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. Farr[7] 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." [Footnote 3: _Prize Essay on Portugal_, London, 1854.] [Footnote 4: _Parliamentary Papers_, London, 1870.] [Footnote 5: _Estudos Estatisticos, hygienicos e administrativas sobre as doenças e a mortalidade do exercito Portuguez_, etc., by Dr. José Antonio Marques, Lisbon, 1862.] [Footnote 6: Doria, p. 184.] [Footnote 7: The Registrar-General of England.] [Footnote 8: L.A. Rebello da Silva (minister of marine), _Economia. Rural_, Lisbon, 1868.] 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."