Nor was there any comfort to be found in the economic aspect of the case.  A country of glorious fertility and ideal climatic conditions, inhabited by an industrious peasantry, Portugal was nevertheless so poor that much of its remaining strength was year by year being drained away by emigration.  The public debt was almost as heavy per head of population as that of England.  Taxation was crushing.  The barest necessaries of life were subject to heavy imposts.  Protection protected, not industries, but monopolies and vested interests.

In short, the material condition of the country was as distressing as its spiritual state to any one with the smallest sense of enlightened patriotism.

King Charles I.—­name of evil omen!—­ascended the throne in 1889.  His situation was not wholly unlike that of the English Charles I., inasmuch as—­though he had not the insight to perceive it—­his lot was cast in times when Portugal was outgrowing the traditions and methods of his family.  Representative government, as it had shaped itself since 1852, was a fraud and a farce.  To every municipality a Government administrator was attached (at an annual cost to the country of something like L70,000), whose business it was to “work” the elections in concert with the local caciques or bosses.  Thus, except in the great towns, the Government candidate was always returned.  The efficacy of the system may be judged from the fact that in a country which was at heart Republican, as events have amply shown, the Republican party never had more than fourteen representatives in a chamber of about 150.  For the rest, the Monarchical parties, “Regeneradores” and “Progresistas,” arranged between them a fair partition of the loaves and fishes.  This “rotative” system, as it is called, is in effect that which prevails, or has prevailed, in Spain; but it was perfected in Portugal by a device which enabled Ministers, in stepping out of office under the crown, to step into well-paid posts in financial institutions, more or less associated with the State.  Anything like real progress was manifestly impossible under so rotten a system; and with this system the Monarchy was identified.

Then came the scandal of the adeantamentos, or illegal advances made to the King, beyond the sums voted in the civil list.  It is only fair to remember that the king of a poor country is nowadays in a very uncomfortable position, more especially if the poor country has once been immensely rich.  The expenses of royalty, like those of all other professions, have enormously increased of late years; and a petty king who is to rub shoulders with emperors is very much in the position of a man with L2,000 a year in a club of millionaires.  He has always the resource, no doubt, of declining the society of emperors, and even fixing his domestic budget more in accord with present exigencies than with the sumptuous traditions, the palaces and pleasure-houses, of his millionaire