Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 097, January, 1876

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

FAMISHING PORTUGAL

The following paper contains the substance of a remarkable letter and accompanying documents recently received from Portugal:

LISBON, September, 1875.

You wish to know what truth there is in the cable reports of "a drought in the north and south of Portugal, and a threatened famine in two or three provinces." Shall I tell you all? Well, then, Heaven nerve me for the task! I shall have an unpleasant story to narrate.

You, who have been in Portugal, need not be reminded that the kingdom consists of six provinces—Minho, Tras-os-Montes, Beira, Estremadura, Alemtejo and Algarve. In the early part of this summer a drought affected the whole kingdom. Toward the end of July abundant rain fell in Minho, where two products only are raised—wine ("port wine") and maize. The rain, which, had it fallen in Alemtejo, the principal wheat-province of the kingdom, would have done incalculable good, benefited neither the vineyards of Minho nor the maize-crop anywhere. The consequence is, that this last-named crop, the principal bread-food of the country, has failed, and famine prevails throughout the land. Having lived in America, I know what you, so accustomed to freedom and plenty, will say to this:

"France, Sprain, Morocco, England—all these countries are near to Portugal. If she is short of bread, let her simply exchange wine for it, and there need be no fears of a famine."

Ah, my dear American friends, little do you suspect the artlessness of this reply. Know, then, that those who own the wines of Portugal do not lack for bread, and those who lack for bread do not own the wines; that the first of these classes are the aristocrats and foreigners who live in the cities or abroad, and the second the people at large; that there exists an abyss between these classes so profound that no political institutions yet devised have been able to bridge it; that there is no credit given by one class to the other, and few dealings occur between them; and that the laws of Portugal discourage the importation of grain into the kingdom.

You are a straightforward people, and dive at once to the bottom of a subject. "Why do not the Portuguese devote themselves so largely to the cultivation of grain that there need never be danger of famine?" you will now ask. My answer to this is: The people do not own the land.

"What! Were the reforms of Pombal, the French Revolution, the Portuguese revolution of 1820 and the various constitutions since that date, the abolition of serfdom and mortmain, and the law of 1832, all ineffectual to emancipate the Portuguese peasant from the thralldom of land?"

Alas! they were indeed all in vain, and the Portuguese peasantry stands to-day at the very lowest step of European civilization—far beneath all others. The number of agricultural workers in Portugal is about eight hundred and seventy-five thousand. Of this number, some seven hundred thousand are hired laborers, farm-servants, emphyteutas (you shall presently know the meaning of this ominous word) and metayers; that is to say, persons who may cultivate only such products as their employers or landlords choose, and the latter in their greed and short-sightedness always choose that the former shall cultivate wine. The remainder, or some one hundred and seventy-five thousand, consist chiefly of small proprietors, owning three, four, five and ten acre patches of land, often intersected by other properties, and therefore not adapted for the cultivation of grain: such of the emphyteutas and metayers as are practically free to cultivate what they please make up the remainder of this class.

The quantity of land devoted to grain is therefore exactly what the aristocratic land-owners choose to make it; and, never suspecting that a well-fed peasant is more efficient as a laborer than a famished one, they have made it barely enough, in good years, to keep the miserable population from entirely perishing. The product in such years is about six bushels of edible grain per head of total population, together with a little pulse and a taste of fish or bacon on rare occasions. In unfavorable years, like the present one, the product of edible grain falls to five bushels per head, and unless the government suspends the corn laws for the whole country—which since 1855 it has usually done on such occasions—famine ensues. The nation (excepting, of course, the court and aristocracy, who live in or near Lisbon and Oporto) is thus kept always at the brink of starvation, and every mishap in these artificial and tyrannical arrangements consigns fresh thousands to the grave.

The population of Portugal was the same in 1798 that it is to-day—viz., about four millions—and there has been no time between those periods when it was greater. Knowing, as we do, that the law of social progress is growth—in other words, that the condition of individual development, both physical and intellectual, is that degree of freedom which finds its expression in the increase of numbers—what does this portentous fact of a stationary population bespeak? Simply, the utmost degradation of body and mind; vice in its most hideous forms; filth, disease, unnatural crimes; a hell upon earth. These are always the characteristics of nations which have been prevented from growing. The melancholy proofs of a condition of affairs in Portugal which admits of this description shall presently be forthcoming.

Antonio de Leon Pinelo, who was one of the greatest lawyers and historians that Spain ever produced, very profoundly remarked that no man could possibly understand the history of slavery in America who had not first mastered the subject of Spanish encomiedas. With equal truth it may be said that the solution of Portuguese history lies in the subject of emphyteusis. Emphyteusis (Greek: zmphutehuis, "ingrafting," "implanting," and perhaps, metaphorically, "ameliorating") is a lease of land where the tenant agrees to improve it and pay a certain rent. The origin of this tenure is Greek, and it was probably first adopted in Rome after the conquest of the Achaean League (B.C. 146), when Greece became a Roman province. It was carried into Carthage B.C. 145, and into Spain and Portugal about B.C. 133, when those countries fell beneath the Roman arms. Whenever this occurred the first act of the conquerors was to assume the ownership of the land. They then leased it on emphyteusis, either to the original occupiers, to their own soldiers, or to settlers ("carpet-baggers"). The rent was called vectigal, and decurions (corporals in the army) were usually employed to collect it and administer the lands.

Syria, Greece, Carthage, and the Iberian Peninsula were the first countries to succumb to the Roman arms outside of Italy. These conquests all occurred within the space of fifty-seven years (from 190 to 133 B.C.), and this was doubtless the period when emphyteusis was first employed upon an extensive scale. Originally, the tenants were liable to have their rents increased, and to be evicted at the pleasure of the state, and thus lose the benefit of any improvements effected by them. The result was, that no improvements were effected. The forests were cut down, the orchards destroyed, the lands exhausted by incessant cropping; and by the beginning of the present era the entire coasts of the Mediterranean were exploited.

This great historical fact is replete with significance—not only to Portugal, but also to the rest of the world, even to America, which, by abandoning its public lands to the rapacity of monopolists and the vandalism of ignorant immigrants, is preparing for itself a future filled with forebodings of evil.

The ruin of the lands of Carthage, Spain, etc. eventually hastened the ruin of Italy. It put an end to the legitimate supplies of grain which those countries had been accustomed to contribute; it forced their populations to crowd into already overcrowded Italy, and increase the requirements of food in a country which had been exploited like their own, and, though not so rapidly, yet by similar means;1 and it gave rise to the servile wars, to the most corrupt period in Roman history, to the Empire, and to the endless series of consequences in its train.

After the Western Empire had apparently fallen beneath the Northern arms—that is to say, five hundred years later—and not until then, the Roman Code ameliorated the baneful tenure of emphyteusis. A law of the emperor Zenos (A.D. 474-491) fixed whatever had theretofore been uncertain in the nature and incidents of emphyteusis. The tenant was guaranteed from increase of rent and from eviction—the alienation of the property by the state being held thenceforth to affect the quit-rent only—and finally he obtained full power to dispose of the land, which nevertheless remained subject to the quit-rent in whatever hands it might be. Before these reforms were effected, Portugal was conquered by the Visigoths, the Roman proprietors of the soil were expelled, and their laws and institutions suppressed. This occurred in the year 476. Whether emphyteusis in any form remained is not quite certain, but it seems not; and during this government, and the Moorish one which superseded it in the year 711, the Iberian Peninsula enjoyed an interval of prosperity to which it had been a stranger for ages.

In the eleventh century this happy condition of affairs was disturbed by the appearance of certain Spanish crusading knights, who, issuing from the mountainous parts of the country adjacent to their own, began to war against the Moorish authorities. In the course of a century, and with little voluntary aid from the peasants, who distrusted them and their religious pretensions and promises of advantage, they managed to acquire possession of the country. Now, what do you suppose was one of the first acts committed by these adventurers? Nothing less than the re-enactment of the odious Roman tenure of emphyteusis, and that in its most ancient and worst form—liability to increased rent and to eviction; not only this, but with certain base services combined. The wretched inhabitants were required to work so many days in the week for these lords, to break up a certain amount of waste land; to furnish so many cattle; to kill so many birds; to provide (in rural districts remote from the sea) so many salt fish; to furnish so much incense or so many porringers, iron tools, pairs of shoes, etc.

Talk of the Western Empire having "declined and fallen," as Messrs. Gibbon and Wegg put it! Why, here it was again, and with the worst of its ancient crimes inscribed upon its code of law. Emphyteusis was reintroduced into Portugal by King Diniz (Dennis) in the year 1279, and was followed by its usual effects—ruin and depopulation. In 1394 was born Prince Henry. He was the son of John I. and Philippa, daughter of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and was therefore the nephew of Henry IV. of England. Perceiving and commiserating the wretchedness of the people, and casting about him for a remedy, Henry saw but one: that was departure from the land, emigration, colonization, escape from the tyranny of the soil, of nobles and of ecclesiastics—a tyranny which both his illustrious rank and his piety forbade him to oppose. Hence his intense devotion to the discovery and colonization of strange lands, which is in vain to be accounted for on the ground of a mere passion, the only one usually advanced by unthinking historians.

The results of this mania, as it was then considered, of Prince Henry are well known—the discovery of Madeira, the Azores, Senegambia, Angola, Benguela, etc., and, after Prince Henry's death, the Cape of Good Hope, Goa, Macao, the islands, etc.; all of which were colonized by Portuguese. These colonies, and the commerce which sprang up with them, afforded outlets for the downtrodden serfs of Portugal. Such was the beneficial result of this partial measure of freedom that in the course of the following two centuries Portugal became one of the leading nations of the world, with a population of 5,000,000 and a flag respected in every clime.

Unhappily, this interval of prosperity to Portugal was the cause of infinite misery to the negro race. The discoveries in Africa and Asia afforded a career to the enslaved Portuguese; yet, by leading, as they did, to the discovery of America, they were eventually the cause of the slave-trade, which without America could not have flourished. Such will ever be the result of the attempt to palliate instead of cure evil. Moreover, the discovery of America and the resulting slave-trade were the cause of Portugal's retrogression to the point whence she had started in Prince Henry's time. When gold and slaves rendered maritime discovery profitable to the aristocratic class, all the nobles went into it—not only the aristocrats of Portugal, but those also of Spain, England, France, Holland, Italy. They all went into the trade of acquiring empires, and it is not to be wondered at if in this rivalry of greed and violence Portugal, exploited and burdened with serfdom and other features of bad government at home, was distanced and overcome. Her colonies were captured and reduced by foreign enemies, or invaded and ruined by one of the several political diseases from which she had never wholly rid herself. For example, the once magnificent city of Goa, which formerly contained a population of 150,000 Christians and 50,000 Mohammedans, is now an almost deserted ruin, with but 40,000 inhabitants, chiefly ecclesiastical.

When Pombal assumed the reins of government in 1750 the population of Portugal had been reduced to less than 2,000,000: there was neither agriculture, manufactures, army nor navy. Perceiving this state of affairs, and recognizing the cause of it, Pombal caused the vines to be torn up by the roots and corn planted in their place. Ruffianism was crushed, the Jesuits were banished, the nobility were taught to respect the civil law, the peasantry were encouraged. After twenty-seven years of reforms and prosperity Pombal was dismissed from office and the old abuses were reinstated, among them those worst incidents of emphyteusis which had been devised by the base ring of nobles and ecclesiastics who held the land in their grasp.

These abuses remained without material change until 1832, and thus you have a complete history of emphyteusis from the first to the last day of its institution in Portugal. In truth, however, its last day has not come even yet, for many of its incidents still linger in the code of laws.

Now for its effects on the land. What growth of forest trees had followed the abolition of emphyteusis under the Gothic and Saracenic monarchs was destroyed under the government of Christian nobles, and to-day there is scarcely a tree in Portugal—the woods, including fruit and nut trees, covering less than 400,000 out of 22,000,000 acres, the entire area of the country. The destruction of the woods, to say nothing of its effects upon the rainfall, caused the top soil to be washed away, and thus impoverished the arable land, filling the rivers with earth, rendering them innavigable, and converting them from gently-flowing streams to devastating torrents, which annually bestrew the valleys and plains with sand and stones.2 In the next place, emphyteusis has caused every kind of improvement to be avoided. The soil has been exhausted by over-cropping; public works, like roads, wells, irrigating canals, etc., have been neglected; and the numerous works left by the industrious Saracens have been allowed to go to ruin. Finally, the tenant, being placed entirely in the power of the lord, was continually kept at the point of starvation. To escape this dreadful fate he has committed every conceivable offence against the laws of Nature and humanity. Tyranny and starvation have made of him a liar, thief, smuggler, assassin, beast. The very ground is tainted with his tread, the air is redolent of his crimes.

I am aware of the eminently legal, and therefore judicial, mind of Americans; therefore I shall give nothing of importance on my own testimony alone. It shall be seen what the Portuguese peasant is from the descriptions that travelers have written, and from the fragments of statistical evidence which the deeply-culpable ruling classes have permitted to be published.

But first let me describe the degree of destitution to which the peasant has been reduced, for without this destitution this criminal character would not have been his.

Baron Forrester says:3 "The poverty of the inhabitants of the interior of Portugal is equal to that of the Irish." (This was written in 1851, immediately after the Irish famine.) "The wretchedness of their condition checks marriage and promotes clandestine intercourse." William Doria writes:4 "The inhabitants (all ages) do not obtain half (scarcely one-third) as much as the minimum of animal food required to sustain active vitality, which is one hundred grammes, about one-fifth of a pound, per day." Marques says:5 "The daily ration of an able-bodied man should consist of at least twelve hundred grammes, of which one-fourth (about three-fifths of a pound) should be animal food. The Portuguese soldier (much better fed than the peasant) receives but seventeen grammes (little over half an ounce) of animal food." Notwithstanding the superior food of the soldier, such is the hatred of the peasant for the aristocratic classes, in whose service the army is employed, that he will mutilate himself to escape the conscription.6 Says Malte-Brun: "During four months of the year the inhabitants of the Algarve have little to eat but raw figs. This causes a disease called mal de veriga, which sweeps away numbers of the people." Says Doria: "All the women work in the fields;" and Dr. Farr7 tells us that "when women are employed in any but domestic labors they discharge the duties of mother imperfectly, and the mortality of children is high." Says Forrester: "Leavened bread is beginning to be known in the principal cities, but not in the provinces. Gourds, cabbages and turnip-sprouts, with bread made from chestnuts (which are always wormy), form the peasant's diet." "In Algarve carob-beans are commonly roasted, ground into flour and made into bread." Says Da Silva:8 "The growth of the peasantry is stunted by insufficient nourishment, which consists largely of chestnuts, beans and chick-peas."

The utmost area of land which the average Portuguese peasant can cultivate is two and a half acres: in the United States the average of cultivated land per laborer is over thirty-two acres; on prairie-land sixty acres is not uncommon. Forrester writes: "In the Alto Douro, the richest portion of the kingdom, the villages are formed of wretched hovels with unglazed windows and without chimneys. Instead of bread or the ordinary necessaries of life, one finds only filth, wretchedness and death. Emigration is the one thought of the people."

Now for the moral, intellectual and physical results of the destitution thus evinced. The work entitled Voyage du Duc du Châtelet en Portugal, although usually quoted under this title, was really written by M. Comartin, a royalist of La Vendée, and written during the French Revolution. If it had any bias at all, that bias was all in favor of Portugal, yet this is his description of her people: "Il est, je pense, peu de peuple plus laid que celui de Portugal. Il est petit, basané, mal conformé. L'intérieur répond, en général, assez à cette repoussante envelope, surtout à Lisbonne, où les hommes paroissent réunir tous les vices de l'âme et du corps. II y a, au reste, entre la capitale et le nord de ce royaume, une différence marquée sous ces deux rapports. Dans les provinces septentrionales, les hommes sont moins noirs et moin laids, plus francs, plus lians dans la société, bien plus braves et plus laborieux, mais encore plus asservis, s'il est possible, aux préjugés. Cette différence existe également pour les femmes; elles sont beaucoup plus blanches que celles du sud. Les Portugais, considérés en général, sont vindicatifs bas, vains, railleurs, présomptueux à l'excès, jaloux. et ignorans. Après avoir retracé les défauts que j'ai cru appercevoir en eux, je serois injuste si je me taisois sur leurs bonnes qualités. Ils sont attachés à leur patrie, amis géneréux, fidèles, sobres, charitables. Ils seroient bons Chrètiens si le fanatisme ne les aveugloit pas. Ils sont si accoutumés aux pratiques de la religion qu'ils sont plus superstitieux que dévots. Les hidalgos, ou les grands de Portugal, sont très bornés dans leur éducation, orgueilleux et insolens; vivant dans la plus grande ignorance, ils ne sortent presque jamais de leur pays pour aller voir les autres peuples." Time and changed circumstances have somewhat softened these traits, but their general correctness is still recognizable.

"Add hypocrisy to a Spaniard's vices and you have the Portuguese character," says Dr. Southey. "They are deceitful and cowardly—have no public spirit nor national character," says Semple. "The morals of both sexes are lax in the extreme; assassination is a common offence; they rank about as low in the social scale as any people of Christendom," says McCulloch. "Their songs are licentious: the national dance or the toffa is so lascivious that every stranger who sees it must deplore the corruption of the people, and regret to find such exhibitions permitted, not only in the country, but in the heart of towns, and even on the stage," says Malte-Brun. "Portugal is a paradise inhabited by demons and brutes," says Madame Junot—a phrase taken probably from Byron's description of Cintra.

My countrymen will be enraged with me for thus repeating the worst that has been said about them, but I repeat it for their own benefit, like the surgeon, who, to save the patient's life, cruelly probes the wound or lays bare the corruption from which he is suffering. Moreover, I shall have still darker spots to exhibit in a national character which has been stamped with centuries of feudal and ecclesiastical tyranny.

In a country possessing a fair share of the natural resources commonly in demand a free and prosperous population will double in numbers every fifteen years, an increase of about 4-1/2 per cent. per annum compounded. The United States, a country rich in natural resources, and one whose government offers but few obstacles to freedom and individual prosperity, has doubled its population every twenty-two and a half years since 1790. This is equal to over 3 per cent. per annum. In that country the annual number of births in every 10,000 of population is 500,9 of immigrants, 75; total increase, 575. The deaths are 250, leaving 325 in 10,000, or 3-1/2 per cent. gain as the net result of the year's growth and decay of population.

There is no reason for believing that the proportion of births in Portugal is less than it is in Germany, or even the United States: on the contrary, "in climates where the waste of human life is excessive from the combined causes of disease and poverty affecting the mass of the inhabitants, the number of births is proportionately greater than is experienced in countries more favorably circumstanced.... Population does not so much increase because more are born, as because fewer die."10 Hence, the presumption is that the rate of births in Portugal is equal to that in Carthagena de Colombia, where it is 8 to 10 per cent., or at least that of some parts of Mexico, where it is 6.21 per cent. Yet the population of Portugal has not increased during a hundred years. What, then, has become of the 250,000 human beings annually called into existence in Portugal? One-half of them took their chances with the rest of the population, were registered at birth, died according to rule, were duly entered upon statistical tables and buried in consecrated ground: the other half were strangled by their mothers, flung into ditches, exposed to die, starved to death, assassinated in some manner. The crimes of foeticide and infanticide have become so common that there is scarcely a peasant-woman in Portugal not guilty of them, either as principal or accessory.

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-thirds11 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!"