Note (return) — FAMISHING PORTUGAL.

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.