In the first place, it is to be noted that a great number of newspaper notices of revolutions and seditions in Portugal are either grossly exaggerated, or altogether fabrications. There are telegraphic agencies (news agencies) and other (...) who invariably «enlarge» the smallest riot (so long as it takes place in Lisbon) into a serious revolution, in which, according to the well-known Spanish formula, the «steers are knee-deep in blood».

But, even discounting all this, the fact is that even real revolutions have been commoner in Portugal than is exactly compatible with any sane political life. The real revolutions are: the 5 th. October (1910), which established the Republic, the royalist rising in the North (1912), the (...) against the «constitution». What is the constitution? (...) they are not so fortnightly as is generally supposed.

In these conditions, there is obviously no constitutional life, but a mere dictatorship — not even a «parliamentary» dictatorship, but a pseudo-parliamentary one, for the Parliement is a fiction, not only in the sense in which it may be, and often is, said that all «representative assemblies» do not really represent anything, but even subordinately to the acceptance of that fiction as not one.