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.

[Footnote 9:  It is understood, of course, that the census figures of births are admittedly and grossly inaccurate.]

[Footnote 10:  Porter’s Progress, p. 21.]

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 acouque (’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]