tment of such legislation. These
are (1) the management of the local interests of the province and the
commune shall be left entirely to the respective councils; (2) the
estimates, accounts, and official acts of these bodies shall
invariably be made public; (3) the fiscal powers of the councils shall
be so determined that the financial system of the nation may never be
brought in jeopardy; and (4) in order to prevent the councils from
exceeding their prerogatives to the prejudice of general and
established interests the power of intervention shall be reserved to
the sovereign and, under certain circumstances, to the Cortes.[867]
The theory, carried over from the liberal constitution of 1869, is
that within the spheres marked out for them by law the provinces and
the municipalities are autonomous. And it undoubtedly is true that,
compared with the system in operation prior to 1868, the present
regime represents distinct decentralization. None the less it must be
said that in practice there is ever a tendency on the part of the
central authorities to encroach upon the privileges of the local
governing agencies, and through several years there has been under
consideration a reorganization of the entire administrative system in
the direction of less rather than more liberalism. In 1909 a Local
Administration bill devised by the recent Maura ministry was adopted
by the lower chamber of the Cortes. This measure, which was combatted
with vigor by the Liberal party, proposed to enlarge the fiscal
autonomy of the communes, but at the same time to modify the
provincial and municipal electoral system by the establishment of an
educational qualification, by the admission of corporations to
electoral privileges, and by otherwise lessening the weight of the
vote of the individual citizen. In the Senate the measure met
determined opposition, and as yet its fate is uncertain.[868]

[Footnote 867: Art. 84. Dodd, Modern Constitutions,
II., 215.]

[Footnote 868: J. Gascon y Marin, La reforme du
regime local en Espagne, in _Revue du Droit
Public_, April-June, 1909.]

CHAPTER XXXIV (p. 629)

THE GOVERNMENT OF PORTUGAL

I. A CENTURY OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

*695. The Napoleonic Subjugation and the Constitution of 1820.*--The
government of Portugal at the opening of the nineteenth