The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, August 15, 1897, Page 20

THE SAN FRANCISCO CALL, When the principal newspapers of a 'monarchical conntry begin to hold up the sovereign to public obloquy as a ‘“‘mani- | fest coward,” asa “ridiculous and useless | dude,” and as ‘an incapable fool,” and Joudly demand that he should take his | departure and make way for the estab- lishment of a republic, “‘the only form of | government consistent with human dig- nity, common-sense and modern prog- Yess,” then a revolution may be regarded as imminent, and the overthrow of the throne as at hand. This is the state of aftairs in Pertugal, ‘which is of such extreme gravity tuat| King Humbert has considered it neces- sary to hurriedly dispaich two Italian | irouciads to Lisbon for the purpose of affording refuge and means of escape to his favorite sister, the Dowager ( Pia, as well as to his nephew and nicce, the reigning King and Queen, when the crown is finally torn from their feeble {grasp and they are driven into that path of exile which has been trodden by the feet of s0 many royal personages during 1his nineteenth century. For the last few years the disturbances in Cuba have had the effect of co; - trating the attention of the American peo- ple to such an extent upon Spain that lit- tle or no note has been taken of the march of events in the neighboring king- dom of Portugal; and while we have been hearing much of the likelihood of Nepublics being proclaimed at Madrid, at Christiania, at Athens and at Brussels, few weem to be aware tbat the passing bell of the Braganza dynasiy is now being totled at Lisbon, Few will regret King Carlos at home or abroad. For the eyes of the Le imists and of the old-feshioned courts of Europe, who regard the law of beredity and pr.mogeniture asthe chief principle and basis of the monarchical system, he is nothing more than a usurper, the rizhtful | govereign of Portugal beingz Duke Miguel of Braganza, who stands in precisely the same position toward the Portuguese | throne as Don Carlos occupies toward that | of Spain. For in the same wa ) v that the | crown of the latter ought by right to have gone at the death of King Ferdinand VII | to his brotber, Don Carios Sr., instead of | to his Majesty’s daughter, lsabella, so, 100, should the crown of Portugal have passed on the abdication of King Pedro IV to his brotter, Dom Miguel, instead of to his daughter, who became Queen under the name of Maria de la Gloria, Don Carlos in Spain and Dom Miguel in Portugal both resisted to the utmost this usurpation of the rights which they in- | dubitab'y possessed under the laws of legitimacy, and found their princi | adherents among those whose political creed was one of clericalism and reaction, the two countries being engaged in civil wer atthe same time and for causes of almost an identical nature. 1In each case rusgle resuited in the defeat of the the victory of the young Queens, Don Carlos as well as Dom Miguel being exiled from the pe: = and com- pelled to seek retuge in Austria, where in course of time they both died, Miguel bequeathing his rights to the Portoguese | throne to his son, the present Duke of Braganza, an officer o trian cava while the claims of Don Carlos are now vested in the person o! his grandson, who bears the same name as himself, and who | isreportea to be on the eve of making | another cffort to secure possession of the | crown of his granduncle, King Ferdinand. If this bit of ancient history is recalled here it is with the object of aemonstra- | ting how little support King Carlos of | Portugal can expect from those who in | other monarchic: intries constitute the principal bulwark of the throue, namely, the clergy and the aristocracy, both of | which, of course, look to the Dake of Bra- ganza, whose success would, they are | convinced, result in a restoration of old- time power, prerogatives and influence, to | the church and to t sility, which was deprived of all i eges during the reign of the late King. Equally hopeless are the prospects of assisiance from the middle or lower classes. All the political life and vigor of Portugal, the intelligence, the enhighten- ment, the industry and the commerce of | the nation are centered in the principal | cities and towns, the rural districts being of little account, politically speaking. For owing to the fact that the railroads, few | ave been built for the benefit | Iry, | may | mit | his | been enacted by the Lsgi H——— | UNDAY, AUGUST 15, 1897. | o &——s—1T9 A RIBICU OPUCACE : AR DECLARE THAT THE LOUS ANDY USELESS DUDE 00 e ard. 'or the urban population and without any reference to the requirements and de- yelopment of agriculture, the peasantry bave remained unaffected by modern progress, steeped on the contrary in the crass ignorance of three centuries ago and utterly indifferent to everything except to the behests of their priests and the ex- actions of the tax collector. Itisimma- terial to them who wields the executive power at Lisbon. Perhaps they do not even know; for they cannot read or write, the latest official returns issued by the Portuguese Government showing that no less than 82 per cent of the inhabitants of the kinzdom—that is to say over 4,000,600 ol the total population of 5,000,000—are en- tirely illiterate, and, as such, debarred from tbe polls. For, ridiculous though it educational test constitutes one of the qualifications for the exercise of the elec- toral iranchise. Just® at the present mo- ment, however, the peasantry are seething with discontent due to the ex- cessive and ever-increasing taxation to which they are subjected, and they will cheerfully welcome and submit to any ange of rulership, no matter what it is, that will tend to alleviate the crushing burden of imposts with which they are at present literaliy overwhelmed. The urban population is republican to the very core. The chambers of com- merce, the chambers of manufacture, the associations of wine-growers and .wine- dealers, the industrial guilds, the banking classes, the legal and medical professions, the faculties and students of the various ities and colieges, nay. even the cers and-soldiets of trearmy, par- the ientific branches of the Iatter, are ne all openly professed foes of the monarchy and acknowledged re- publicans, who are firmly convinced that Portugal will never recover her former prosperity as well as her prestige among the nations of the universe until she ppear under the circumstances, the | | | adopisa form of government thatexer- | cises a less blighting inflnence upon the life of the people than the deplorable rule of the house of Braganza. As for the urban labor element it 1s almost wholly socialist. Until quite recently neither the King nor yet his Ministers were able to gather sufficient courage or summon enough en- | todeal with this cohdition of affairs. did not dare to remove Colonel Elias ia, who is one of the republican efs, from his position as professor of ary engineering at the army school at Lisbon, which is the Portuguese coun- terpart of West Point. Nor has the King made any attemp. as yet to remove from the roster of the army ‘the name of Latino Coelho, who, in addition to commission as general of artillery, is president of the Stiate Polytechnical School at Lisbon and member of the Na- tional Academy of Sciences. Yet he is the second of the triumvirate which di- rects the destinies of the republican cause in Portugal. Trae, the King on one occa- sion caused the summary arrest at a pub- lic meeting of Manuel Arriaga, the cele- brated and popnlar lawyer, renowned as the most eloquent orator of the land of Camoens, and who is the third of the tri- umyirate. But after Arriaga had been de- tained for a couple of days on board a e | man-of-war lying at anchor in the Tagus the King got frightened and bad him set at liberty. All the principal newspapers of Lisbon, Oporto and ot the other cities and towns are violently republican, vying witii ons another in their denunciations of the King, and, in fact, the latter has abso- lutely no adherents except among the of- ficial classes—that is to say, among the bureauncrats of the civilian portion of the administration. Now, however, matters have reached a | crisis. ‘The kingdom, with a national debt of nearly $1,000,000,000 and only | $55.000,000 revenue—on paper—is bank- rupt, the treasury empty, and the Govern- ment, without a vestige of inancial credit left either abroad or at hom®, with no fur- ther means of borrowing, and the national banks eo depleted of their ballion reserves that specie payments have long been sus- pended by order of the crown, is now com- pelied to create tresh taxes in order to provide the necessary 1unds for carrying on the administration. T ese taxes have ature in which the present Cabinet, thanks to dishonest manipulation of the ballot-boxes and the | { | | { | | bstention of by far the largest moiety | of the electors, has a majority.§ But this majority in Parliament is very far from representing the ideas of the majority of the people, who have assumed so threat- ening an attitude toward the Government in connection with its financial pro- gramme that rendered desperate by the peril which menaces both its existence and that of the monarch the Cabinet has recently inaugurated a policy of terror- ism and of despotism which can only be compared to thet by which the third Na- extraordinary indolence and apathy in connection wigh his duties of rulership. The late King Luis was the most easy going and good natured of sovereigns; so much so, indeed, that his readiness to for- give and forget goaded his Italian wife, Queen Pia, to ountbursts of paesion and anger that have passed into the domains mother, Queen Pia, and this very simi- larity of character has brought the two ladies into such frequent conflicts that their quarrels have contributed to demor- alize the King and to weaken still further his position. Pia was at the outset of the present reign determined to wield the same influence over hér eldest son, King of history, as for instance when in 1870 Carlos, as she had exercised over his the disreputable oid Duke of Saldanha, after having been caught making use of bis official position to conspire against the poleon inaugurated his reign in France in ! crown, had been pardoned by the King, THE 1851. Houses are being searched and peo- ple are being arrested on every side, and only a spark is required to set in flames the revolution which will drive the pres- ent administration out of office, and King Carlos from his throne, Yet, as monarchs go nowadays, Dom | Carlos cannot be described as 2 bad King. He is certainly no fool, while physically at any rafe he is no coward, wbatever he may be politically. He bas inherited, however, from his father not only the lat- ter’s excessive embonpoint, but also his n Wi on account of his previous service, Queen ‘ Pia strode up to him in the council cham- | ber, her eyes flashing with fury, and ex- | claimed, “Would to heaven, Duke, that I | had been King, for you shouid have been | shot within twenty-four hours.” One can imagine the French consort of the present King speaking in precisely the same manner as her mother-in-law. A daughter of the Count de Paris, and a sister tnerefore of the Duke of Orleans, | Queen Marie Amelie, 13 every bit as mas- {terful and as energatic as her husband’s father, a project which of course was re- sisted by her daughter-in-law, and mat- ters at one moment reached such a pitch that Queen Pia was publicly charged with KING OF PORTUGAL. ; plotting a coup d’etat for the purpose of removing the King from the throne and appointing her second son, the Dnke of Oporto, as regent in his stead pending the minarity of the lit- tle Crown Prince, now only 10 years old. Then, too, there have been all sorts of troubles between the two ladies in con- nection with money matters, for whereas Queen Marie Amelisis rich and has 1n- herited all the economical propensities for which the House of Orleans is so un- enviably famed Queen Pia is frightfully ex- travagant and invariabiy short of cash, being compelled to make frequent appeals to the purse of her son, the Kingz, and of her brother, King Humbert of Italy. In- deed it is not so very long ago that several of her servants, on being charged in the Lishon courts with the theft of some of her bric-a-brac and jewelry, were able to plead as an excuse that their wages had remained unpaid for more than two years. | Finally, it isimpossible to deny that Queen Pia, in spite of her being a grandmother, is flighty in the extreme, while Queen Marie Amelie is excessively domestic and imbued with a strong sense of propriety, and there are many people at Lisbon and elsewhere who are to this day convincec that it was the younger of these two royal ladies who instigated the arrest at night, and summary deportation from the kingdom of the popular Italian tenor, Bassini, who was being rendered con- spicuons in the extreme by the tokens of admiration and even infatuation lavished upon him by the red-haired Queen Pia, Had the two Queens shown the good sensg to pull together instead of apart, and combined their forces tostrengthen tue throne of their son and husband, the crown might not to-day be so dangerously near falling to the ground. Indeed, their quarrels which have done so much to bring discredit upon the court of Lisbon are all the more to be deplored as they are each in their own particular way excellent people. Queen Pia for instance wears upon her breast a medal tor the rescue of two chil- dren from drowning by vplunging fully dressed into a gale-swept sea, while Queen Marie Am elie deserves immense credit for ber institution of hospitals and dispen- saries at Lisoon, and especially for her inauguration of the treatment by anti- toxine of aiphtheria, that terrible scourge | of Portugal, she being the first to submit herself to inoculation with the serum in order to prove to the poorer classes of the population that there was no danger in the remedy. She is, moreover, the only lady of royal birth who has the rightto add the letters M.D, to her name, having passed all her examinations and taken her degree as a full-fledged doctor of medicine. Her husband, King Carlos, too, is a magnificent swimmer, and sike his motner has rescued a fel- low-creature from drowning, while on another occasion, when out driving on the outskirts of Lisbon, he jumped out of his carriage, felled with bis siuick 10 the ground, aud then collared single handed a burly highwayman who was endeavor- ing to rob and knife a wayfarer. More- over, until a few years ago the King was renowned for his prowesses as a torrero, and any one who has had the opportunity of weeing bim tackling an angry bull in tha corridas, which he was wont to for- merly organize at Lisbon for the enter- tainment of his friends and for the mem- bers of his court, will acquit him of any charges of cowardice that may be brought against him—that is to say, cowardice vfa poysical character—since it is impossible to deny that he has lacked courage in dealing with the political situation. Only on one point haye the two Queens been united, namely in the animosity which they bave each of them displayed toward that American girl hailing from Boston, who may be said for 'a timeto have sharea the tbrone of Portugal, al- thougu she did not bear any sovereign title, but merely that of Countess. Queen Muria de la Gloria, whose accession 1o the throne led to the Miguelist and Legiti- mist c.vil ware in Portugal, died when her children were still young, and pend- ing the minority of her sons, her hasband, King Ferdinand, a Prince ot the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and a cousin there- fore of Queen Victoria, exercised a monar- chical sway asregent. Almostimmediately on becoming widower, he married a Bos- ton aciress named Elise Hensler, whom he created Couniess of Edla, and who now survives him. She is a re- markably clever woman, and her royal husband during the period of her marriage was so blindly devoted to her that she may be said to bave almost ruled Portugal through him. Stepmother to the late King and step- grandmother to the present ruler, she still remains a conspicuous figure in Portuguese life, while the great wealth and vast land- ed possessions beGueathed to her by Fer- dinand, render her a factor in politics sufficiently powerful to be able w0 hold ber own against the two Queens. Their quarrels with her constitute yet another disturbing element of the Portugzese court, and one is tempted to believe that if the loss of his throne will relieve him from further participations in the merry war raging at Lisbon between his French wife and his Italian mother and his American stepgrandam, the outbreak of a revo- lution and the inauguration of a republic at Lisbon will be welcomed by no one more heartily than by fat, easy-going, in- dolent King Carlos. ExX-ATTACHE. e e Victoria’s Three Growns. The only crown that is likely to be used during the stately functions of the cam- memoration is the tfiara which is fa- miliar to this generation in sketéhes of the Queen when holding a draw- ing-room. This was manufactured by the state jewelers in 1862 .at the personal cost of her Majesty, and, in gen- eral terms, may be said to weigh eight troy cunces. It is a light shell of gold, entirely incrusted with dia« monds, and comprises 2673 bprilliants, besides 523 rose diamonds, makiag an aggregate of 3196 stones. It is re- tained in the charge of the sovereign, of whom itis a personal possession, and to all intents and purposes never requires any attention. It was specifically devised for use in conjunction with a veil, and apart from thedrawing-rooms hasscarcely been used at all. This crown was preceded in point of time by a diadem or circlet of gold, choicely bejeweled, which was made for the Queen in 1858. The stones used on this oecasion, which are wholly diamonds, were in the main crown jewels, and the diadem will therefore remain the property of the crown, although the cost of mounting them for the use of her Majesty was borne out of the privy purse. This diadem is technically known as a circlet, surmounted by the cross patee (whereoi the Maitese cross is a decoration variant) and the fleur-ae-lis. ‘Lhe general effect of thiscrown is excellently shown in the currentcoinage, in which itis half-con- cealed by a veil, which was not worn in the earlier years of the reign, when this form of circlet was in ordinary use and, indeed, there would seem to be some doubt as to whether the particular form of coronet depicted on the present coin issues has ever been adopted by the Queen in actual use at ail. It wasthisdiadem and anotber of a like shape that preceded it which were used when her Majasty opened or prorogued Parhament, and also on such occaslons as the marriage of the Princess Royal. On every occasion on which the Queen visited the House of Lords the state crown was taken out of the regalia-room in the Tower of London and was borne before her on a cushion. Except for this pur- pose the crown has only left the Tower on two occasions during her reign—once for repair (some part of the set- ting having become loosened) and once in order to modify the ermine. The crown has never been actually worn by the Queen at any function whatever since the act of coronation, sixty years ago, and there is nothing in the episodes of the forthcoming commemoration that that will require its removal from the Tower. The state crown was made for the Queen by Messre. Rundell & Bridge (the predecessors of Garrard’s, the present holders of the appointment), and its construction is familiar history. It may, Wowever, be interesting at this juncture to say that the estimated valne at that time of its stones, comprising 2783 diamonds, 277 pearls, 16 sap- phires, 11 emeralds and 4 rubies, was £112,760, apart from the priceless ruby which belonged to Edward the Black Prince and the large sapphire purchased by George IV. In the opinion of compe- tent experts the stones still have an in- trinsic worth of a like sum, even if no account be taken of the value that would attach to their illustrious associations,— St. James Gazette. R Itissaid tbat Mr. Ruskin’s habits of life are remarkably regular. He told a friend that in two years bis time of going to bed and getting up had not varied fifteen minutes. e e About 5,000,000 pills are, it appears from manufacturers’ statistics, taken every week in England. GOVERNMENT PHOTOGRAEHS OF FHE RECENT MISSISSIPPI These photographs were taken by States snagboat Meigs, who took them from the deck”of his vessel, and who permits them, through the courtesy of Harry Corson Clarke, to be The Meigs was sent by the Govern- published here for the first time. ment to the relief of the flooded districts. Captain Eton of the United The view_on the Itef shows a submerged plantation at Cottonwood Point, sixty miles above Vicks- burg. A portion of the levee may be seen, on which narrow foothold a conglomeration of living things is gathered for refuge, with fifty miles of water surrounding them. The Meigs touched the levee at a point about where the artist’s name appears in the above drawing. In the burg. - © 2.1 “ ], e left-hand view may be sezn a stretch of water forty miles wide, covering farms to the depth of from two to eight feet. This was opposite Vicks- A narrow strip of levee is still left to view, and a few buildings belonging to one of the larger plantations are as yet uncovered. A no more faithful depiction of this awful calamity could be possible than 5, o QT e =l = T WED = FLOODS. SR — i = O demand for such pictures, that which is afforded by these photographs, taken directly on the scene fro_rn so advantageous a view point as the deck of a stanch Gevernment relief boat. These photographs were taken on April 27 last, and are now on file in many of the Government offices where there is a