PORTUGAL 



policy of the republic separated the 

 church from the state, and decreed 

 the abolition of the religious orders ; 

 this played into the hands of the 

 monarchists, and led to armed 

 royalist incursions in 1911, 1912, 

 and 1913, the last being the most 

 serious, but all were defeated. 



Revolution o! 1915 

 In May, 1915, a sanguinary revo- 

 lution, which demonstrated that 

 Portugal as a whole wished to 

 make war on the Central Powers, 

 broke out, but it was not till March, 

 1916, that war was declared, 

 Bernardino Machado being then 

 in power. Machado succeeded in 

 forming a coalition of all the repub- 

 lican parties, which was known as 

 the Union Sagrada. Enemy ships 

 in Portuguese ports were seized, 

 and the German colony was ex- 

 pelled, and in spite of a revolu- 

 tionary movement in Dec., 1916, 



6282 



she had two divisions in France. 

 April, 1917, saw the break up of 

 the Union Sagrada, and the latter 

 part of that year was marked by 

 many strikes and much unrest. In 

 Dec. a military revolution took 

 place under the leadership of 

 Sidonio Paes, which, after four 

 days' bloodshed, was successful, 

 and Paes became provisional presi- 



Portugal. Scenes and types of the peasantry. 1. Farmer ol Ramalde. 2. A 



Caioca farmer in bis straw coat. 3. Fisherman of the Aveiro river. 4. Woman 



from Castro Laboreiro. 5. A girl from Carvalhos. 6. Peasant girl at her 



spinning-wheel. 7. Women washing clothes on the banks of the Minho 



PORTUGAL 



dent ; he was elected in April, 1918, 

 but did not hold office long, for he 

 was shot in the following Dec. 



Out of 65,000 officers and men 

 sent to France, 1,860 were killed, 

 and about 12,000 were wounded or 

 missing. Some 35,000 European 

 Portuguese troops and upwards of 

 100,000 native askaris took part 

 in the war in Angola and in the 

 fighting for Ger- 

 man E. Africa. 

 The Peace Confer- 

 ence on Sept. 3, 

 1919, allotted to 

 Portugal the terri- 

 tory S. of the 

 Kovuma, formerly 

 German E. Africa. 

 On the death of 

 Paes, Canto e 

 Castro was provi- 

 sional president, 

 and in Jam, 1919, 

 a strong revolu- 

 tionary effort 

 3* u n d e r Couceiro, 

 the noted royalist, 

 was brought to naught. In Aug. 

 Antonio Almeida was elected presi- 

 dent, and in March, 1921, Machado 

 was premier. On Oct. 19 a group 

 of republicans in the army engi- 

 neered a revolution which was 

 accompanied by bloodshed, the 

 premier Granjo and two colleagues 

 being assassinated. Manoel Texeira 

 Gomes was elected president, 



Aug. 6, 1923. Robert Machray 



LANGUAGE. Portuguese belongs 

 to the Hispanic group of the Ro- 

 mance languages. Its alphabet is 

 the same as the English alphabet, 

 apart from the letters k and w, 

 which are only used in words bor- 

 rowed from other languages. There 

 are thus 24 letters 18 consonants 

 and 5 vowels, with y, almost in- 

 variably a semi-vowel in Portu- 

 guese. Every vowel has two or 

 more distinct sounds, and there are 

 numerous combinations of vowels, 

 such as ei, ao, do, odo, oes, ties. 



Like Spanish, Portuguese is a 

 direct descendant of the rustic 

 Latin dialects spoken by the legion- 

 aries who conquered and held the 

 Iberian Peninsula, and in some 

 respects it is nearer to classical 

 Latin than any other of the literary 

 languages of Europe. The Moorish 

 occupation enriched its vocabulary 

 with many Arabic words, but a 

 more important influence was that 

 of the French knights from Bur- 

 gundy and Provence. By the 

 16th century Portuguese had be- 

 come one of the great literary lan- 

 guages of Europe, and the changes 

 it has since undergone are relatively 

 slight. Modern Portuguese is thus 

 far nearer to the speech of Camoens 

 than is modern English to the lan- 

 guage of Shakespeare and the Bible. 



