Many families live from day to day and from hand to mouth by odd jobs, and the tendency to live thus precariously has been increased by the recent unrest. They live on little or nothing, and devote all their energy and wits to pay arrears of rent sufficient to prevent them from being turned out of their houses, which often consist of but one or two rooms. In one instance a family of seven lives in a single room, the entire furniture consisting of an old mattress in one corner. Needless to say, the windows are kept closed at night and there is no fire-place, a comparatively rare thing in the Portuguese climate. (The cooking is done over three stones.) Far worse than their poverty is their ignorance and carelessness of health and hygiene. Not that these deficiencies are confined to the peasants of Portugal, but they are most serious in a hot climate. Little attention is given to the advantages of air and water, and what wonder when even educated persons pay little heed to them. During some days of exceptional heat, in the summer of 1913, the correspondent of a Lisbon newspaper at Oporto wrote that the heat there had been so terrible that windows had to be kept open at night. And this in a climate which rarely gives excuse for closed windows. There is no direction from above; many villages have not a single educated inhabitant, and but few inhabitants who can write or read, and have not even a church.
Sanitation.
The mayors of many a town and village are too much occupied with high politics to think of such sublunary matters as the cleanliness of the streets. Rubbish is left in the burning sun for children to play in, street, river, and cliff being polluted with it, and many small towns are in a truly miserable state. The mayor of one of them was asked why a cart was not sent to collect the rubbish, and his answer was typical. Although it was well known that no such cart was in existence, he did not say that a cart would be sent or that he would see what could be done or any other such polite evasion. He merely said that a cart is sent every day, and there was an end of the matter. With such simplicity are these questions solved. It is worth while to dwell on such matters since they are of more importance than fine-sounding party programmes. The local authorities, appointed for party reasons, would no doubt scout the idea that anti-clericalism may be of less value than the destruction of flies. They drive out the “ominous soutane,” and the land, as Egypt of old, is “corrupted by reason of the swarm of flies.” “The unhealthiness of a great part of the country, the crowded and sometimes wretched houses, the complete absence of any hygienic discipline among the rural population, are other probable causes of the lack of energy of the agricultural labourer, who for the rest is constitutionally capable of great endurance.... With notable power of endurance, a climate which permits an almost uninterrupted activity, both for labourers and vegetation, the agricultural population of Portugal will have a wide future before it when food, houses, and hygiene are improved, and many regions rendered more healthy, when irrigation and technical instruction are extended, crops better adapted to the soil, machinery more generally employed and agrarian societies organised.”[5]
Overcrowding and Starvation.
In many houses such a thing as a bed is unknown, but in houses that can afford it the articles are far more numerous (and ugly) than, for instance, in Spain, and in the kitchen an infinite variety of pots and pans fills up the room to the exclusion of cleanliness. Many families subsist on bread, potatoes, mussels, sardines, with occasional rice and bacalhau, meat being unknown. Their state has not changed much since the sixteenth century, when many of the Portuguese are represented as “ne vivant quasi d’autre chose que de caracolles, de moulles et petits poissons”—a people “non adonné aux superfluités.”[6] With overcrowding in unhealthy quarters in the towns and gnawing poverty in the country it is not surprising that the mortality is high.
Absentee Landlords.
The evils are increased by the total lack of direction. Sometimes at the very gates of a large and flourishing property one comes across a village of tumble-down hovels like so many walls of loose stones built irregularly and picturesquely along a “street” of stone and rock which becomes a torrent in winter; and one is inclined to compare them with the neat, comfortable cottages in villages under the supervision of those “harassing” English squires. Yet in each case it needs only the interest and goodwill of one person to alter the state of the whole village and give an impetus to cleanliness and comfort and education, but that person will certainly not be the agent of an absentee landlord.
A FARMHOUSE, MINHO
Small Holdings of Minho.