Illegitimacy is more common in Portugal than in any country of Europe. This fact can be proved from a comparison of marriages, births and baptisms; but since the statistics on these subjects are defective, the better testimony is to be derived from the number of deposits at the foundling hospitals. The foundling of the house of Misericordia in Lisbon, that of the Real Casapin in Belem and the foundling at Oporto together receive nearly five thousand foundlings during the year, of whom two-thirds[11] perish in the establishments, which thus become "charnels and houses of woe." Almost every town or village in the kingdom has its roda dos expostos—literally, a "wheel for exposed ones"—where, upon the ringing of a bell, the children deposited in a turning-basket or wheel are passed into the interior of the establishment without inquiry. Although their term of stay is limited to a few weeks, less than one-half of them ever pass out of the establishment alive! Says Dr. T. de Carvalho: "The roda is the açouque ('slaughter-house') for children. It is the permanent and legal means of infanticide. Abaixo a roda dos expostos!"
Notwithstanding this frightful mortality, the number of infants always on hand in the foundlings of Portugal is nearly 40,000, or 1 per cent of the entire population. One-eighth of all the reported births in the kingdom become foundlings: as for the non-reported ones, their fate is known only to the recording angel. Says Claudio Adriano da Costa: "Promiscuous intercourse has become common all over the country;" and he attributes it, though I think superficially, to the "misplaced indulgence to concubinage awarded by the rodas."[12]
The true cause of Portuguese immorality and crime is the unequal distribution of wealth, which leaves the mass of the inhabitants a prey to the vicissitudes of the seasons, the tyranny of the powerful and wealthy and the despair of insecurity. The origin of this evil state of affairs was the tenure of emphyteusis: its active and unfeeling promoters have been always the nobility and ecclesiastics, and its only powerful enemy, the only hope of the people, the Crown.
After what has been mentioned it is unnecessary to speak of minor crimes—- of street assassinations, highway robberies and the like. Your own McCulloch will inform you that according to official information reported to the Cortes there occurred in one year, and merely in the two districts of Oporto and Guarda, no less than three hundred and forty-two assassinations and four hundred and sixty robberies. It is true that life is not quite so insecure now as when McCulloch wrote. Some few rays of light have penetrated the profound abyss of misery and evil in which the country was then plunged; nevertheless, the improvement has been but slow and partial, and nothing short of revolution can accelerate it. There is but one man in the world who possesses the means to render that revolution successful, and that man—His Majesty Dom Pedro II., the emperor of Brazil—is now, or soon will be, on his way to the United States. May he not peruse in vain this sad account of famine and crime in Portugal!
There are persons with nervous organisms so abused that a sudden cry, whether it be of boisterousness or despair, will cause them great agony: so there are others with moral susceptibilities so overstrained that the story of a nation's misery and crime, such as I have endeavored to sketch, will evoke within them more pain than interest. Regard for such exceptional persons has created a namby-pambyism in literature which would banish these topics—the greatest and holiest in which human sympathy can be enlisted—to the domains of science. But science cannot aid unhappy Portugal. Sympathy and prayer alone can mitigate our sufferings. Therefore sympathize with and pray for us, you who stand in the broad glare of freedom, filled with plenty and surrounded by promise, Pray for unhappy Portugal!
AT THE OLD PLANTATION.
TWO PAPERS.—I.
The life of the low-country South Carolina planter, until broken up by the war, had changed but little since colonial times. It was the life which Washington lived at Mount Vernon, with some slight differences of local custom. The two-storied house, with its ten or twenty rooms and broad piazza, had probably been built in ante-Revolutionary days by the British country gentleman or Huguenot exile from whom the present owner drew his descent. I well remember how the old house at Hanover bore near the top of the chimney stack the legend "Peu à peu" written with a stick in the soft mortar with which the bricks had been covered. The old Huguenot builder had burned his bricks by guess, and three times the work had to stop until the kiln could be replenished and a new lot prepared. The top was finally reached, however, and the triumphant Peu à peu was only his French way of proclaiming to posterity Perseverantia vincit omnia. In many instances, however, fire has destroyed the original structure—a danger to which the country residence is specially exposed—but the new one has usually been modeled after that which it succeeded. Indian names, flowing softly from the tongue, have usually come down with the tracts to which they originally belonged, as Pooshee, Wantoot, Wampee, Wapahoula, though Chelsea, White Hall, Sarrazin's or Sans Souci often betrays the English or French origin of the first patentee.
To understand the home and life of the wealthy Carolina planter we must remember that he was the most contented man in the world. The greed of gain was unknown to him, and his deep-rooted conservatism forbade everything like speculation. Solid, substantial comfort and large-hearted hospitality were the objects in all his expenditures. He never invested his surplus money except in another plantation to put his surplus negroes on, for he never sold a negro except for incorrigible bad qualities or to pay some pressing debt. He had no expensive tastes except for rare old madeira and racing-stock, from the last of which his splendid saddle-horses were always selected; and these were usually of the best and purest blood. He was as much at home in the saddle as an English fox-hunter or a Don Cossack, and the only wheeled vehicles in his spacious carriage-house were the heavy family coach, and the light sulky in which his summer trips were made between the pineland and the plantation.
Come back with me now to the days when the North-eastern Railroad was a possibility of the future, and join me in a Christmas visit to old Pooshee. We take the little steamer for the head of Cooper River, the December sun being warm enough to tempt us from the close cabin to the airy deck. The graceful spire of old St. Michael's cuts sharply against the sky, reminding you, if you have visited the suburbs of London, of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, that fine specimen of Sir Christopher Wren's style, after which it was modeled. The old customhouse looks just as it did when Governor Rutledge had the tea locked up in its store-rooms, and the gray moss droops in weeping festoons from the live-oaks of beautiful Magnolia. I wonder how the miles of green marsh through which we pass can seem to you such a dreary waste. To my eye it is all alive with interest. I never tire of watching how the lonely white heron spears his scaly prey, how the clapper-rail floats on his raft of matted rushes, how the marsh-wren jerks his saucy little tail over his bottle-shaped nest, or how with quick and certain stroke the oyster-catcher extracts the juicy "native" from his bivalved citadel. We are now getting above the salt-water line, and on either hand the rice-fields, now covered with water, stretch away from the banks, their surface covered with countless thousands of ducks. As the winding river brings the channel somewhat nearer to the shore, the splash of the paddles startles the feeding multitude, and they rise with a rush and roar of wings which might be heard for miles. Could we stop for a day or two at Rice Hope, we might have rare sport among the mallards and bald-pates as they fly out between sunset and dark, or in the early morning from behind a well-constructed blind. But we must decline the cordial invitation which urges us to do so as the boat casts off from the landing, and in a couple of hours more we step ashore at Fairlawn, where we find the carriage waiting to take us over the twelve remaining miles of our journey. The road, like the marsh, may seem lonely and tedious to you, but I know every turn and bend of it, and the trees are all old friends. I'm sure I know that green heron which "skowks" to me as he springs from the rail of the bridge, and there is something familiar in the bark of the black squirrel which has just rushed up that pine. Hark! that was the yelp of a turkey. Stop the horses for a moment and we may see them. One, two, four, seven! What a splendid old gobbler last crossed the road, and no guns loaded! And there is the track of as noble a buck as I ever saw: that's where he jumped into the pea-field, and ten to one he's lying now in that patch of sedge.