has been compulsory for the last generation, yet four and a half million out of six million inhabitants cannot write or read. There is indeed little inducement for the peasants to send their children to school, and considerable inducement to keep them at home where they can be useful in the fields. In a land of few industries, where a large majority of the inhabitants live by agriculture and fishing, there is but little need of book-learning, nor is there any universal book to be found in peasants’ houses, as the Bible in England. Moreover, the peasants distrust education, and distrust it the more the more it is mixed up with politics and questions of religion. And if illiterates are disfranchised they look upon that rather as a blessing than a penalty, being desirous to have as little to do with politics as may be. Some of the children are quite keen to learn, and after being kept at work all day willingly attend night classes; but there is many a family in which the parents not only do not encourage their children to learn to write and read, but deliberately forbid it, considering that the drawbacks of education exceed its advantages. The Republic is credited with the project of providing all the children at the primary schools with food and clothes. It may be wondered what the ill-paid schoolmasters would say to this—probably they would go on strike until they were given clothes and food too—but the children would certainly flock to school, as indeed they often do now, without therefore necessarily learning to write or read. Para que serve saber ler? What use is it? That is the question which the peasant children learn from their parents, who, it is to be feared, do not pay all the respect that were to be desired to Lisbon’s crowding politicians. Perhaps, too, in their native good sense, they consider the pale and sickly Lisbon school children who on the shortest provocation will rattle you off a fable of La Fontaine in French or talk of the eclipses or the equinox, or the scientific reason for the colour of sunsets, or other high matters of which you know nothing and which to them are mere abstractions, while they do not know the difference between an ash and an oak. Of Portuguese as it should be spoken, of Portuguese literature, history and geography they are more ignorant. Yet before learning French or English they should surely be taught Portuguese—the direct and forcible Portuguese of the early prose-writers.

In Portugal, and especially in the towns, the children are for the most part too serious and precocious and sad. This seems to be encouraged; they are willingly taken to funerals or marshalled in thousands to attend political demonstrations. It was even proposed recently, on the occasion of the death-sentence in the English law-courts of a Portuguese who had murdered his wife, that all the school-children, pompously lectured on the duties of humanity, should sign a petition to the King of England on his behalf. Thus they are doctors at ten—docteurs à dix [ans]—in Montaigne’s phrase and die of old age before they are twenty.

The theoretical character of the education provided is especially noticeable in the lycées. This ensino secundario is described by a master in July, 1913, as consisting of “immense disconnected programmes.” It overloads the pupil’s mind, and stuffs him with abstractions. Far from diminishing, it increases his natural vagueness and teaches him to approach Portugal by way of China or Japan and mankind through that wicked abstraction, Humanity. Freedom and Happiness, too, fade away into abstract ideals to be intrigued and fought for, perhaps, but scarcely to be enjoyed in common life. Yet it is as true now as when Blake wrote the words that “Those who want Happiness must stoop [not soar] to find it: it is a flower that grows in every vale.” It is as true now, in spite of all the changed conditions, as when Goethe said it, that “If a man has enough Freedom to live a healthy life and carry on his work, it should suffice him, and so much freedom anyone can easily attain.” The number of those who matriculated at the lycées throughout the country is given for 1907-8 as 6,947, including 1,845 at the three Lisbon lycées, 802 at the two Oporto lycées, 630 at Coimbra, 343 at Braga, 310 at Vizeu, 181 at Evora.[33]

The University of Coimbra has the advantage of attracting scholars from all Portugal and of thus being Portugal’s factory of ideas and future politicians. The practical object of the undergraduates is to become lawyers, journalists, politicians, Government officials. To be addressed for the rest of their lives as Senhor Doutor (bacharel, licenciado, doutor) appeals to their vanity.

The result is that all these liberal professions are overcrowded and so unremunerative that it is necessary for one person to combine two or three professions; to be for instance, journalist, advocate, and leader of a party, or journalist, doctor, and Minister of Finance. The number of applicants for every post makes it possible, moreover, for the Government to leave the officials unpaid: others will be only too willing to succeed them should they rebel. Every Government department, and indeed every liberal profession, is overstaffed. “In nearly every service there is an army of supernumeraries, many of whom merely receive a salary without doing any work, the public department to which they belong not even knowing their address. Yet when a post becomes vacant a new official is appointed, the supernumeraries continuing as before” (O Seculo, 7th December, 1912). The first years after a revolution were unlikely to bring any change: “Republican Ministers seem to have considered matters of administration too insignificant to notice.... New expenses have been created, the action of the public departments extended with lamentable rapidity, and no check has been set, as was urgently required, on the system of promotions and the growth of the bureaucracy” (O Seculo, 3rd December, 1912).

The Department of Public Works has an army of architects and other officials, but when some public work crops up a foreign engineer is usually called in. The Department resembles a river which dries up before reaching the region that required irrigation or that army sent by Philip XII of France against Spain, which had dwindled away before crossing the Bidasoa. In the same way it was complained in Portugal a few years ago that there were “too many canons” (O Diario de Noticias, January, 1902). In the same way it is complained to-day that there are too many officers. The sum of 1,535 contos, over a sixth of the whole military estimates, was devoted to the retired list in the Budget of 1913-4. The average of officers is, roughly, one to nine men. “Our officers would suffice for an army as large as that of Germany” (O Diario de Noticias, 11th February, 1902). (In the Engineers there are 145 officers to 1,075 men, in the Artillery 368 to 2,610 men, in the Cavalry 263 to 1,837, in the Infantry 1,291 to 12,289 men.) (A Republica, 26th March, 1913). It has been suggested that a thousand officers would be sufficient, and that the other thousand should be employed as mayors, a course also proposed in 1893. And in the same way there are too many journalists, too many politicians. Some attempts have been made to get back to reality, and several technical schools, for instance, are in existence.

The same lack of funds which fetters the schools prevents the libraries of Lisbon, Oporto, Coimbra, Evora, and Braga from being kept up to date. But for these difficulties, the material to the teacher’s hand is promising enough, for the people, if it can be persuaded that it is to its advantage, is quick and eager to learn. The attempts, however, to dissociate the teaching from all the traditions of Portugal is bound to be a failure. The trouble already is that the Portuguese are too much inclined to be cosmopolitan, and what is required is a development of that part of the Portuguese people still untainted with francezismo along strictly national lines. The lament of the novelist Eça de Queiroz is well known. Accused of Gallicism in his work, he retorted: “Scarcely was I born when I began to breathe a French atmosphere. France was all around me.” The atmosphere of his home was continued in French text-books, at Coimbra. At Lisbon, “in theatres and shops and cookery there was nothing left of Portugal: there was nothing but cheap imitations of France.” And especially was this true in politics: a small group of Frenchified persons ruled Portugal.[34] In the last half-century this Frenchification has only increased in Portugal. “Portugal is a country translated from the French into slang,” said Eça de Queiroz on the same occasion, in an essay published after his death. Fortunately this is an exaggeration, and a symptom of the disease that a Portuguese should thus mistake Coimbra and Lisbon for Portugal. “Outside Lisbon,” he declared, “there is neither intellectual nor social life,” and this may be deplorable but it is of good augury for the future. Not Portugal but Lisbon is “translated from the French.” The francezismo has not yet extended to the mass of the people, and it is therefore of the utmost importance that it should not be denationalized by French text-books, French laws, French customs. At the root of this francezismo lies the love of progress which has always characterised the Portuguese, but the truest progress at present will surely consist in going back to Portugal’s past, to the study of the land of Portugal, of her history, as rich as that of any other country in striking episodes and personalities, and of her literature, in which the glories of that history are reflected.