Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 345, July, 1844

But a tremendous physical calamity was now about to put to the test at once the fortitude of this great minister, and the resources of Portugal.

On the morning of All-Saints' day, the 1st of November 1755, Lisbon was almost torn up from the foundations by the most terrible earthquake on European record. As it was a high Romish festival, the population were crowding to the churches, which were lighted up in honour of the day. About a quarter before ten the first shock was felt, which lasted the extraordinary length of six or seven minutes; then followed an interval of about five minutes, after which the shock was renewed, lasting about three minutes. The concussions were so violent in both instances that nearly all the solid buildings were dashed to the ground, and the principal part of the city almost wholly ruined. The terror of the population, rushing through the falling streets, gathered in the churches, or madly attempting to escape into the fields, may be imagined; but the whole scene of horror, death, and ruin, exceeds all description. The ground split into chasms, into which the people were plunged in their fright. Crowds fled to the water; but the Tagus, agitated like the land, suddenly rose to an extraordinary height, burst upon the land, and swept away all within its reach. It was said to have risen to the height of five-and-twenty or thirty feet above its usual level, and to have sunk again as much below it. And this phenomenon occurred four times.

The despatch from the British consul stated, that the especial force of the earthquake seemed to be directly under the city; for while Lisbon was lifted from the ground, as if by the explosion of a gunpowder mine, the damage either above or below was not so considerable. One of the principal quays, to which it was said that many people had crowded for safety, was plunged under the Tagus, and totally disappeared. Ships were carried down by the shock on the river, dashes to pieces against each other, or flung upon the shore. To complete the catastrophe, fires broke out in the ruins, which spread over the face of the city, burned for five or six days, and reduced all the goods and property of the people to ashes. For forty days the shocks continued with more or less violence, but they had now nothing left to destroy. The people were thus kept in a constant state of alarm, and forced to encamp in the open fields, though it was now winter. The royal family were encamped in the gardens of the palace; and, as in all the elements of society had been shaken together, Lisbon and its vicinity became the place of gathering for banditti from all quarters in the kingdom. A number of Spanish deserters made their way to the city, and robberies and murders of the most desperate kind were constantly perpetrated.

During this awful period, the whole weight of government fell upon the shoulders of the minister; and he bore it well. He adopted the most active measures for provisioning the city, for repressing plunder and violence, and for enabling the population to support themselves during this period of suffering. It was calculated that seven millions sterling could scarcely repair the damage of the city; and that not less than eighty thousand lives had been lost, either crushed by the earth or swallowed up by the waters. Some conception of the native mortality may be formed from that of the English: of the comparatively small number of whom, resident at that time in Lisbon, no less than twenty-eight men and fifty women were among the sufferers.

The royal family were at the palace of Belem when this tremendous calamity occurred. Pombal instantly hastened there. He found every one in consternation. "What is to be done," exclaimed the king, as he entered "to meet this infliction of divine justice?" The calm and resolute answer of Pombal was—"Bury the dead, and feed the living." This sentence is still recorded, with honour, in the memory of Portugal.

The minister then threw himself into his carriage, and returned to the ruins. For several days his only habitation was his carriage; and from it he continued to issue regulations for the public security. Those regulations amounted to the remarkable number of two hundred; and embraced all the topics of police, provisions, and the burial of the sufferers. Among those regulations was the singular, but sagacious one, of prohibiting all persons from leaving the city without a passport. By this, those who had robbed the people, or plundered the church plate, were prevented from escaping to the country and hiding their plunder, and consequently were obliged to abandon, or to restore it. But every shape of public duty was met by this vigorous and intelligent minister. He provided for the cure of the wounded, the habitancy of the houseless, the provision of the destitute. He brought troops from the provinces for the protection of the capital, he forced the idlers to work, he collected the inmates of the ruined religious houses, he removed the ruins of the streets, buried the dead, and restored the services of the national religion.

Another task subsequently awaited him—the rebuilding of the city. He began boldly; and all that Lisbon now has of beauty is due to the taste and energy of Pombal. He built noble squares. He did more: he built the more important fabric of public sewers in the new streets, and he laid out a public garden for the popular recreation. But he found, as Wren found, even in England, the infinite difficulty of opposing private interest, even in public objects; and Lisbon lost the opportunity of being the most picturesque and stately of European cities. One project, which would have been at once of the highest beauty and of the highest benefit—a terrace along the shore of the Tagus from Santa Apollonia to Belem, a distance of nearly six miles, which would have formed the finest promenade in the world—he was either forced to give up or to delay, until its execution was hopeless. It was never even begun.

The vigour of Pombal's administration raised bitter enemies to him among those who had lived on the abuses of government, or the plunder of the people. The Jesuits hated alike the king and his minister. They even declared the earthquake to have been a divine judgment for the sins of the administration. But they were rash enough, in the intemperance of their zeal, to threaten a repetition of the earthquake at the same time next year. When the destined day came, Pombal planted strong guards at the city gates, to prevent the panic of the people in rushing into the country. The earthquake did not fulfil the promise; and the people first laughed at themselves, and then at the Jesuits. The laugh had important results in time.

There are few things more remarkable in diplomatic history, than the long connexion of Portugal with England. It arose naturally from the commerce of the two nations—Portugal, already the most adventurous of nations, and England, growing in commercial enterprise. The advantages were mutual. In the year 1367, we have a Portuguese treaty stipulating for protection to the Portuguese traders in England. In 1382, a royal order of Richard II. permits the Portuguese ambassador to bring his baggage into England free of duty—perhaps one of the earliest instances of a custom which marked the progress of civilization, and which has since been generally adopted throughout all civilized nations. A decree of Henry IV., in 1405, exonerates the Portuguese resident in England, and their ships, from being made responsible for the debts contracted by their ambassadors. In 1656, the important privilege was conceded to the English in Portugal, of being exempted from the native jurisdiction, and being tried by a judge appointed by England. This, in our days, might be an inadmissible privilege; but two centuries ago, in the disturbed condition of the Portuguese laws and general society, it might have been necessary for the simple protection of the strangers.

The theories of domestic manufactures and free trade have lately occupied so large a portion of public interest, that it is curious to see in what light they were regarded by a statesman so far in advance of his age as Pombal. The minister's theory is in striking contradiction to his practice. He evidently approved of monopoly and prohibitions, but he exercised neither the one nor the other—nature and necessity were too strong against him. We are, however, to recollect, that the language of complaint was popular in Portugal, as it always will be in a poor country, and that the minister who would be popular must adopt the language of complaint. In an eloquent and almost impassioned memoir by Pombal, he mourns over the poverty of his country, and hastily imputes it to the predominance of English commerce. He tells us that, in the middle of the eighteenth century, Portugal scarcely produced any thing towards her own support. Two thirds of her physical necessities were supplied from England. He complains that England had become mistress of the entire commerce of Portugal, and in fact that the Portuguese trade was only an English trade; that the English were the furnishers and retailers of all the necessaries of life throughout the country, and that the Portuguese had nothing to do but look on; that Cromwell, by the treaty which allowed the supply of Portugal with English cloths to the amount of two million sterling, had utterly impoverished the country; and in short, that the weakness and incapacity of Portugal, as an European state, were wholly owing, to her being destitute of trade, and that the destitution was wholly owing to her being overwhelmed by English commodities.

We are not about to enter into detail upon this subject, but it is to be remembered, that Portugal obtained the cloth, even if she paid for it, cheaper from England than she could have done from any other country in Europe; that she had no means of making the cloth for herself, and that, after all, man must be clothed. Portugal, without flocks or fire, without coals or capital, could never have manufactured cloth enough to cover the tenth part of her population, at ten times the expense. This has occurred in later days, and in more opulent countries. We remember, in the reign of the Emperor Paul, when he was frantic enough to declare war against England, a pair of broadcloth pantaloons costing seven guineas in St Peterburg. This would have been severe work for the purse of a Portuguese peasant a hundred years ago. The plain fact of domestic manufactures being this, that no folly can be more foolish than to attempt to form them where the means and the country do not give them a natural superiority. For example, coals and iron are essential to the product of all works in metal. France has neither. How can she, therefore, contest the superiority of our hardware? She contests it simply by doing without it, and by putting up with the most intolerable cutlery that the world has ever seen. If, where manufactures are already established, however ineffectual, it may become a question with the government whether some privations must not be submitted to by the people in general, rather than precipitate those unlucky manufactures into ruin; there can be no question whatever on the subject where manufactures have not been hitherto established. Let the people go to the best market, let no attempt be made to force nature, and let no money be wasted on the worst article got by the worst means. One thing, however, is quite clear with respect to Portugal, that, by the English alliance, she has gained what is worth all the manufactures of Europe—independence. When, in 1640, she threw off the Spanish usurpation, and placed the Braganza family on the national throne, she threw herself on the protection of England; and that protection never has failed her to this hour. In the Spanish invasion of Portugal in 1762, England sent her ten thousand men, and the first officer of his day, Count La Lippe, who, notwithstanding his German name, was an Englishman born, and had commenced his service in the Guards. The Spaniards were beaten in all directions, and Portugal was included in the treaty of Fontainbleau in 1763. The deliverance of Portugal in the Peninsular war is too recent to be forgotten, and too memorable to be spoken of here as it deserves. And to understand the full value of this assistance, we are to recollect, that Portugal is one of the smallest kingdoms of Europe, and at the same time the most exposed; that its whole land frontier is open to Spain, and its whole sea frontier is open to France; that its chief produce is wine and oranges, and that England is incomparably its best customer for both.

Pombal, in his memoir, imputes a portion of the poverty of Portugal to her possession of the gold mines of Brazil. This is one of the paradoxes of the last century; but nations are only aggregates of men, and what makes an individual rich, cannot make a nation poor. The true secret is this—that while the possession of the gold mines induced an indolent government to rely upon them for the expenses of the state, that reliance led them to abandon sources of profit in the agriculture and commerce of the country, which were of ten times the value. This was equally the case in Spain. The first influx from the mines of Peru, enabled the government to disregard the revenues arising from the industry of the people. In consequence of the want of encouragement from the government, the agriculture and commerce of Spain sank rapidly into the lowest condition, whilst the government indolently lived on the produce of the mines. But the more gold and silver exist in circulation, the less becomes their value. Within half a century, the imports from the Spanish and Portuguese mines, had reduced the value of the precious metals by one half; and those imports thus became inadequate to the ordinary expenses of government. Greater efforts were then made to obtain them from the mines. Still, as the more that was obtained the less was the general value, the operation became more profitless still; and at length both Spain and Portugal were reduced to borrow money, which they had no means to pay—in other words, were bankrupt. And this is the true solution of the problem—why have the gold and silver mines of the Peninsula left them the poorest nations of Europe? Yet this was contrary to the operation of new wealth. The discovery of the mines of the New World appears to have been a part of that providential plan, by which a general impulse was communicated to Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Europe was preparing for a new vigour of religion, politics, commerce, and civilization. Nothing stimulates national effort of every kind with so much power and rapidity, as a new general accession of wealth, or, as the political economist would pronounce it, a rise of wages, whether industrial or intellectual; and this rise was effected by the new influx of the mines. If Peru and Mexico had belonged to England, she would have converted their treasures into new canals and high-roads, new harbours, new encouragements to agriculture, new excitements to public education, new enterprises of commerce, or the colonization of new countries in the productive regions of the globe; and thus she would at once have increased her natural opulence, and saved herself from suffering under the depreciation of the precious metals, or more partially, by her active employment of them, have almost wholly prevented that depreciation. But the Peninsula, relying wholly on its imported wealth, and neglecting its infinitely more important national riches, was exactly in the condition of an individual, who spends the principal of his property, which is continually sinking until it is extinguished altogether.

Another source of Peninsular poverty existed in its religion. The perpetual holidays of Popery made even the working portion of the people habitually idle. Where labour is prohibited for nearly a fourth of the year by the intervention of holidays, and thus idleness is turned into a sacred merit, the nation must prepare for beggary. But Popery goes further still. The establishment of huge communities of sanctified idlers, monks and nuns by the ten thousand, in every province and almost in every town, gave a sacred sanction to idleness—gave a means of escaping work to all who preferred the lounging and useless life of the convent to regular labour, and even provided the means of living to multitudes of vagabonds, who were content to eat their bread, and drink their soup, daily at the convent gates, rather than to make any honest decent effort to maintain themselves. Every country must be poor in which a large portion of the public property goes to the unproductive classes. The soldiery, the monks, the state annuitants, the crowds of domestics, dependent on the families of the grandees, all are necessarily unproductive. The money which they receive is simply consumed. It makes no return. Thus poverty became universal; and nothing but the singular fertility of the peopled districts of Spain and Portugal, and the fortune of having a climate which requires but few of the comforts essential in a severer temperature, could have saved them both from being the most pauperized of all nations, or even from perishing altogether, and leaving the land a desert behind them. It strangely illustrates these positions, that, in 1754, the Portuguese treasury was so utterly emptied, that the monarch was compelled to borrow 400,000 crusadoes (L.40,000) from a private company, for the common expenses of his court.

Wholly and justly disclaiming the imputation which would pronounce Portugal a dependent on England, it is impossible to turn a page of her history without seeing the measureless importance of her English connexion. Every genuine source of her power and opulence has either originated with, or been sustained by, her great ally. Among the first of these has been the wine trade. In the year 1756—the year following that tremendous calamity which had sunk Lisbon into ruins—the wine-growers in the three provinces of Beira, Minho, and Tras-os-Montes, represented that they were on the verge of ruin. The adulteration of the Portuguese wines by the low traders had destroyed their character in Europe, and the object of the representation was to reinstate that character. Pombal immediately took up their cause; and, in the course of the same year, was formed the celebrated Oporto Wine Company, with a capital of £120,000. The declared principles of the establishment were, to preserve the quality of the wines, to secure the growers by fixing a regular price, and to protect them from the combinations of dealers. The company had the privilege of purchasing all the wines grown within a particular district at a fixed price, for a certain period after the vintage. When that period had expired, the growers were at liberty to sell the wines which remained unpurchased in whatever market they pleased. Monopolies, in the advanced and prosperous career of commercial countries, generally sink into abuse; but they are, in most instances, absolutely necessary to the infant growth of national traffic. All the commerce of Europe has commenced by companies. In the early state of European trade, individuals were too poor for those large enterprises which require a large outlay, and whose prospects, however promising, are distant. What one cannot do, must be done by a combination of many, if it is to be done at all. Though when individual capital, by the very action of that monopoly, becomes powerful enough for those enterprises, then the time is at hand when the combination may be dissolved with impunity. The Oporto Wine Company had no sooner come into existence, than its benefits were felt in every branch of Portuguese revenue. It restored and extended the cultivation of the vine, which is the staple of Portugal. It has been abolished in the revolutionary changes of late years. But the question, whether the country is yet fit to bear the abolition, is settled by the fact, that the wine-growers are complaining of ruin, and that the necessity of the case is now urging the formation of the company once more.

The decision of Pombal's character was never more strongly shown than on this occasion. The traders into whose hands the Portuguese wines had fallen, and who had enjoyed an illegal monopoly for so many years, raised tumults, and serious insurrection was threatened. At Oporto, the mob plundered the director's house, and seized on the chief magistrate. The military were attacked, and the government was endangered. The minister instantly ordered fresh troops to Oporto; arrests took place; seventeen persons were executed; five-and-twenty sent to the galleys; eighty-six banished, and others subjected to various periods of imprisonment. The riots were extinguished. In a striking memoir, written by Pombal after his retirement from office, he gives a brief statement of the origin of this company—a topic at all times interesting to the English public, and which is about to derive a new interest from its practical revival in Portugal. We quote a fragment.

"The unceasing and urgent works which the calamitous earthquake of November 1st, 1755, had rendered indispensable, were still vigorously pursued, when, in the following year, one Mestre Frei Joao de Mansilla presented himself at the Giunta at Belem, on the part of the principal husbandmen of Upper Douro, and of the respectable inhabitants of Oporto, in a state of utter consternation.

"In the popular outcry of the time, the English were represented as making themselves the sole managers of every thing. The fact being, that, as they were the only men who had any money, they were almost the sole purchasers in the Portuguese markets. But the English here complained of were the low traffickers, who, in conjunction with the Lisbon and Oporto vintners, bought and managed the wines at their discretion. It was represented to the king, that, by those means, the price of wine had been reduced to 7200 rios a pipe, or less, until the expense of cultivation was more than the value of the produce; that those purchasers required one or two years' credit; that the price did not pay for the hoeing of the land, which was consequently deserted; that all the principal families of one district had been reduced to poverty, so much so as to be obliged to sell their knives and forks; that the poor people had not a drop of oil for their salad, so that they were obliged, even in Lent, to season their vegetables with the fat of hogs." The memoir mentions even gross vice as a consequence of their extreme poverty.

We quote this passage to show to what extremities a people may be reduced by individual mismanagement, and what important changes may be produced by the activity of an intelligent directing power. The king's letters-patent of 1756, establishing the company, provided at once for the purity of the wine, its extended sale in England, and the solvency of the wine provinces. It is only one among a thousand instances of the hazards in which Popery involves all regular government, to find the Jesuits inflaming the populace against this most salutary and successful act of the king. At confession, they prompted the people to believe "that the wines of the company were not fit for the celebration of mass." (For the priests drink wine in the communion, though the people receive only the bread.) To give practical example to their precept, they dispersed narratives of a great popular insurrection which had occurred in 1661; and both incentives resulted in the riots in Oporto, which it required all the vigour of Pombal to put down.

But the country and Europe was now to acknowledge the services of the great minister on a still higher scale. The extinction of the Jesuits was the work of his bold and sagacious mind. The history of this event is among the most memorable features of a century finishing with the fall of the French monarchy.

The passion of Rome for territory has been always conspicuous, and always unsuccessful. Perpetually disturbing the Italian princes in the projects of usurpation, it has scarcely ever advanced beyond the original bounds fixed for it by Charlemagne. Its spirit of intrigue, transfused into its most powerful order the Jesuits, was employed for the similar purpose of acquiring territorial dominion. But Europe was already divided among powerful nations. Those nations were governed by jealous authorities, powerful kings for their leaders, and powerful armies for their defence. All was full; there was no room for the contention of a tribe of ecclesiastics, although the most daring, subtle, and unscrupulous of the countless slaves and soldiers of Rome. The world of America was open. There a mighty power might grow up unseen by the eye of Europe. A population of unlimited multitudes might find space in the vast plains; commerce in the endless rivers; defence in the chains of mountains; and wealth in the rocks and sands of a region teeming with the precious metals. The enterprise was commenced under the pretext of converting the Indians of Paraguay. Within a few years the Jesuits formed an independent republic, numbering thirty-one towns, with a population of a hundred thousand souls. To render their power complete, they prohibited all communication between the natives and the Spaniards and Portuguese, forbidding them to learn the language of either country, and implanting in the mind of the Indians an implacable hatred of both Spain and Portugal. At length both courts became alarmed, and orders were sent out to extinguish the usurpation. Negotiations were in the mean time opened between Spain and Portugal relative to an exchange of territory, and troops were ordered to effect the exchange. Measures of this rank were unexpected by the Jesuits. They had reckoned upon the proverbial tardiness of the Peninsular councils; but they were determined not to relinquish their prize without a struggle. They accordingly armed the natives, and prepared for a civil war.