Events

Say what you will about our last two Cartas - of '26 and '48 - but they have kept Portugal at peace. At home, civil war is receding from memory to history, our father's generation giving way to the children of the Liberal order. Abroad, our colonies have been quiescent, and threats to them rare. Attempts to entangle us in foreign conflicts, be they in far Persia or in the battlefield of revolutionary Europe, have been thankfully fended off. Thanks to our predecessors, to Passos and Maria, Noronha and Pereira, we have known stability.

But have we known progress? Some argue we have - a few more people can vote, a few more tons of iron are mined, a few more of the poor can afford bread. But not too many. We have stagnated, and the Regeneration promised by Passos and his claimed successors has not come to pass. Our noble King seeks to bring us to true Regeneration, and he is wise in doing so. The drastic change of course he calls for is what we need to break out of the rut that our fatherland has become mired in. However, his methods are doomed to failure.

His ears occupied by the warmongering oriental de Mesquitas, His Majesty has come to believe that it is by expanding and developing our colonies that we will prosper. But his dreams are of the pipe - likely the Macaneseman's pipe, specifically. Our army is brave and skilled, but they are few in number, and can only be in so many places at once. Now, with the Treaties of Luanda and Sao Salvador, they must be in two continents at once, in one fighting a piratical and bloody European power and in the other the endless hordes of the Chinese. To reach these battles, they must entrust themselves to an outdated, underfunded and undermanned fleet. All the while, the money being spent on their adventures is not going to our homeland.

Ultimately, issues such as these are inevitable when it is popularity rather than expertise which rules our government. So long as our Ministers are drawn from the body of the elected, rather than appointed experts in economics, war and diplomacy, they will implement His Majesty's will ineptly, and in self-serving manners. They will appoint equally self-serving and foolish candidates to enforce their own wills, and thus corruption and incompetence remains in our state. Only in a nation which pays heed to the masses, merely because they hold some scant property, could a monstrous foreigner such as Mesquitas rise so far as to endanger our nation with his self-serving counsel and bloody-minded despotism.

The ideals of Vintismo were righteous, but they must change with the times and evidence. The Historic Party must adopt a platform of technocracy in administration and government, of rooting out the superstition, corruption and foolishness which hold us back. We must fix our society, then our economy, and then, perhaps, consider spreading our wings once more. Portugal is not yet ready to take flight, and if pushed out of the nest now, it will surely perish.