A Year of Prophesying by H.G. Wells — Read

I have recently been watching British politics from a rather interesting angle; I have been seeing Britain through Latin eyes from the Portuguese corner of Europe. Events come to me generally in this order. First the Lisbon _Diario des Noticias_ comes in with my coffee; next day the French _Quotidien_ arrives before lunch and the Italian _Secolo_ at dinner, and there is usually another twenty-four hours before a bundle of London papers comes to hand. The Paris _Daily Mail_ or the _Action Francaise_ may come in neck and neck with the _Quotidien_, but I don't go out of my way to see them. I get no American papers at all.

In this perspective the death of Dr. Theophilo Braga, a sort of Frederic Harrison, who was the first President of the Portuguese Republic, and a congress of Latin Pressmen in Lisbon take on the importance of considerable international events, and all that looms largest in the London _Times_ or the American Press undergoes a compression that amounts at times to complete effacement. That stupid outrage upon civilisation, the deportation of Miguel de Unamuno, the great rector of the University of Salamanca, to the Canary Islands because of his disrespect for the Spanish monarchy and dictatorship gets a large Press in all these Latin countries. It matters to them. It ought to matter to every civilised man. The petroleum scandals in the United States get a rather muddled attention; every country has the oil scandals it deserves; and there were important articles upon the death of President Wilson. In its day the coming of the League of Nations was a great event.