t several points. It was
the total lack of spirited leadership that left the insurgents masters
of the field. Having done its work at the Necessidades, the _San
Raphael_ moved up stream again, and began dropping shells over the
intervening parallelogram of the "Low City" into the crowded Rocio.
They caused little loss of life, for they were skilfully timed to
explode in air; the object being, not to massacre, but to dismay. There
is nothing so trying to soldiers as to remain inactive under fire; and
as there had never been much fight in the garrison of the Rocio, the
little that was left speedily evaporated. At eleven in the morning of
Wednesday, October 5th, the Republic was proclaimed from the balcony of
the Town Hall, and before night fell all was once more quiet in Lisbon.

The first accounts of the fighting which appeared in the European Press
were, as was only natural, greatly exaggerated. A careful enumeration
places the number of the killed at sixty-one and of the wounded at 417.
Some of the latter, indeed, died of their wounds, but the whole
death-roll certainly did not exceed a hundred.

The Portuguese Monarchy was dead; and the causes of death, as disclosed
by the autopsy, were moral bankruptcy and intellectual inanition. It
could not point to a single service that it rendered to the country in
return for the burdens it imposed. Some of its defenders professed to
see in it a safeguard for the colonies, which would somehow fly off
into space in the event of a revolution. As yet there are no signs of
this prophecy coming true; but the prophets may cling, if they please,
to the hope of its fulfilment. For the rest, it was perfectly clear
that the monarchy had done nothing for the material or spiritual
advancement of the country, which remained as poverty-stricken and as
illiterate as it well could be. Dom Carlos had not even the common
prudence to affect, if he did not feel, a sympathy with the nation's
pride in its "heroes." The Monarchy could boast neither of good deeds
nor of good intentions. Its cynicism was not tempered by intelligence.
It drifted toward the abyss without making any reasonable effort to
save itself; for the dictatorship was scarcely an effort of reason.
"The dictatorship," said Bernardino Machado, the present Foreign
Minister, "left us only one liberty--that of hatred." And again, "The
monarchy had not even a party--it had only a _clientele_." That one
word explains the disappearance of Ro