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.