The sun. [volume] (Morris, Stevens County, Minn.) 1882-1895, 1889-12-12


IN the gay throng that daily gathered at the
railway station to receive the trains from
town, the Count d'Eu came along, walking
by the side of his little son, the prince i'm
perial who was driving goat cart. Tall,
angular and awkward, clad in a well worn
dress suit and wearing shabby silk hat,
the count was anything but an imposing
object.
"DO you suppose we Brazilians are going
to be governed by a thing like that?" the
major asked, with a contemptuOus gesture.
And in saying this he defined concretely
the position of the army-or rather all the
brainy men among it's officers-toward the
emperor and his family. The vast majority
of army officers were nOnentities, and the
mass of the soldiers were ignorant negroes,
or cabOcles, who might be counted on to
follow their leaders with as little thought
as the lat pet sheep of the Tenth Brazilian
regiment used to march with it through the
streets of Rio.
Gen. Fonseca himself, the provisional pres
ident OF the new republic, owes his nominal
leadership to the press, and could not hope
to rally the army about him in opposition
to the united will of the journals named.
He is the nominee of the real authors of the
revolution, put forward by them to secure
the army for them, and not the leader of
an armed revolt who has called them into
his councils to represent the civil element.
In the first place, he is in no sense the idol
of the army, as was the great duke of
Caixias, the hero of Paraguay, of glorious
memory. Caixias was capable ofinspiring
even the bloodless undergraduates of the
Amazon, whom the necessities of the war
had drafted into his ranks, with something
of his own dashing courage and vigorous
| loyalty. Gen. Fonseca cannot infuse his
personality into the mixed elements which
compose the Brazilian army in any such
way, and unless he did he could not bring
them to face the people for twenty -four
hours, were he to attempt to shape the
government to his own ends. The
troops for ten years past have had
no notion of loyalty to Their
sovereign and have become intimately as
sociated with the populace and its aspira-
tions. To have called on the army to fur
| ther his personal ambitions would have
been only to distribute so many rifles
among the people. In the second place
Gen. Fonseca obtained the support of the
Republican press more by good luck than
| ROOu management. NO ulSparagenenC OF
brave officer and sincere friend of his coun.
try is irsplied in this; but even his newly
fledged admirers cannot deny that he made
an accidental hit when he took part in the
anti-slavery meetings whose anti-monarch
ical sentiments led to his reprimand.
/ conversed with more than one of hi:
colleagues in rank at the time, and thu
general opinion was Deodoro had put hi!
foot in it. To be sure the army was, or pro
fessed to be, degraded" by the mannerir
which the general was treated by the gov
ernment but it was not so much on account
of Fonseca himself as because they wer'
sulky on general principles and found, tc
their intense surprise, that they were being
egged OH by the popular press to resen
the supposed blow at their rights o
free speech. Only little while before
the army had been openly charged py
some of the same journals with thu
assassination of the editor of an indecen
sheet who was stabbed to death in thu
streets while under the protection of head
quarters. Now the wheel had turned ant
they were being extolled as ill-used patriot
who, while pining for an opportunity tC
shed their best hearts blood pro patria, wer,
gagged and muzzled by an unfeeling anC
despotic government. No wonder that tn,
hollow-chested little lieutenants gave them