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.

[Footnote 2:  The Mondega annually overflows its banks, changes its course and buries thousands of once fertile acres under sand and stones; the Vonga has converted the once productive land between Aveiro and Ovar into a vast morass; the Douro is periodically converted into a frightful and resistless torrent which sweeps everything before it.]

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