Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1889-11-21
A TENACIOUS PEOPLE.
The Portuguese Nation, and What 1t
Has Acquired and Held On To
in the World.
Probably There Is No Country or
People About Which So Little
Is Known by the General
Public.

The easy succession of the Duke of Bra
ganza to his fathers throne matters little
to Europe and not much to England.
though Portuguese policy in Africa annoys
and lmpedes US at every turn. says the
London Spectator, but there Is something
striking about it too. 1t shows what a
solid force there is In the conservatism
which as history proves is natural to the
mass of mankind The Duke of Braganza
claims and receives his throne, and with it
the leading influence In Portugal, ON one
plea alone-that he is the nearest repre-
sentative of the Burgundian Prince, a cadet
of the Carlovingian House who In 1895,
thirty years after the Norman conquest of
England, made of Portugal a separate
State. For almost 800 years, 800 years
more than the duration of the Roman En-
pire In the West, the people of Portugal,
through evil report and good report, have
adhered to the Burgundian House which
was originally chosen to rule them almost
by an accident. The King of CASTLE
wanted soldier to keep order on the Ta-
gus, where he had made conqueSts he
could not retain, and chose the strongest
man he could find who was of high de-
scent. The House has been extinct
once, and has ended in women twice,
and once lost It's throne for two
generations; but the Portuguese have
never swerved In their decision that
they intended this line to be for
ever at the head of their State When
Legitimate heirs failed, they rose in favor
of partly illegitimate one-partly ille-
climate, we say, because though the Bra
ganzas derived their title from an illegit-
innate son, his son married the legitimate
heiress-and went on TRANQUILITY, and, so
as the dynasty was concerned, apparently
content. The family was not very great
one though it produced hero or two; and
the Portuguese, one would think, have every
reason to merge themselves in Spain
Their geographical position is wholly in
| favor of that course. They are Latins,
| like the Spaniards, and hardly more
separated from them in language sthan the
| Scotch of 100 were from the English.
They believed not only in the same creed
! but the same shade ofthe same creed; and
| they had for enemies the same hereditary
Mussulman foes. Their river is the
great river Of Spain, their capital is the
natural capital of the whole peninsula, and
there never was time when unity with
| Spain would not have made them a richer
and more prosperous people. They were
| threatened for centuries and they
are threatened now; once they were act
ually merged in Spain for sixty years; and
once they received the offer made to Scot
land and accepted by her, to seat their
| own dynasty on the common throne. 1t all
made no difference. Threats did not shake
them or ambition tempt them, or conquest
! after their feeling. They chose to remain
as they always had been-a little people
but seperate, with their seprate dynasty
which had never forced its way into the
general European system, but remained
always distinctively Portuguese; and they
had their will. Portugal is as separate to-
day as she was In 1885, when her national
hero, King Alfonso, died. Hardly in any
continuity of national life as In the one
to which, priori' continuity a national
life would have seemed most difficult or
impossible.
If the Portuguese, were merely a stolid
people devoted to the past, and content
If the world passed them, to decay in Dig
nifed isolation by themselves. this con-
| tinuity would not be so remarkable, but
they have been for 300 years an ambitious
and even grasping people, selling at
every opportunity more than their share
of the world, and holding on to all they
have seized with a terrier-like tena-
city They tried to conquer Bengal once,
and were only defeated by positive want of
physical force. They did conquer much
of the coast of Western India, and hold
colony In it now. They have been per-
petually making bites at Africa, and pos
sess on that continent even now territories
! sixteen times as great as their own. with
claims which, if acknowledged now,
in the progress of events, they can never
be-would make them lords, from the At
lantic Sea to the Indian Ocean, of belt
Of 800 miles. They did conquer the most
splendid bit of South America, and they
keep it now, and may keep it, so far as
appears, for the next 500 years Brazil is
independent, but it is Portuguese, and it
is ruled by the same family as the parent
state The house of Brananza is the soil
tary one in Europe which has succeeded
in founding a transmarine monarchy which
lives and reigns and is fairly successful In
new chimes, and under conditions new in
every respect but one, that its
own people with an answering at
tachment, lost everywhere else In
America, still support its throne. The
Brazilian monarchy is still strongest of
political anomalies, and its continuance
and success testify to the existence in the
Portuguese people, and in their ruling
houses, of some capacities for which the
remainder of Europe scarcely gives them
fair credit. They must have courage In
no mean degree, extreme tenacity, and
certain largeness of view besides, shown
in their repeated and sometimes successful
springs at colonial empire They have
never produced very great men. They
have never had the physical force to carry
out their own conceptions. They have al
ways been embarrassed by want of cash.
by the enmity of great powers, and by a
continuous want of proportion between
their objects and their power of securing
them by force Still they must be pro-
nounced a successful people, more success
full for example than the Dutch or the
Swedes; and much of their success has
been due 70 their spirit of conservatism
the spirit which wastes no force ON change,
but utilities always what there is and in
sists that anything once accomplished Is
thenceforward part of the regular order of
things, and is not to be given up. They
are not pleasant people politically, they
have always revealed faint of cruelty in
their blood, and they talk with pride
which seems to their rivals quite ridicu-
lous; but, after all, they were little peo-
pie never as many as the Belgians, and
they settled Brazil; their language when
Give landed was employed as the lingua
franco on all the coast of India; and they
at this moment perplex and impede the
otherwise unresisted march of the British |
to unimpeded supremacy in South Africa. |
The Wonderful Walled Lake.
The greatest wonder in the state Of Iowa |
and perhaps In any other state, is what is
called the Walled Lake in Wright coun-