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 Portugal’s pride?  They are two:  her national independence and her achievements in discovery and colonization.

A small country, with no very clear natural frontier, she has maintained her independence under the very shadow of a far larger and at one time an enormously preponderant Power.  Portugal was Portugal long before Spain was Spain.  It had its Alfred the Great in Alfonso Henriques (born 1111—­a memorable date in two senses), who drove back the Moors as Alfred drove back the Danes.  He founded a dynasty of able and energetic kings, which, however, degenerated, as dynasties will, until a vain weakling, Ferdinand the Handsome, did his best to wreck the fortunes of the country.  On his death in 1383, Portugal was within an ace of falling into the clutches of Castile, but the Cortes conferred the kingship on a bastard of the royal house, John, Master of the