lifted shoulder-high by the crowd, and carried in triumph from the
station, amid the blaring of the bands and the crackling of innumerable
little detonators, which here enter freely into the ritual of
rejoicing. Next morning I read in the papers a full account of the
"Apoteose" of Machado dos Santos, which seems to have kept Torres
Vedras busy and happy all day long.

One can not but smile at such simple-minded ebullitions of feeling; yet
I would by no means be understood to laugh at them. On the contrary,
they are so manifestly spontaneous and sincere as to be really
touching. Whatever may be the future of the Portuguese Republic, it has
given the nation some weeks of unalloyed happiness. And amid all the
shouting and waving of flags, all the manifold "homages" to this hero
and to that, there was not the slightest trace of rowdyism or of
"mafficking." I could not think without some humiliation of the
contrast between a Lisbon and a London crowd. It really seemed as
though happiness had ennobled the man in the street. I am assured that
on the day of the public funeral of Dr. Bombarda and Admiral dos Reis,
though the crowd was enormous and the police had retired into private
life, there was not the smallest approach to disorder. The
police--formerly the sworn enemies of the populace--had been reinstated
at the time of my visit, without their swords and pistols; but they
seemed to have little to do. That Lisbon had become a strictly virtuous
city it would be too much to affirm, but I believe that crime actually
diminished after the revolution. It seemed as though the nation had
awakened from a nightmare to a sunrise of health and hope.

And the nightmare took the form of a poor bewildered boy, guilty only
of having been thrust, without a spark of genius, into a situation
which only genius could have saved. In that surface aspect of the case
there is an almost ludicrous disproportion between cause and effect.
But it is not what the young King was that matters--it is what he stood
for. Let us look a little below the surface--even, if we can, into the
soul of the people.

Portugal is a small nation with a great history; and the pride of a
small nation which has anything to be proud of is apt to amount to a
passion. It is all the more sensitive because it can not swell and
harden into arrogance. It is all the more alert because the great
nations, in their arrogance, are apt to ignore it.

What are the main sources of Po