The Hospital of the Santo Spirito at Rome is a foundling asylum with a revenue of about fifty thousand dollars per annum. About one in sixteen of these children is claimed by its parents; the majority are cared for, during infancy and childhood, either in the hospitals or with the neighboring peasantry, with whom they are boarded at a small stipend. When of sufficient age they are dismissed to work for themselves; but in many of the hospitals they have some claim in after-life on occasions of sickness or distress. We have already alluded to the wide differences of national character in the various political divisions of Italy. The vices of laziness, mendicancy, and their kindred failings of licentiousness and unchastity are chiefly confined to the towns, large and small.[231] The peasantry of Naples and of the Papal States are industrious, temperate; and the peasant women, even those who, from the vicinity of Rome, frequent the studios of the artists as models, are generally of unexceptionable character.[232] The mountaineers of the Abruzzi, long infamous as banditti (a stigma affixed by the French or other dominant powers on those who resisted their rule), in harvest-time brave the deadly malaria of the Campagna to earn a few liri honestly for their starving children, although in so doing the many that never return to their mountain homes show the risks that all have run. The corn, wine, and oil raised in Italy, the well-supplied markets of Rome and other cities, are evidence that the peasantry do not all eat the bread of idleness. The Papal States contain some of the finest, richest, and best cultivated provinces in Italy.[233] It is in the towns we must look for the worst results of misgovernment and bad example. CHAPTER XII. SPAIN. Resemblance between Spanish and Roman Laws on Prostitution.--Code of Alphonse IX.--Result of Draconian Legislation.--Ruffiani.--Court Morals.--Brothels.--Valencia.--Laws for the Regulation of Vice.-- Concubines legally recognized.--Syphilis.--Cortejo.--Reformatory Institutions at Barcelona.--Prostitution in Spain at the Present Day.--Madrid Foundling Hospital.