The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

In the Palace, on its bluff above the river, King Manuel was practically alone. No minister, no general, was at his side. It is said, on what seems to be good authority, that when he saw the San Raphael moving down-stream under the Republican colors, he telephoned to the Prime Minister, Teixeira de Sousa, to ask whether there was not a British destroyer in the river that could be got to sink the mutinous vessel. Even if this scheme had been otherwise feasible, it would have demanded an effort of which the minister was no longer capable. At about two in the afternoon the San Raphael, cruising slowly up and down, opened fire upon the Palace, and her second shot brought down the royal standard from its roof. What could the poor boy do? To sit still and be blown to pieces would have been heroic, but useless. Had he had the stuff of a soldier in him, he might have made his way to the Rocio and tried to put some energy into the officers, some spirit into the troops. But he had no one to encourage and support him. Such counselors as he had were all for flight. He stepped into his motor-car, set off for Cintra and Mafra, and is henceforth out of the saga.

The flight of Dom Manuel meant the collapse of his cause. It is true that the Royalists were reenforced by certain detachments of troops who came in from the country, and, beaten off by the insurgents at the Rotunda, made their way to the Rocio by a circuitous route. The Guardia Municipal, too, were stanch, and showed fight at 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 clientèle." That one word explains the disappearance of Royalism.