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 con