Lopes de Lima (vol. iii. part ii.) gives São Paulo in 1846 a total of 5,065 whites, mulattoes, and blacks, distributed into 1,176 hearths; the census of 1850-51 raised the number to 12,000, including 7,000 negroes, of whom 5,000 were serviles; in 1863 the figure was understood to have diminished rather than to have increased. Old authors divided the population into five orders. The first was of ecclesiastics, the second contained those who were settled for command or trade, and the third were convicts, especially new Christians of Jewish blood, who were prevented from attending the sacred functions for a scandalous reason. Then ranked the Pomberos, or Pombeiros, mostly mulattoes, free men, and buyers of slaves; their morals seem to have been abominable. Last and least were the natives, that is, the "chattels." Amongst the latter the men changed wives for a time, "alleging, in case of reproof, that they are not able to eat always of the same dish;" and the women were rarely allowed by their mistresses to marry--with the usual results. The missionaries are very severe upon the higher ranks of colonists. Father Carli (A.D. 1666) found the whites the most deceitful and the wickedest of men,--an effect caused by the penal settlement. Father Merolla (A.D. 1682) declares that "the women, being bred among blacks, suffer themselves to be much perverted--they scarcely retain anything white about them except their skins." J. C. Fêo Cardoso (Memoir published in Paris in 1825) attributes the decadence of Angola and Benguela to three reasons; rare marriages amongst the higher orders; poverty amongst the lower; and the immorality and incontinence of both. Lopes de Lima (p. 149 loc. cit.) traces the decline and fall of Christianity in the eighteenth century to the want of priests, to the corruption of the regular clergy (Carmelites and Franciscans), for whom West Africa, like Syria and Palestine, was made a kind of convict station, and to the inhuman slave-export, as opposed to domestic slavery. All has now changed for the better; society in Angola is not a whit inferior to that of any English colony in West Africa, and, as a convict establishment, Loanda is a great success.