But let us come more to details about this statement in regard to Rome. We quote from Mr. Seymour's book:
"In the Italian statistics of Mittermaier we have the number of exposed infants received in Il S. Spirito, Il Conservatorio, and other establishments of this class. The number received during a series of ten years amounts to 31,689. This total distributed among the ten years gives as the mean, the number of 3160 infants exposed annually in the city of Rome."
He goes on to say that according to Bowring, an agent of the British government, the population of Rome was 153,678, and the total number of births was 4373. Hence we have,
Total number of births, 4373 Total number of foundlings, 3160
And we are left to infer that there were only 1213 lawful children born in Rome in that year.
To make a still closer deduction from his premises, we should take his remark that the population of Rome should be taken at the mean of 130,000, instead of 153,678. The mean number of births corresponding to this would be 3700; hence, in strictness, we should have,
Total number of births, 3700 Total number of foundlings, 3160 ---- Total number of lawful children, 540
This is indeed a state of things described by Mr. Seymour as indicating "a frightful number of illegitimate births, and a number without parallel of cruel and unnatural mothers." And we may add, it indicates an unparalleled amount of gullibility in any one who will entertain for a moment such an absurd statement. It would be more creditable to Rev. Mr. Seymour and his friend Rev. L. W. Bacon and _The New Englander_, before circulating the story, to inquire who Mittermaier is; whether he has said exactly what he is quoted to say; whether he was misled about his statements; whether some one else has not altered what he said; whether some word has not been used in a double sense, to carry a wrong impression, or some word slipped into the general statement to put the reader on the wrong track; in short, to pay great attention and be extremely cautious in a matter which wears so great an improbability on its face.
The story is an absurd fabrication, and very clumsily put together at that. "The number of exposed infants in Il S. Spirito, Il Conservatorio, and other establishments of this class, according to Mittermaier, amounts to 31,689 in ten years." Mittermaier, or whoever else wrote this, proves conclusively that he knew very little of what he was writing about. There is no such establishment as Il Conservatorio in Rome. This is not the name of a particular place, but a general term signifying about what we mean by the term "asylum." There are more than a dozen asylums for children in Rome, but only one is a foundling hospital, that of Il S. Spirito. The conservatorios or asylums are not "of this class," but of a different class altogether. There may have been 3160 children provided for, annually, in Il S. Spirito and all the different establishments for children, for what we know, and we see no reason to dispute the statement; but this is the aggregate of children of all ages and all sorts, of the sick and destitute, and by no means the number of foundlings received, or even the number of orphans received within a single year.