The writer whom we have already quoted[245] speaks of the venereal disease as being, at the time he wrote (1770-1780), habitual in Portugal, and that the Portuguese not knowing how to cure it, its malignity had become so intensified that, in some cases, individuals who had contracted a peculiar form of the malady had died in a few hours, as though struck down by an active and deadly poison. This is most probably the exaggeration of popular opinion on the subject. More recent writers are chary of information, and avoid the mention of matters so offensive to ears polite.
The manners and morals of the higher ranks of society must have undergone a material change for the better in the present century, for an English nobleman (Lord Porchester, since Earl of Caernarvon) speaks in very favorable terms of the propriety, amiability, and excellence of the Portuguese ladies, which, excepting in the matter of intellectual education, left them in no wise behind the worthy of their sex in other countries of Europe.
Among the lower classes, however, it would not seem that the tone of morals had been very much amended, whether we consider their regard for female virtue, or their cultivation of the maternal tenderness and solicitude natural to all created beings.
In the neighborhood of Oporto, country women may be met conveying little babies to the Foundling Hospital, four or five together, in a basket. These helpless creatures are the illegitimate children of peasant girls, openly deserted in the villages, and thus forwarded by the authorities to the care of those pious strangers who undertake their nurture and preservation.[246]
In these cases, says Mr. Kingston, the females are not treated by their parents with any harshness or rigor. They are rather compassionated for their misfortune, and are only sent away from home when found obstinately persistent in a course of evil.
As may be supposed, the foundling hospitals have abundant claims on their funds. The Real Casapia, at Belem, near Lisbon, and another hospital in Lisbon attached to the Casa de Misericordia, receive together nearly three thousand children, who are brought up to different callings, and otherwise prepared for active life, as is usual in such institutions. There is a similar asylum, equally frequented, in Oporto. In this city there is also an asylum in which husbands may place their wives during their own absence from home. It often happens that ladies, on such occasions, enter the asylum of their own accord.
There is also in Oporto an establishment in the nature of a Penitentiary, in which husbands may immure their faithless wives, or even those who give grounds of suspicion. It is presumed that in the nineteenth century, even in Portugal, this must be done under color of some legal authority.
CHAPTER XIV.
ALGERIA.