Causes of the decline of the peninsular peoples in the last three centuries.

Causes of the Decline of the Peninsular Peoples in the Last Three Centuries ANTERO DE QUENTAL 

Abstract. In his lecture of 27 May, the second of the series of 'Democratic Conferences' promoted at the Lisbon Casino in May-June 1871 by the new generation of Portuguese intellectuals who would become known as the 'Generation of 1870', Antero de Quental enduringly framed the terms in which both 'decline' and 'Europe as modernity' would assume, for his and subsequent generations, their mythic and obsessive status and fascination in the public and political debate of the Portuguese question and the state of the nation. Historically, the causes of decline are named as three, and of three orders: moral--the Counter-Reformation's transformation of Catholicism into a Roman and Jesuitic institution, stifling individual conscience and national Churches; political--the Absolutist turn of monarchy ruthlessly suppressive of local autonomies, representative institutions and potential rival powers; and economic--the Conquests and its attendant aristocratic ethos, with its neglect of productivity and disdain for the work ethic. In consequence of all of these, the middle classes, carriers of the project of modernity, were stillborn. The Causes of Decline identified, the solutions were correspondingly three: the promotion of the scientific spirit of enquiry; federative government; and industry. With his lecture Antero answered the very question he himself had set at the heart of the concerns of the Conferences: Modernity as Europe, Europe as telos.

Keywords. Portugal; Generation of 1870; Modernity; Decadence; Europe

Resumo. Nesta conferencia de 27 de Maio, segunda da serie de Conferencias Democraticas promovidas no Casino Lisbonense de Maio a Junho de 1871 por elementos da nova geracao de intelectuais portugueses que viria a ser conhecida por 'Geracao de 70', Antero de Quental cunhou os sentidos e o fascinio que os conceitos de decadencia e Europa como modernidade assumiram no debate publico e politico sobre o problema do atraso portugues e o estado da nacao, quer pela sua, quer pelas geracoes seguintes. Adoptando uma perspectiva de analise historica do presente, Antero apresentou as causas do declinio como sendo tres, e de tres especies: moral, politica e economica. A primeira, consequencia da reaccao Contra-Reformista Catolica cuja expressao Romana e Jesuitica se manifestou pela extincao da liberdade de consciencia e autonomia das igrejas nacionais; a segunda, o advento do Absolutismo, intolerante das autonomias municipais, Cortes, e poderes rivais; a terceira, as Conquistas, espirito guerreiro e exploracao do trabalho escravo que fizeram descurar a agricultura e industria, e desprezar o trabalho. O resultado foi o desenvolvimento abortado das classes medias, agentes historicos da modernidade. Identificadas as causas da decadencia, igualmente ficavam indicadas as solucoes: o espirito cientifico, o principio federativo, e a industria produtiva. Com esta conferencia Antero deu como resposta aos objectivos que ele proprio enunciou como problematica das Conferencias a Europa como modernidade e destino.

Palavras chave. Portugal; Geracao de 70; Decadencia; Europa; Modernidade

Speech given on the evening of 27 May [1871], in the hall of the Lisbon Casino (1)

Gentlemen--

The decline of the peoples of the Peninsula in the last three centuries is one of the most incontestable, most evident facts in our history; one could even say that that decline, following almost without a break upon a period of glorious vigour and rich originality, is, to the eyes of the philosopher-historian, the only evident and incontestable fact in this history. As a Peninsular man, in a meeting of Peninsular people, it pains me to have to declare this disheartening truth. But if we do not recognize and freely confess our past errors, how can we aspire to a sincere and lasting reform? The sinner humbles himself before his God, in a heartfelt act of contrition, and only thus is he pardoned. Let us also, before the spirit of truth, make an act of contrition for the sins of our history, for only thus will we be able to reform and regenerate.

I realize how delicate this matter is, and I am aware that this places a greater burden of responsibility on my remarks. In a meeting of foreigners this would be no more than a historical thesis, stimulating to the mind, but something cold and indifferent to the personal feelings of each one. For an audience of Peninsular people, however, this is not the case. The history of the last three centuries lives on amongst us, even today, in opinions, beliefs, interests and traditions that reflect it in our society, making it in a sense contemporary. There is in all of us an inner voice that speaks up in favour of the past when someone attacks it: reason may condemn it, but the heart attempts to acquit it. For there is nothing in man more delicate, more touchy, than his illusions: and it is in our illusions that reason, by challenging the past, most deeply strikes us.

I cannot appeal to the fraternity of ideas: I know that my words cannot be accepted by everyone. Fortunately, though, ideas are not the only bond that links the spirits of men to one another. Independently of them, if not above them, there exists for all upright, sincere and loyal thinkers, even in the midst of the greatest divergence of opinions, a moral fraternity based on mutual tolerance and mutual respect, which unites all spirits in the same communion--love of and disinterested seeking for the truth. What would become of men if there were not, above the impulses of passion and the follies of intellect, that serene realm of harmony through good faith and mutual tolerance--a space where the most hostile thoughts could meet up, loyally stretching out a hand and saying to one another with a humane and peaceful sympathy: you are an honest soul! It is to this moral communion that I appeal. And I appeal to it confidently, because, feeling myself guided by that sense of respect and universal generosity, I cannot believe that there is anyone here who would doubt my good faith, and refuse to follow me on that path of loyalty and tolerance.

As I already said, a few days ago, in inaugurating and explaining the thinking behind these Conferences, we do not seek to impose our ideas, but simply to set them out; we do not ask the endorsement of the people who hear us, we ask only for discussion. That discussion, far from alarming us, is what we desire, because even if it were to result in the condemnation of our ideas, we would--provided that condemnation were just and intelligent--be content, having contributed, if only indirectly, to the publicizing of some truths. Proof of the sincerity of this desire are those places and those tables provided especially for journalists, where they can take down our words, thus allowing them to challenge us freely and easily.

Gentlemen--

The Peninsula, during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, offers us a picture of defeat and insignificance, all the more notable for contrasting distressingly with the splendour, the importance and the originality of the role that we played in the first period of the Renaissance, during the whole of the Middle Ages, and even in the final centuries of Antiquity. Already in the Roman period there had appeared the essential features of the Peninsular race: a spirit of local independence, and an originality of inventive talent. Nowhere else was it so hard for Roman rule to establish itself, nor did its establishment ever become complete. That independent personality shows itself clearly in its literature, where the Spaniards Lucan, Seneca and Martial introduced into Latin a style and a quality that were entirely Peninsular, and especially characteristic. They were the precursors of a lively originality that would appear in the following periods. In the Middle Ages the Peninsula, free of foreign influences, shone in the fullness of its talent, through its natural qualities. The political instinct for decentralization and federalism was manifested in the multiplicity of sovereign kingdoms and counties into which the Peninsula was divided, as an assertion and a triumph of local interests and energies against an oppressive and artificial uniformity. Within each one of these divisions, the Communes and the Forais made rights still more local, manifesting and securing in countless institutions the independent and self-governing spirit of the peoples. And this spirit was not merely independent: it was, to the extent that the period admits of it, particularly democratic. Amongst all the peoples of Central and Western Europe, only those of the Peninsula escaped the iron yoke of feudalism. The grim spectre of the feudal castle did not cast a shadow over our valleys, or hang threateningly over the banks of our rivers, or sadden our horizons with its harsh and sinister outline. Certainly there was the nobility, as a distinct order. But in those heroic centuries of incessant war the privileges of nobility became so generalized, and so easy to obtain, that there is no exaggeration in the phrase of the poet who called us Spaniards a people of nobles. Nobles and common people were joined together in interests and in feelings, and to them the royal crown was more a brilliant symbol than a reality of power. If in those unlettered ages the idea of Justice was vague and ill-defined, the instinct for Justice stirred vigorously in the conscience, and actions were forceful, like men's natures.

Such men were no more suited to religious despotism than to political despotism: spiritual oppression was as repugnant to them as civil subjection. The Peninsular peoples are naturally religious; they are so in an ardent, exalted and exclusive manner, even, and this is one of their most pronounced qualities. But they are at the same time inventive and independent: they worship passionately, but they only worship what they themselves have created, not what is imposed on them. They make their religion; they do not accept it ready made. Even today, two-thirds of the Spanish population are completely unaware of the Christian dogmas, theology and mysteries, but they faithfully worship the patron saints of their cities. Why? Because they know them; because they made them. Our nature is creative and individualistic; it needs to see itself reflected in its creations. This (along with the lack of cohesion of the Catholic apparatus in the Middle Ages, still poorly defined and little regulated by the stern Roman school) sufficiently explains the independence of the Peninsular churches, and the haughty attitude of the monarchs of the Peninsula towards the Roman Curia. The Popes already carried some weight; but the bishops and the courts could still hold their own. To the Italian claims there was a very clear and very firm no. And this resistance did not come just from the wishes and the interests of a few; it came from the insuperable impulse of the popular character. That creative nature was seen in the appearance of indigenous rituals, in a particular freedom of thought and interpretation, and in a thousand original points of observance. It was the Christian ethos, in its living and human form, not formal and mindless; charity and tolerance took a higher place than dogmatic theology. That tolerance for the Moors and Jews, unfortunate but so praiseworthy races, will always be one of the glories of the Christian ethos in the Peninsula in the Middle Ages. Charity triumphed over the antipathies and prejudices of race and creed. For this reason the bosom of the people was fruitful; out of it came Saints, individuals at once ingenuous and sublime, living symbols of the popular soul, whose remarkable histories we cannot read, even today, without being moved.

The expansion of the Peninsular spirit in the Middle Ages is no less notable in the world of thought. The great intellectual movement of medieval Europe embraced scholastic philosophy and theology, the national productions of the epic cycles, and architecture. In none of this did the Peninsula show itself inferior to the great cultured nations which had received the heritage of Roman civilization. To Learning we gave philosophers such as Raimon Lull, to the Church theologians and popes, one of them, Pope John XXI, a Portuguese. The colleges of Coimbra and Salamanca were famous throughout Europe: in their classrooms were to be found distinguished foreigners, attracted by the fame of their professors. Amongst the leading men of the twelfth century was a Spanish monarch, Alfonso the Wise, a man of his times, a philosopher, a statesman and a legislator. Nor can I leave unmentioned the Moors and the Jews, because they were one of the glories of the Peninsula. The reform of Scholasticism, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, through the revival of Aristotelianism, was almost exclusively the work of the Arab and Jewish colleges in Spain. The names of Averroes (of Cordoba), Ibn Tufayl (of Seville) and the Jews Maimonides and Avicebron will always counted amongst the greatest in the history of philosophy in the Middle Ages. Alongside Philosophy comes Poetry. To set against the epic cycles of the Round Table, of Charlemagne and the Holy Grail we had the admirable Romancero and the legends of El Cid, the Princes of Lara and so many others, which would have become condensed into true epics if the classical spirit of the Renaissance had not taken Poetry in a different direction. Even so, a large part, perhaps the greater part, of Spanish Theatre came from the inexhaustible quarries of the Romancero. To set against the Provencal troubadours we too had the Peninsular troubadours. Of our kings and knights, some made verses with equal skill, like Beltao de Born or the Count of Tolosa. As for Architecture, it is sufficient to mention the Monastery of Batalha and Burgos Cathedral, two of the finest gothic roses to blossom in the heart of the Middle Ages. In all this we kept pace with Europe, in step with the general advances. In one area, though, we exceeded her, becoming pioneers: in geographical studies and the great sea voyages. The discoveries, which so brilliantly crowned the end of the fifteenth century, were not made by chance. They were preceded by intellectual labour, as scientific as the age allowed, inaugurated by our Prince Henry in the famous school of Sagres, from which there emerged men like the heroic Bartolomeu Dias, and whose influence, directly or indirectly, produced the likes of Magellan and Columbus. It was a wave, first swelling here, that grew until it broke upon the shores of the New World. It showed what the intelligence and the energy of the Peninsula were capable of. As a result, the eyes of Europe were upon us, and in Europe our national influence was amongst those that counted most. Spain and Portugal were relied upon for everything. The Holy Roman Empire offered the coveted imperial crown to a king of Castile, Alfonso the Wise. In the fifteenth century, D. Joao I, an arbitrator in several international disputes, was generally esteemed as one of the leading monarchs in Europe, in influence and ability. All this prepared us, with the coming of the Renaissance, to play a glorious and dominant role. We fulfilled it, in fact, brilliantly and spectacularly: our mistakes, though, did not allow that role to be lasting and advantageous. How it was that the regenerating tendency of the Renaissance, so well prepared, failed amongst us I shall presently explain with conclusive facts. But that tendency was only exemplified amongst us by one generation of superior men, the first. Those following generations that should have consolidated it had become fanatical, torpid and impotent, and were unable to understand or to apply that spirit, so lofty and so free: they were ignorant of it, or they fought against it. There was, though, a first generation that answered the call of the Renaissance; and while that generation occupied the stage--that is, until the middle of the sixteenth century--the Peninsula kept abreast with that extraordinary age of creativity and freedom of thought. The renewal of learning was welcomed in its new and reformed universities, in which the great literary treasures of Antiquity were taught, very often in the very language of the originals. Of the forty-three universities established in Europe in the sixteenth century, fourteen were founded by Spanish kings. Neoplatonist philosophy, which everywhere was replacing the old and exhausted Scholasticism, was adopted by the most eminent minds. A new style and a new literature emerged with Camoes, with Gil Vicente, with Sa de Miranda, with Lope de Vega, with Ferreira. We gave the colleges of Europe wise men like Miguel Servet, precursor to Harvey, philosophers like Sepulveda, one of the leading peripatetics of his time, and the Portuguese Sanches, tutor to Montaigne. The family of Humanists, truly characteristic of the Renaissance, was represented amongst us by Andre de Resende, by Diogo de Teive, by Antonio Agustin, bishop of Tarragona, by Damiao de Gois, and by Camoes, whose talent did not preclude an almost universal erudition. Finally, Peninsular art rose in a mighty flight, with the so-called Manueline architecture, a production of surprising originality and grace, and with the brilliant school of Spanish painting, immortalized by artists such as Murillo, Velazquez and Ribera. Beyond the homeland, famous warriors showed the world that the valour of the Peninsular peoples was no lesser than their intellect. If the seeds of our decline already lay hidden there, no gaze could detect them yet; our glory, a deserved glory, occasioned only admiration.

From this brilliant society, created by the Peninsular genius freely extending itself, we slipped almost without a break into a society that was sombre, inert, poor, unintelligent and virtually unknown. One might think that between one and the other there lay ten centuries of decline; but for this total transformation a mere fifty or sixty years sufficed. It would be impossible to advance any more rapidly along the path to perdition in such a short time.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Portugal no longer counted amongst the nations, and when the anomalous, inconsistent and unnatural monarchy of Filipe II crumbled all around, when the glories of the past could no longer disguise the ruin of the present edifice, and the Peninsula was sinking under the weight of many accumulated errors, then our unavoidable decline became clear and evident on all sides. It was visible in everything: in politics, in our reputation, in intellectual production, in economic society and in industry, and, as a result of all this, in behaviour. The ascendancy that we had exercised in European affairs disappeared, giving way to insignificance and impotence. New or obscure nations rose up and seized the influence in the world of which we had shown ourselves unworthy. The crown of Spain was put up for a bloody auction amongst the nations, and awarded, after twelve years of war, to a grandson of Louis XIV. With the foreign dynasty there began an anti-national policy that debased and discredited the monarchy. And that foreign king cost Spain the loss of Naples, Sicily, Milan and the Netherlands! In Portugal it was the influence of the English that, through underhand treaties, turned us into a sort of British colony. At the same time our own colonies slipped gradually from our hands: the Moluccas came to be Dutch; in India, the Dutch, English and French fought over our spoils; in China and Japan, the prestige of the Portuguese name disappeared. We Spanish and Portuguese went from century to century, dwindling in lands and influence, until we became no more than two shadows, two ghostly nations, amongst the peoples around us! And what a sad picture our internal administration makes! The municipal autonomy, the local initiative of the Communes, and the Forais, which gave each local population a character and a life of its own, were replaced by a uniform and barren centralization. The Crown then ceased to find a resistance and an external force that could counterbalance it, and turned itself into pure absolutism; forgetting its origin and its mission, it naively assumed that the people were no more than the God-given property of kings. Worst of all, the people came to believe that too! That spirit of independence that had inspired the firm 'si no, no!' of the Middle Ages, slumbered and expired in the heart of the people. The people fell silent: with the abandonment of the Cortes they were denied the right to speak; they were not consulted, nor did they matter. Those who mattered were the palace aristocracy, a court nobility, which was ever more separated from the people by its interests and its feelings, and which was turning itself from a class into a caste. This aristocracy, like a blockage in the circulation of the body of society, impeded the natural rise of a new element, an essentially modern element, the middle class, and thus frustrated all the progress associated with that rise. Consequently economic life declined as well; production dropped, agriculture fell back, trade stagnated, one by one the national industries languished; wealth, a showy and sterile wealth, became concentrated in a few particular places, while poverty spread to the rest of the country; the population, decimated by war, emigration and poverty, dropped staggeringly. Never had a people devoured so many treasures, while becoming at the same time so poor! In the midst of this poverty and exhaustion, the national spirit, disheartened and lacking stimulation, fell inevitably into a state of torpor and indifference. It is this that shows us most clearly that mortal leap taken by the minds of the Peninsular peoples in passing from the Renaissance to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A generation of philosophers, scholars, and creative artists gave way to a common tribe of men of uncritical erudition, of academics, of imitators. We left behind a society of living men, moving in the open air; we entered a cramped and almost sepulchral enclosure, in an atmosphere cloudy with the dust of old books, and inhabited by the ghosts of scholars. Poetry, after the sterile, false exaltation, artificially provoked by Gongorism, after the affectation of its conceits (which revealed still further the nullity of its ideas), fell into a servile and mindless imitation of Latin poetry, that heavy and monastic classical school which is the antithesis of all inspiration and all feeling. Poems were composed in a scholarly fashion, like dissertations. Translation was the ideal. Invention was considered dangerous and inferior: the more verses translated from Horace and Ovid a poem contained, the more perfect it was. What flourished was tragedy, the Pindaric ode, and the mock-heroic poem--that is, affectation and the degradation of poetry. As for human truths or the popular and national sentiments, no one concerned themselves with that. Invention and originality, in that deplorable age, were focussed entirely on the cynically droll descriptions of the hardships, the intrigues and the artifices of everyday life. The Spanish Romances picarescos and the Portuguese Comedias populares that remain are the irrefutable proofs, from its own pen, of the guilt of that society, whose profound demoralization plumbed the depths of frank and candid vice. Beyond this pungent reality, the official and courtly literature ambled through the insipid fields of the academic discourse, the funeral oration and the panegyric to order--genres that are artificial, puerile and, above all, soporific. With such a state of the spirit, what could be expected of Art? It is enough to raise our eyes to those dismal heaps of stone that are called the Escorial and Mafra to see that the same lack of feeling and invention that had produced the heavy and insipid tastes of Classicism also erected the mounds of Jesuit architecture, compact and coldly correct in their lack of expression. What a wretched contrast between those mountains of marble, with which they supposed they achieved greatness simply because they made something huge, and the delicate, aerial, well-proportioned and, so to speak, spiritual construction of the monastery of the Jeronimos, of Batalha, or Burgos cathedral! The gloomy and depraved spirit was reflected, with a reckless accuracy, in Art, which in the eyes of history will always be an incorruptible witness for the prosecution against that age of true moral death. That moral death not only invaded feeling, imagination and taste; it also, and above all, invaded the mind. In the last two centuries the Peninsula has not produced a single superior man whom one could place beside the great creators of the modern world: not even one of the great intellectual discoveries that are the great labour and the great honour of the modern spirit originated in the Peninsula. In the course of two hundred years of productive work cultured Europe has reformed the ancient sciences and created six or seven new sciences: anatomy, physiology, chemistry, celestial mechanics, the differential calculus, historical criticism, geology; there have appeared the likes of Newton, Descartes, Bacon, Leibniz, Harvey, Buffon, Ducange, Lavoisier and Vico--where is there, amongst the names of these and the other true heroes of the age of thought, one Spanish or Portuguese name? What Spanish or Portuguese name is linked to the discovery of a great scientific law, a theory, or a key fact? Cultured Europe grew in stature, gained in dignity, and advanced above all through science; it was above all through the lack of science that we declined, that we degraded ourselves, that we nullified ourselves. The modern soul had died within us completely.

The path of ignorance, oppression and poverty leads naturally, and inevitably, to depravity in morals. And morals did indeed degenerate: amongst the mighty, with the ostentatious corruption of the court, where the kings led by example in vice, brutality and adultery--Afonso VI, Joao V, Filipe V, Carlos IV; and amongst the humble, with hypocritical corruption, as the poor man's family was sold, out of poverty, for the vices of the nobility and the powerful. It was the age of mistresses and bastard offspring. What it meant to be a poor woman then, confronted with aristocratic gold, can be seen in the scandalous lawsuit for the annulment of Afonso VI's marriage, and in the memoirs of the Cavaleiro de Oliveira. Being a rogue was a generally approved occupation, practised advantageously in the Court itself. Religion ceased to be a living sentiment; it became a mindless, formal, mechanical practice. What the friars were like, we all know: the knavish and base morals of this class are still recalled even today in the Decameron of popular tradition. The worst is that these tonsured impostors were bloodthirsty too. The Inquisition weighed on consciences like the vaulting of a gaol. The public spirit sank gradually under the pressure of the terror, while vice, ever more refined, quietly took hold of the empty space left behind in their souls by dignity, moral sense, and the force of individual will, crushed and destroyed by fear. The Casuists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have left us a shameful monument to the bestial refinement of all vices, the depravation of imagination, the private hardships of the family and the ruin of morals that run through those deplorable societies. This on one hand; because, on the other, the Casuists also showed us that the degradation had reached the spirit of the clergy, digging every day into the filth, doggedly turning over with partiality, almost with love, that stinking heap of abjection. All those profound horrors were faithfully reflected in literature. What public morality was in the seventeenth century--political intrigues, nepotism at Court, the audacious or surreptitious theft of public wealth--can be seen (with all the clarity of a stern and sarcastic pen) in Padre Antonio Vieira's Arte de Furtar. As to the documents for the story of the family and of private morals, we find them in the Carta de Guia de Casados, by D. Francisco Manuel, in the Portuguese Farsas populares, and in the Spanish Romances picarescos. The Peninsular spirit had descended, step by step, to the furthest limits of depravity!

Thus we have been for the last three centuries: without life, wealth, science, invention, morals. Today, we Spanish and Portuguese are raising ourselves, with difficulty, from that tomb where our great errors have buried us; we are raising ourselves, but the remnants of the shroud still hinder our steps, and by the pallor of our faces the world can easily see from what dismal and deathly places we have been resuscitated. What are the causes of that decline, so visible, so universal, and generally so little explained? Let us examine the phenomena which occurred in the Peninsula over the course of the sixteenth century, a period of transition between the Middle Ages and modern times, during which there appeared the seeds, good and evil, that, by developing into modern societies, gave each one its true character. If these phenomena are found to be new and universal, if they should reach all spheres of national life, from religion to industry, and thus be intimately connected to what is most vital in the people, I shall be justified in using the argument (in this case, rigorously logical) post hoc, ergo propter hoc ['after this, therefore because of this'] and in concluding that it is in these new phenomena that we should look for, and find, the causes of the decline of the Peninsula.

Now then, there were three principal phenomena, and of three kinds: one moral, another political, and the last economic. The first is the transformation of Catholicism, by the Council of Trent. The second is the establishment of Absolutism, through the destruction of local liberties. The third is the advance of the distant Conquests. These three phenomena thus brought together, taking in the three main aspects of social life, thought, public affairs, and production, clearly show us that a profound and universal revolution took place, during the sixteenth century, in Peninsular societies. That revolution was ruinous, quite ruinous. If a counter-proof were necessary, it would be sufficient to consider a very simple parallel fact: these three phenomena were the exact opposite of the three main features seen in other nations which grew, elevated themselves morally, that made themselves intelligent, rich and powerful, and carried civilization forward. Those three civilizing features were moral autonomy, won by the Reformation or by philosophy; the raising of the middle class, the instrument of progress in modern society, and the governor of kings, until the day it deposed them; and finally industry, the true basis of contemporary society, which gave nations a new conception of Justice, substituting trade for violence, and commerce for the war of conquest. Now moral autonomy, appealing to enquiry and individual conscience, is completely the opposite of the Catholicism of the Council of Trent, for which human reason and free thought are a crime against God; the middle class, imposing on kings its interests, and very often its values, is the opposite of Absolutism, based on the aristocracy and governing only for its benefit; and industry, finally, is the opposite of the spirit of conquest, hostile to trade and commerce.

So while other nations rose, we sank. They rose on account of the modern virtues; we sank on account of the old vices, concentrated, taken to the highest degree of development and application. We sank in our industry, and our public affairs. And we sank, above all, in our religion.

This was the prime cause of our moral decline. The Catholicism of the Council of Trent certainly did not inaugurate religious despotism in the world; but it organized it in a complete, powerful, formidable and, until then, unknown way. In this respect it may be said that Catholicism, in its definitive, fixed and intolerant form dates from the sixteenth century. The tendencies towards this state of affairs, however, reach back much further; the Reformation, indeed, does not signify anything other than the protest of Christian sentiment, free and independent, against those authoritarian and formalistic tendencies. Those tendencies were logical, and up to a point legitimate, for the Roman interpretation and organization of the Christian religion; they were not so, though, for the Christian sentiment in its virginal purity, outside the precarious conditions of its political and worldly manifestation--in a word, the Christian sentiment in its natural domain, the religious conscience. It is necessary, in fact, for us to clearly establish a rigorous distinction between Christianity and Catholicism, without which we shall understand nothing of the historical evolution of the Christian religion. If there is no Christianity outside the bosom of the church (as the theologians assert, but as reason, impartiality and judgement neither are able nor wish to accept), then we shall have to refuse the name of Christians to the Lutherans, and all the sects that have emerged from the Protestant movement, in which, nevertheless, the evangelical spirit quite clearly lives on. Furthermore, we shall have to deny the name of Christians to the apostles and the evangelists, since at that time Catholicism was so far in the future that the word Catholic had not even been invented! But in reality Christianity existed, and can exist, outside Catholicism. Christianity is an ethos; Catholicism is above all an institution. One lives on faith and inspiration, the other on dogma and discipline. All of religious history, up to the middle of the sixteenth century, is no more than the transformation of the Christian sentiment into the Catholic institution. The Middle Ages were the period of transition: the one still exists and the other now appears. They balance one another. Unification was present, made itself felt, but was still not enough to smother local life and autonomy. For this reason it was also the period of the national Churches. During the Middles Ages those of the Peninsula, like all the others, had their freedoms and initiative, national councils, their own discipline, and their own way of feeling and practising their religion. From this came two great results, yielding beneficial consequences. Dogma, instead of being imposed, was accepted, and in a certain sense created; since, when morality is based on dogma, there can only be a good morality when it is derived from a dogma that is accepted, and to a certain extent created, and never imposed. This was the first consequence, of incalculable impact. The feeling of duty, instead of being contradicted by religion, rested upon it. Hence the strength of character, the elevation in morality. Secondly, those national Churches, just because they were independent, had no need to oppress. They were tolerant. In the shadow of them--very much in the shadow, it is true, but in any case tolerated--lived Jews and Moors, intelligent and industrious races, to whom the Peninsula's industry and thought owe so much, and whose expulsion has almost the proportions of a national calamity. This was the second consequence, of no lesser importance than the first. If the Peninsula was not then so Catholic as it was later, when it burned Jews and received from the Father General of the Jesuits the watchword of its public life, it was certainly more Christian, that is, more charitable and moral, as these facts prove.

The sixteenth century, then, so rich in new developments, was torn apart, and with it there appeared in the world the Reformation, joined by almost all the people of the Germanic race. For the Latin peoples, who remained allied to Rome, this situation created an immediate imperative which was at the same time a great problem. It became necessary to respond to the attacks of the Protestants, to show the world that the religious spirit had not died in the bosom of the Latin races, and that beneath the Roman corruption there was soul and will. A unanimous cry of reform arose from the midst of the representatives of orthodoxy, opposing themselves to the challenge that had been made to the Catholic world, with the same word, by Luther, Zwingli, AEcolampadius, Melanchthon and Calvin. Kings, commoners and priests all cried out for reform. But herein lay the problem: what sort of reform? The opinion of the bishops, and of the Catholic populations in general, declared for a liberal reform, in harmony with the spirit of the age, many even wanting a reconciliation with the Protestants: this was the Episcopal opinion, representative of the national Churches. In Rome, though, the solution that was presented to the problem had quite a different character. Hatred and anger filled the hearts of the heirs to the apostles. They recoiled in horror at the idea of conciliation, or the smallest concession. They thought it necessary to reinforce orthodoxy, concentrating all their forces, disciplining and centralizing; to harden the Church, to make it unshakeable. This was the absolutist opinion, representative of the Papacy. This opinion (one might say, this party) triumphed, and this triumph was a true calamity for the Catholic nations. It was not this that they wanted, and that their bishops sought and argued for, struggling helplessly for sixteen years against the overwhelming majority held by the minions of Rome. They were asking for a true reform, sincere and liberal, in harmony with the requirements of the time. Their programme was formulated in three great foundational chapters. No. 1--Independence of the Bishops, autonomy of the national Churches, inauguration of a religious parliamentarianism through the frequent convocation of the Councils, those Estates General of Christianity, superior to the Pope, and supreme arbiters of the spiritual world. No. 2--Marriage for priests, that is, the progressive secularization of the clergy, a return to the laws of humanity for a class pledged for over a thousand years to harsh asceticism, then perhaps necessary, but by the sixteenth century already absurd, dangerous and demoralizing. No. 3--Restrictions on the holding of multiple ecclesiastical benefices, an odious abuse tending to introduce into the Church a veritable feudalism, with all its power and immoderation. From these reforms would naturally emerge a gradual humanization of religion, a growing freedom of conscience, and the capacity for Christianity to transform itself day by day, to progress, to be equal always to the human spirit, the immense and principal result which the Reformation brought to the peoples that adhered to it. The grave prelates who were then fighting for the reforms I have just laid out certainly did not wish for or even foresee these consequences; Luther himself did not foresee them. But even so these were the consequences. Bartolomeu dos Martires and the bishops of Cadiz and Astorga were not, to be sure, revolutionaries: they represented at the Council of Trent the last defence and protest of the Churches of the Peninsula against the invading Ultramontanism; but their work really was, in its consequences, revolutionary, and by labouring for it they belonged to the movement and the spirit of the great and emancipatory sixteenth century. If they had achieved that reform, we Spanish and Portuguese might perhaps have escaped decline. Who today can deny that it is to a large extent to the Reformation that the reformed peoples owe the moral advances that have placed them naturally in the lead of civilization? A significant contrast that the world shows us today! The most intelligent, the most moral, the most peaceful and the most industrious nations are precisely those that joined the religious revolution of the sixteenth century: Germany, Holland, England, the United States, and Switzerland. The most decayed are precisely the most Catholic! With the Reformation we would today, perhaps, be on a par with those nations: we would be free, prosperous, intelligent, moral ... but Rome would have fallen!

But Rome did not wish to fall. So for a long time it resisted, it evaded as long as it could the pleas of the nations, which demanded the convocation of the reforming council. Not able to resist any longer, it gave in. But how did it do so? How did Rome, by then dominated by the Jesuits, give in? This was Italy, gentlemen, the country of Machiavelli! I do not say that Rome deliberately and consciously used a Machiavellian strategy; I cannot judge its intentions. I say merely that it seems so, and that in the eyes of history Rome's strategy in all the business of the Council of Trent seems to have a marked character of cunning and calculation ... hardly evangelical attributes! Rome, unable to resist any longer the idea of a council exploited the idea for its own purposes. Out of an instrument of peace and progress it made a weapon of war and domination; it appropriated the great drive for reform and made it work to the advantage of Ultramontanism. How? Very simply: 1--by giving only papal legates the right to propose reforms; 2--by replacing the old method of voting by nations with voting by heads, which gave Rome with its Italian bishops and cardinals, its minions, a solid majority, always determined to crush, to smother, the votes of the other nations. Sufficient to say that France, Spain, Portugal and the Catholic lands of Germany never had more than sixty votes between them, while the Italians numbered 180 or more! In these circumstances the council ceased to be all-inclusive, it was simply Italian; and not Italian, even, just Roman! From the first day it could be seen that the cause of reform was lost. Summoned to make that reform, the council only acted against it, to mislead and annul it.

With the machine thus assembled and armed, let us see it at work. To subjugate man on earth it was necessary first to condemn him in Heaven: to this end the council started, in the fifth session, by establishing as dogma original sin, with all its consequences: the hereditary damnation of humanity, and the incapacity of man to save himself through his own merit, but only through the action and grace of Jesus Christ. Many theologians and a few individual synods had already taken up this topic, but no ecumenical council had yet defined it. A truly liberal council would have left this matter shadowy and undefined; it would not have restrained human liberty and dignity with that shackle. The Council of Trent made this definition the prologue to its labours. It suited it, right at the start, to condemn human Reason without appeal, and lay this foundation to its edifice. Which it did. From then until now it has been established dogma in the Catholic world that man is a body without a soul, that individual will is an invention of the devil, and that we need only the Pope in Rome and the confessor at the bedside to guide us. Perinde ac cadaver ['just like a corpse'], (2) say the statutes of the Society of Jesus.

At the thirteenth session they confirmed and fixed the dogma of the Eucharist, already defined, though vaguely, at the fourth Lateran council, and anathema threatened anyone who did not believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the bread and wine after the consecration. It was another step (and a decisive one) in bringing Christianity on to the path of idolatry, to making the divine absurd. Few dogmas have contributed as much as this materialism of the Real Presence to coarsen the modern peoples, to revive in them pagan instincts, to mislead their natural reason. It seems that this was what the council wanted!

In the fourteenth session they dealt in detail with the Confession. Confession already existed in the Church, but was comparatively free and voluntary. That freedom had already been much restricted at the fourth Lateran council. But at the fourteenth session at Trent the Christian conscience was decisively imprisoned. Without Confession there is no remission of sins! The soul is incapable of communicating with God, except through the intermediary of the priest! It was made obligatory for the faithful to confess at certain times, and they were exhorted to confess as often as they could. Here was founded the power, both fearful and mysterious, of the confessional. There appeared a distinctive character: the spiritual director. From then on there is always within the family--immobile at the bedside, invisible but always present--a figure in black who separates husband and wife, a hidden will that rules the house, an intruder who has more authority than the master. Is there anyone here, Spanish or Portuguese, who is unaware of the deplorable state of the family, with its hidden head, hostile as a rule to the apparent head? Who is unaware of the disorders, the scandals, the distress brought into the family home by way of the confessional? The council did not wish this, certainly; but it did everything that was necessary for it to happen.

Concerning discipline and the relations between Church and State the same spirit of absolutism, of centralization and the invasion of all rights predominates. At the fifth session the regular orders became independent of the bishops, and almost exclusively dependent on Rome. What a weapon this was in the hands of the papacy, already in itself no more than a weapon in the hands of the Jesuits! With the thirteenth session only the Pope, through his commissioners, could judge the bishops and priests. It was impunity for the clergy! At the fourth session restrictions were placed on the reading of the Bible by lay people, restrictions that amounted to a real prohibition. What was this, then, other than a suspicion of human Reason, condemned to think and to read through the thoughts and the eyes of a half-dozen of the elect? In the seventh, ninth, eighteenth and twenty-fourth session arrangements were made tending to subjugate governments, to impose on the peoples policing by Rome, implacably extinguishing everywhere the last vestiges of the national Churches. Finally, the authority of the Pope over the Councils triumphed at the twenty-third and twenty-fifth sessions, by the lips of the Jesuit Laynez, inspiration and soul of the council--if when speaking of a Jesuit one can, even metaphorically, use the word soul ... This labour of high politics was topped with the preparation of a Catechism. This Catechism, imposed in all places and in all manners on young and simple spirits, served to nip liberty in the bud, to swallow up new-born generations, to twist and torture them, to press them into the narrow moulds of a dry, formal, scholastic and subtly unintelligible doctrine. Whether that fearful outcome was achieved or not is shown by some few moribund nations, sickly with the worst of sicknesses, moral atrophy!

Yes, gentlemen! What could that fearful machine of repression that was Catholicism after the Council of Trent offer to the people? Intolerance, brutalization, and then death! I shall take three examples. The first is the Thirty Years' War, the most cruel, the mostly coldly bloodthirsty, the most systematically destructive of all those seen in modern times, which nearly annihilated Germany. That war, provoked by the Catholic side, and conducted by it with a hellish perseverance, clearly showed the world what depths of hatred words of peace and religion can conceal. The priests did not merely direct it, they witnessed its execution. Each general took with him a Jesuit director, and those generals were called Tilly and Piccolomini, the most hardened of executioners. Germany and Europe were saved by the indomitable firmness of a heart as great as it was pure, serene in the face of those fanatical hordes--the true and perhaps only hero of that accursed war, the true saint of the dark period, was a Protestant, Gustavus Adolphus. As for the Pope, he applauded the slaughter! My second example is Italy. The anxiety of the papacy at the creation of a strong state in Italy, which would be a barrier to an ambition growing day by day, made it the greatest enemy of Italian unity. It was the papacy that sowed discord between the cities and the Italian princes, whenever they attempted to join forces. It was the papacy that invited foreigners to cross the Alps in a crusade against the national forces, each time it seemed that they were trying to get organized. 'The papacy', says Edgar Quinet, 'has been a holy thorn in the flesh of Italy, preventing it from healing.' Even today, though that desired unity has been consummated, was it not in the face of the curses and wrath of the clergy and of Rome? The only thought that today occupies that papacy is to undo that national undertaking, to call down upon it the hatred of the world, and the foreigner's sword, if it can, to assassinate the resuscitated Italy. These facts are known by everyone. What perhaps is not known is the role that Catholicism played in the assassination of Poland. 'The intolerance of the Jesuits and Ultramontanes', says Emile de Laveleye, 'was the primary cause of the dismembering and the fall of Poland.' This heroic but poorly organized--or rather, poorly unified--nation, was a sort of federation of small nationalities, with different customs and religions. Wedged between powerful and ambitious monarchies of the time, like Austria, Russia and Turkey, Poland could only survive through political liberty, and above all through toleration against the common enemy by the autonomous groups that comprised it. It was to that tolerance, in fact, that it owed the strength and importance it had in the history of Europe up to the seventeenth century. For a long time Catholics, schismatic Greeks, Protestants and Socinians lived as brothers in a society that was truly Christian because it was truly tolerant. One day, though, the Jesuits, right there in the heart of Rome, fixed their eyes upon Poland as a fine piece of prey--that nation was indeed a scandal to the good fathers. They plotted so well that by 1570 they had been able to enter Poland: King Stephen Bathory, with reprehensible imprudence, granted them the University of Vilnius. Masters of education, and soon of the consciences of the Catholic nobility, the Jesuits became a power in the land, and religious persecution began. In 1648, John Casimir, who before becoming king had been a cardinal and a Jesuit, tried to make the Ruthenian peasants, followers of the Greek schism, convert to Catholicism. They rose up, joined forces with the Cossacks, who also followed the Greek rites, and started a formidable war, which resulted in the separation of the Cossacks and Ruthenians from the Polish federation; they yielded to Russia, in whose hands they became a terrible weapon always aimed at the heart of Poland. This nation never had such bloodthirsty enemies as the Cossacks! Without them Poland, weakened between formidable neighbours, had to fall, and fall it did. The sharing of the spoils in 1772 did no more than confirm a long-known fact: the nullity of the Polish nation.

In this way, gentlemen, the Catholicism of the last three centuries has been, through its principles, its discipline and its politics, the greatest enemy of the nations, and the true sepulchre of the national peoples. 'The cave of the Sphinx', a poet-philosopher said of it, 'can be recognized at the entrance by the bones of the devoured peoples.'

And for us, Spanish and Portuguese, how was it that Catholicism reduced us to nought? Catholicism lay heavily upon us on all sides, with its full weight. With the Inquisition an invisible terror spread over society: hypocrisy became an essential national vice; denunciation became a religious virtue; the expulsion of the Jews and Moors impoverished the two nations, paralysed commerce and industry, and delivered a mortal blow to agriculture in all of southern Spain; the persecution of the New Christians made capital disappear; the Inquisition crossed the seas, and by making the Indians hostile to us, and hindering the fusion of conquerors and conquered, it made the establishment of a solid and lasting colonization impossible; in America it depopulated the Antilles, terrified the indigenous populations, and made the name of Christ a symbol of death; finally, religious terror corrupted the national character, and made two generous nations into hordes of fanatics, and the horror of the civilized world. With the Jesuits the Christian sentiment disappeared, to give way to the most deplorable deceits to which the religious conscience has ever lowered itself. Their methods of teaching, at once brutal and refined, sterilized intellects, steering them towards rote-learning, with the aim of killing off inventive thought, and they succeeded in alienating the Peninsular spirit from the great advance of modern science, which is essentially free and creative; Jesuit education turned the upper classes into dull and passive machines and the people into cruel and corrupt fanatics. The fearful Jesuit morality, explained (and practised) by its casuists, with its mental restrictions and its subtleties, its equivocations and its condescensions, seeped in everywhere, like a slow poison; it disrupted society morally, it broke up the spirit of the family, it corrupted the conscience with constant swings in the notion of duty, and destroyed the character by deceiving and weakening it. The ideal of Jesuit education was a nation of children, mute, obedient and feeble-minded; it achieved this in the famous Paraguay missions. Paraguay was the Society of Jesus's Kingdom of Heaven: perfect order, perfect devotion; only one thing was lacking: the soul, that is, dignity and will, what distinguishes men from animals. These were the benefits that we took to the savage races of America, by the civilizing hands of the Society's priests. So the free talents of the people decayed and slumbered everywhere, in the arts, in literature, in religion.

The saints of the time do not have the simple, ingenuous character of the true popular saints; they are fanatical friars, they are cunning Jesuits. As for the books of sermons and other devotional books, I do not know what is most shameful about them, their vacuous ideas, their cheap sentiments, or their ridiculously childish style. As to the arts and literature, the decline is to be seen clearly in the idiotic stone heaps of Jesuit architecture, in the conventional poetry of the academies, or in the odes to the divine, and priestly invocations. As for the popular genius, it died at the hands of the clergy, as Teofilo Braga has so clearly demonstrated in his recent books on Portuguese literature, rich in new findings. We know what morals emerged from this school. I have already mentioned the Arte de Furtar, the Romances picarescos, the Farsas populares, the Spanish theatre, the writings of D. Francisco Manuel and of the Cavaleiro de Oliveira. But even without these documents we would know enough from popular tradition, which still speaks of the scandals of that aristocratic and clerical society. The fearful influence of Catholic instruction was no less visible in the political world. How could spiritual absolutism fail to affect the soul of the civil power? The example of despotism came from so high up, and the kings were so religious! They were the Catholic kings par excellence, the most faithful! Nothing provided so great a support to the absolutist power, by its example, its authority, its doctrine and its incitement, as the Catholic spirit and the Jesuit influence. In those saintly times the real ministers were the king's confessors, and the choice of confessor was a matter of state. The passion for ruling, and the criminal pride of one man, were supported by the divine scripture. Theocracy joined hands with despotism. This tendency was clearly seen in foreign policy. Instead of safeguarding the true interests of the people, informed by a national outlook, it betrayed its mission, becoming the instrument of Roman Catholic policy, that is, of the interests and ambitions of a foreigner. D. Sebastiao, a disciple of the Jesuits, would die on the sands of Africa for the Catholic faith, not for the Portuguese nation. D. Carlos V and Filipe II brought the world to death and destruction, for what? For Spanish interests? For the glory of Spain? No, for the glory and interests of Rome! For over seventy years Spain, ruled by these two crowned inquisitors, gave the best of her blood, her wealth and her energies, so that the Pope could once again lay down the law in England and Germany. That was the national policy of those famous kings; I call it simply betraying the nations.

This was one, if not the principal cause of the decline of the Peninsular peoples. Of the harmful influences none was so universal, none put down such deep roots. It wounded man in his innermost self, at the most essential points of his moral life, his believing, his feeling--his being: it poisoned life in its deepest wellsprings. That transformation of the Peninsular soul reached such intimate depths that it has escaped the greatest revolutions; they have passed superficially over this almost inaccessible region and left it in its centuries-old inertia. Within all of us, however modern we would like to be, hidden, disguised, but not entirely dead, there is a bigot, a fanatic or a Jesuit! This shade that rises amongst us is the enemy, it is the past. It is necessary to bury it once and for all, and with it the sinister spirit of Tridentine Catholicism.

This first cause affected mainly moral life; the second, Absolutism, although reflected in the state of mind, affected mainly political and social life. The history of the transformation of the Peninsular monarchies is long and, to my little learning, obscure and to some extent unknown: I could not deal with it here. Suffice it to say that the character of these monarchies during the Middle Ages contrasts remarkably with what we find in the sixteenth and subsequent centuries. Formerly the kings were not absolute: and they were not so because local political life, being strong and lively, not only did not allow them a wide sphere of action, but even within that sphere resisted an expansion of authority with obstacles and constant vigilance. The privileges of the nobility and the clergy, on the one hand, and the popular institutions, the municipalities and the communes, on the other, balanced--bar a little swaying--the weight of the crown. For the gravest questions, for moments of crisis, there were the Cortes, where all social classes had representatives and the vote. Liberty was then the normal condition of the Peninsula.

In the sixteenth century this all changed. Absolute power rested upon the destruction of local power. It reduced the nobility, it is true, but only for its own advantage--the people gained little from that revolution. What is certain is that they lost their liberty. Municipal life gradually weakened; the Spanish communes, after a bloody protest, fell lifeless at the feet of a king who was not even wholly Spanish. The institutions, surrounded on all sides, felt a lack of air and of firm ground beneath them. Who could ever tell of the heedless and unfeeling invasions of royal power on to the people's terrain, those subterranean struggles, the successive abdications of the national will into the hands of one man, the hapless rebellions, the long and cruel history of the disappearance of the popular charters? It is a story as sad as it is obscure, which no one has told or ever will. We see the outcome of the drama, but the action escapes us. But alongside this hidden struggle there was another, more evident one, whose history will always appear like an avenging ghost to lay charges against royalty. That struggle was the great war of the communes in the Spanish cities. Defeated, crushed by force, the Spanish cities found a hero from whose ardent breast came a protest which will live as long as the condemnation it provoked. This is what D. Juan de Padilla, leader of the communeros, wrote to his own city of Toledo, hours before being beheaded: 'Oh, City of Toledo, crown of Spain and light of the world, already free in the time of the Goths, who lavished your blood to safeguard your liberty and that of your sister cities--Juan de Padilla, your legitimate son, assures you that your ancient victories are renewed once again with the blood of his body.' Padilla's head rolled, and with it fell the ancient municipal liberty, likewise decapitated. The centralized monarchy, heavy and uniform, fell on the Peninsula like a tombstone. Breath failed in millions of men to concentrate itself all in the chest of one exceptional man, whom chance of birth had made a god. If only that god had been propitious, good and providential! But absolutist centralization, laying low the people, corrupted the king at the same time. D. Joao III, fanatical and of evil repute, Filipe II, the devil of the south, inquisitor and executioner of the nations, Carlos IV, Joao V, Afonso VI--some debauched, others unruly, others again ignorant and base--are good examples of absolute royalty, infatuated to the point of vice and crime by pride in their own power, possessed by that Caesarist madness by which nature makes despots pay for their monstrous inequality, placing them as if outside humanity. To such men as these, without guarantees or examination, nations blindly entrusted their destinies! Had Filipe II not ruled absolutely, he would never have been able to launch his absurd project of conquering England, he would not have entombed in the ocean waters along with his Invincible Armada thousands of lives and a prodigious sum, utterly lost. Had D. Sebastiao not ruled absolutely he would not have gone to Alcacer Quibir to bury the Portuguese nation, the last hopes of the fatherland.

Other monarchies--the French, for example--subjugated the people, but also supported their progress. Though aristocratic in its roots, there was much in the fruit that was popular. The bourgeoisie, to whom the future was destined, rose up and began to be heard. Our mon archies, however, had an exclusively aristocratic character, both in their principles and their practice. Government then was by the nobility and for the nobility. We all know the consequences. Through mortgages they entailed the land, creating immense properties. Through this the class of small landowners was destroyed; with large-scale cultivation then being impossible and the small-scale gradually disappearing, agriculture declined; half of the Peninsula was turned into moorland; the population declined, though without easing the hardships. On the other hand the aristocratic spirit of the monarchy, naturally opposed to the progress of the middle class, obstructed the development of the bourgeoisie, the modern class par excellence, already a civilizing and innovative force in industry, in science and in commerce. Without it, what could we be in the great undertakings by which the modern spirit has transformed society, learning and nature? Only what we really were, thanks to the aristocratic monarchy: nothing! That monarchy, accustoming the people to servitude and to the inertia of those who await everything from above, obliterated their instinctive feeling for liberty, broke their willpower and lulled their initiative. When later they were granted liberty they did not understand it; even today they neither understand it nor know how to use it. Revolutions may call out to them, or draw them in by force, but they go on sleeping the centuries-old slumber!

Alongside these two harmful influences, the two principal causes of decline, one moral and the other political, there is a third, chiefly economic in character: the Conquests. For two centuries the books, the traditions, and the memories of men have been full of this warrior epic that the Peninsular peoples, crossing the unknown oceans, left written all around the world. We have been mesmerized by these stories: to attack them is almost sacrilege. And yet that brilliant poem in action was one of the main causes of our decline--it is necessary to say so, even though it hurts our dearest feelings of patriotic tradition. All the more so since an economic error is not necessarily a national disgrace. From the heroic point of view, who can deny it? That sequence of Spanish and Portuguese conquests was a brilliant, and in some ways sublime, flash of the intrepid Peninsular soul. The subjective morality of that moment is historically undeniable; events that could inspire the great soul of Camoes belong to the domain of poetry, and will always do so. The tragedy is that that warrior spirit was carried over into modern times; modern nations are condemned to make science, not poetry. It is not the heroic muse of epic that rules now; it is political economy, the Calliope of a new world--if not as beautiful then at least more just and logical than the old one. So it is in the light of political economy that I condemn the Conquests and the warrior spirit. We wanted to recreate the heroic times in the modern age. We deluded ourselves: it was not possible, and we failed. What, in fact, is the spirit of the modern age? It is the spirit of labour and of industry: riches and the wealth of nations must be derived from productive activity and not from sterile war. What emerges from war not only runs out quickly, but is also dead capital, consumed unproductively. It is necessary that labour, above all agricultural production, should make it fertile, give it life. This subject is ruled by an economic law formulated by Adam Smith, one of the fathers of science, in the following words: 'capital acquired through commerce and war only becomes real and productive when it is secured in the cultivation of land and other industries'. Let us look at what England has done with India, with Australia, and with world trade. It exploits and it fights, but the wealth acquired is fixed on its own soil through its powerful industry and its agriculture, perhaps the most flourishing in the world. Hence for two centuries the prosperity of England has been the admiration and almost the envy of the nations. By contrast, what use did we, Spanish and Portuguese, make of the prodigious wealth that we extorted from foreign peoples? The answer is in our wasted industry, our ruined commerce, our diminished population, our declining agriculture and those deserts of the Beiras, of the Alentejo, of Spanish Extremadora and of the Castiles, where there is not a tree, or a domestic animal or a human face to be found!

One example, that of Portuguese agriculture before and after the sixteenth century, will demonstrate, with relevant facts, the pernicious example of the spirit of conquest in the economic sphere. These facts are taken from three works whose authority is incontestable: the Memoria historica on Portuguese agriculture, by Alexandre de Gusmao; Camillo Pallavicini's book La economia agraria del Portogallo; and the Historia da Agricultura em Portugal, by Sr. Rebelo da Silva. One thing that impresses anyone studying the first centuries of the Portuguese monarchy is the essentially agricultural character of that society. The epithets of the kings, such as o Povoador, o Lavrador, are in themselves highly significant. In the midst of wars, and despite the imperfections of institutions, the population grew and prosperity spread. The forestation of the country advanced, and the moorland receded thanks to labour. The fleets, which later ruled the seas, came from the woodlands planted by D. Dinis. In the reign of D. Fernando, Portugal was one of the main exporting countries. Castile, Galicia, Flanders and Germany were supplied with olive oil almost exclusively from Portugal: our agricultural prosperity was sufficient to supply such huge markets. The trade in cereals was considerable. In the fifteenth century Venetian ships came to Lisbon and the Algarve ports bringing goods from the East, and taking in exchange cereals, salt fish and dried fruit, which were then distributed throughout Dalmatia and the whole of Italy. We also maintained a lively trade with England. The popular classes advanced thanks to prosperity and work, and the population increased. In the time of D. Joao II the population reached very nearly three million. Suffice it to compare this figure to that of the population of 1640, which scarcely exceeded one million, to see that a great decline occurred during that period!

In fact a deplorable revolution had taken place in the sixteenth century in the economic conditions of Portuguese society, a revolution due, above all, to the new state of affairs created by the conquests. The landowner and the farmer abandoned the plough and became soldiers and adventurers: they crossed the ocean in search of glory and a more illustrious or profitable position. Seduced by the riches accumulated in the main centres of trade the rural population poured in, abandoning the fields and swelling the share of poverty, servility and vice in the big cities. Cultivation gradually diminished. With this diminution, and with the relative depreciation of precious metals caused by the inflow from the treasuries of the East and America, cereals reached fabulous prices. Wheat, which in 1460 cost 10 reis to the alqueire, had risen in 1520 to 20, 30 or 35 reis! Hence the prices fetched in foreign markets did not even cover the cost of production: competition from other countries, which could produce more cheaply, overwhelmed us. We not only ceased to export, but we started importing: 'From the reign of D. Manuel onwards', says Alexandre de Gusmao, 'we were sustained by foreigners'. That sustenance could be afforded by the wealthy, enriched by India and Brazil; the masses, though, were dying of hunger. The wretchedness of the people was tremendous. Begging at the gates of the convents and the noble houses became an institution. They begged in gangs in the streets. In an appallingly expressive image, popular tradition gives us Camoes, the singer of these glories that impoverished us, begging to provide for his sad and disheartened old age. It is the very picture of the nation. The chronicles tell us of great famines, by which the population visibly shrank. What remedy was sought to this evil? An evil incomparably worse: slavery! They experimented with the introduction of servile labour, with slaves from Africa. Happily it did not go beyond an experiment. It was the transformation of a free and civilized country into something monstrous, an oligarchy of plantation owners. The barbarity of the men who had devastated America was transported to the heart of Europe! With these ingredients, what could be expected of industry? Only total decline. Nothing was manufactured, nothing was produced: the gold from the East was enough to pay for the industry of others, enriching them, spurring them to productive labour, while we became ever poorer, with our hands full of treasure! We imported everything: silks, velvet, brocade and pasta from Italy, glass from Germany, cloth from France, cereals, wool and fabrics from England and Holland. There was then only one national industry: India! Men went to India to seek a name and a fortune and returned to enjoy them, and squander them uselessly. Life was concentrated in the capital. The nobility left the lands and the estates of their ancestors, where they had lived in a certain communion with the people, and came to court to shine, to show off... and to beg nobly! The nobleman became a courtier; the common man, unable to be a workman any more, became a lackey: the livery was the seal of his decline. The servants in a noble household made a real commonwealth. The luxury of the nobility had something Oriental about it. It was hardly a step from unbridled luxury to vice and corruption. The passion for gambling spread terribly: they gambled in the taverns, they gambled in the palaces. Idleness, firing the imagination, led from gallantries to amorous intrigues, to adventures and adultery, and destroyed the family. Lisbon was the capital of idle nobles, beggarly plebeians and ruffians.

Far away, outside the country, the consequences of the spirit of conquest were different, but equally fearful. Slavery (beside all its deplorable moral consequences) made all barren with servile labour. Only free labour is productive; only the product of free labour is lasting. Of the colonies that Europeans founded in the New World, which prospered, and which stagnated? They prospered in direct proportion to their free labour: the north of the United States more than the south, the United States more than Brazil. And what of youthful Australia, whose population doubles every ten years, which already exports its products to Europe, whose institutions are today the model and the envy of the civilized peoples, and which within a century will be one of the greatest nations on earth? To what does she owe this phenomenal prosperity if not the influx of free labour, in a land untrodden by the feet of any man who could not call himself free? Australia has done in less than a hundred years of freedom what Brazil could not achieve in three centuries of slavery. It was we, and the effects of our warrior spirit, that condemned Brazil to stagnation, and that condemned to nullity the whole of the African coast, where other hands could have easily carved out several empires! That warrior spirit, with its eyes fixed on the gleam of a false glory, disdained, disparaged and belittled manual labour--manual labour, which is the strength of modern societies, and the salvation and glory of those of the future ... but a capricious idealism moved the soul of the warrior, unable to distinguish between honourable and base motives: in his eyes only the great actions of a heroic endeavour were becoming; for him, peaceful industry was only suited to servile hands. The story of D. Joao de Castro, retiring after a campaign in Africa to his estate, where he devoted himself to the strange new agriculture of cutting down fruit trees and planting wild unproductive trees in their place, gives us a perfect example of the warrior spirit in its distaste for industry. Portugal, the Portugal of the conquests, is that haughty warrior, noble and capricious, who deliberately ruined his properties for the greater glory of his absurd idealism. And since I have spoken of D. Joao de Castro, I shall say that few books have so harmed the Portuguese spirit as the biography of that hero written by Jacinto Freire. Freire--who was a priest, who never went to India, and who was as profoundly ignorant of politics as he was of political economy--made of the life and deeds of D. Joao de Castro not a study in social sciences but an academic discourse. It is literary and very eloquent, certainly, but partisan, uncritical, and inspired by a false ideal of old-fashioned glory, classical glory, in the light of which he continually portrays the actions of his hero. For two centuries we have all learned about D. Joao de Castro from Jacinto Freire, and we have become used to taking that rhetorical fantasy for the model of the true national hero. By this we have distorted our judgement, and the analysis of an important period. We need to know that the true glory of the modern age is not like that: it is exactly the opposite. There is only one thing there that we can adopt as exemplary, and that is the nobility of character of that magnanimous man; but that nobility should be applied by modern men to other enterprises, and in a very different manner. It was just the type of heroism extolled by J. Freire that was our ruin!

How was it possible, with blood on our hands and pride in our hearts, to start to civilize those backward peoples, to join together conquerors and conquered in interests and feelings, to mingle the races, and so to establish after the fleeting rule of violence the lasting and just rule of moral superiority and progress? The conquest of backward nations is, as a rule, neither just nor unjust--they are justified or condemned by their results, the use that is later made of an authority established by force. The Roman conquests are vindicated today by historical thinking because they created a civilization superior to that in which the conquered peoples lived. The conquest of India by the English is just, because it is civilizing. The conquest of India by the Portuguese and of South America by the Spanish was unjust, because it did not civilize. Even had our arms always been victorious, India would have eluded us because we systematically alienated spirits, terrified the people, and through our religious and aristocratic spirit we dug a chasm between the minority of conquerors and the majority of the conquered. One of the first benefits that we took to those people was the Inquisition; the Spanish did the same in America. Indigenous religions were not only ridiculed and vilified, they were horribly persecuted. The moral effect of the efforts of missionaries (many of them saintly heroes!) was entirely cancelled out by the constant threat of religious terror: no one would be converted by a faith backed up by burning at the stake! The ferocity of the Spanish in America was unimaginable, unparalleled in the annals of human bestiality. Two flourishing empires disappeared in less than sixty years! In less than sixty years ten million people were destroyed! Ten million! These figures are tragic; they need no comment. And yet few races have appeared to their conquerors so gentle, simple and tractable, and so ready to take to their hearts the civilization being imposed on them by arms! Bartolomeu de Las Casas, bishop of Chiapa and a true saint, protested in vain against these atrocities: he devoted his missionary life to the cause of those millions of unfortunates: on two occasions he visited Europe to put the case solemnly before Carlos V. All in vain! The job of destruction was fated: it had to be completed, and completed it was.

There is in fact something fateful in the reprehensible acts of the Peninsular peoples, in their errors of policy, and in the decline that overtook them: it is the law of historical evolution, which draws out the consequences, inflexibly and indifferently, of tendencies once introduced into society. Given the absolutism of Catholicism it was impossible that there would not follow, by deduction from it, absolute monarchy. Given absolutism, the aristocratic spirit necessarily followed, with its parade of privileges and injustices, and the predominance of warlike trends over productive ones. Political and economic errors flow naturally from here; and from all this, through the transgression of laws of social life, there also flows naturally a decline, in all its shapes.

And these false social conditions produced not only the effects I have mentioned. They produced another, no less fateful for being invisible and imperceptible. It is the debasement and prostration of the national spirit, perverted and atrophied by several centuries of the most pernicious education. The causes, which I have indicated, have for the most part ceased; but the moral effects persist, and it is to them that we must attribute the uncertainty, the despondency and the malaise in our present society. It is to the influence of the Catholic spirit, with its heavy dogmatism, that we must attribute this universal indifference to philosophy, science, to modern moral and social development, this sleepwalking indifference towards the nineteenth-century revolution which is practically our characteristic national feature amongst the peoples of Europe. Certainly we do not believe in the Catholic dogmas with the blind and passionate ardour of our grandfathers, but we continue to close our eyes to the truths discovered by free thought.

If the Church still bothers us with its demands, the Revolution nevertheless bothers us with its endeavours. We were the intolerant and fanatical Portuguese of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; we are now the indifferent Portuguese of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, while the absolute power of the monarchy has ended, the political inertia of the people--needing (and perhaps wishing) to be governed --persists; centralization and militarism persist, negating and making nonsense of our constitutional liberties. There is no great difference between the sovereign monarch of then and the men of influence today: for the people, servitude is always the same. They used to be ruled, today they are governed: the two terms are almost equivalent. While the old monarchy has disappeared the old monarchical spirit has remained; it is enough to prevent us being much better than our grandfathers. Finally, from the warrior spirit of the conquering nation we have inherited an insuperable loathing for work, and a deep distaste for industry. The grandchildren of the conquerors of two worlds may, without dishonour, fritter away their time and their money in idleness, or solicit the ministries for a position: what they cannot do, without indignity, is work--a factory, a workshop, an agricultural or mining business is inappropriate for our nobility. For this reason the best national industries are in the hands of foreigners, who get rich by them and laugh at our pretensions. It is against manual labour, above all, that prejudice is universal: to us it is a symbol of slavery! Through it, the democratic classes all over the world improve themselves and nations thrive; we prefer to be a nation of the idle poor rather than a prosperous democracy of workers. It is the harvest we have reaped from a centuries-long education of warlike and pompous traditions!

From this education that we have given ourselves over three centuries come all our present difficulties. The roots of the past break out everywhere in our soil: they break out in the shape of feelings, habits and prejudices. We groan under the weight of our historical errors: our history is our fate.

What is needed then for us to recover our place in civilization, to enter once again into the society of cultured Europe? It requires a great effort, a supreme effort, to break resolutely with the past. Let us respect the memory of our forefathers, let us dutifully remember their acts; but let us not imitate them. Let us not, in the light of the nineteenth century, be ghosts that give a new lease of life to the spirit of the sixteenth. Against this deathly spirit let us frankly set the modern spirit. Against Catholicism let us set not indifference or a cold denial, but an ardent affirmation of the new soul, a free conscience, the direct contemplation of the divine by the human (that is to say, the fusion of the divine and the human), philosophy, science, and the belief in progress, in the unceasing renewal of humanity through the inexhaustible resources of its thought, endlessly inspired. Let us set against the centralized monarchy, uniform and impotent, a republican federation of all the self-governing bodies, of all the sovereign wills, broadening and renewing municipal life, and giving it a radically democratic character, because that is the only basis and natural instrument for all practical, popular and egalitarian reforms. Finally, against industrial inertia let us set the initiative of free labour, an industry of the people, by the people, for the people; not managed and protected by the state, but spontaneous; not given over to the blind anarchy of competition, but organized in a fraternal and equitable way--thus gradually bringing about a transition to the new industrial world of socialism, to which the future belongs. This is the course of the century, and it should be ours too. We lag behind as a race because we rejected the modern spirit; we shall renew ourselves by freely embracing that spirit. Its name is Revolution. Revolution does not mean war, it means peace. It does not mean wantonness, but order, true order through true liberty. Far from seeking insurrection it aims to avoid it, to make it impossible; only its enemies, by frustrating it, could force it to take up arms. It is in itself the essence of peace because it is the human essence, par excellence.

Gentlemen, one thousand eight hundred years ago the Roman world offered us a remarkable spectacle, of an exhausted society that was collapsing, but which, as it collapsed, was resisting, struggling, and tyrannizing in order to hold on to its privileges, its prejudices, its vices, and its rottenness; beside it, in the midst of it, was a new, embryonic society, rich only in ideas, aspirations and just sentiments, suffering and enduring, but growing as it endured. The ideal of this new world gradually established itself upon the old world, converting it and transforming it: the day came when it succeeded in eliminating it, and humanity gained another great civilization.

This was called Christianity.

Well then, gentlemen: Christianity was the Revolution of the ancient world: the Revolution is no more than the Christianity of the modern world.

TRANSLATION BY RICHARD CORRELL (3)

(1) Portuguese text of the speech was taken from website 'O Portal da Historia', org. by Manuel Amaral, where it featured as 'speech of the month'. Page at <http://www.arqnet.pt/portal/ discursos/maio_julho01.html> [consulted 11 December 2007]. Minor scanning errors were corrected.

(2) In their supreme oath Jesuits swore to have no more opinion, will or mental reservation to their superiors than a corpse.

(3) With thanks to AbdoolKarim Vakil for his careful reading of the text and his comments.