“Our towns,” says the parliament of Brittany,[35] “are so filled with beggars it seems as if the measures taken to suppress mendicity only increase it.” — “The principal highways,” writes the intendant, “are infested with dangerous vagabonds and vagrants, actual beggars, which the police do not arrest, either through negligence or because their interference is not provoked by special solicitations.”

What would be done with them if they were arrested?  They are too many, and there is no place to put them.  And, moreover, how prevent people who live on alms from demanding alms?  The effect, undoubtedly, is lamentable but inevitable.  Poverty, to a certain extent, is a slow gangrene in which the morbid parts consume the healthy parts, the man scarcely able to subsist being eaten up alive by the man who has nothing to live on.

“The peasant is ruined, perishing, the victim of oppression by the multitude of the poor that lay waste the country and take refuge in the towns.  Hence the mobs so prejudicial to public safety, that crowd of smugglers and vagrants, that large body of men who have become robbers and assassins, solely because they lack bread.  This gives but a faint idea of the disorders I have seen with my own eyes[36].  The poverty of the rural districts, excessive in itself, becomes yet more so through the disturbances it engenders; we have not to seek elsewhere for frightful sources of mendicity and for all the vices."[37]

Of what avail are palliatives or violent proceedings against an evil which is in the blood, and which belongs to the very constitution of the social organism?  What police force could effect anything in a parish in which one-quarter or one-third of its inhabitants have nothing to eat but that which they beg from door to door?  At Argentré,[38] in Brittany, “a town without trade or industry, out of 2,300 inhabitants, more than one-half are anything else but well-off, and over 500 are reduced to beggary.”  At Dainville, in Artois, “out of 130 houses sixty are on the poor-list."[39] In Normandy, according to statements made by the curates, “of 900 parishioners in Saint-Malo, three-quarters can barely live and the rest are in poverty.”  “Of 1,500 inhabitants in Saint-Patrice, 400 live on alms.”  Of 500 inhabitants in Saint-Laurent three-quarters live on alms.”  At Marboef, says a report, “of 500 persons inhabiting our parish, 100 are reduced to mendicity, and besides these, thirty or forty a day come to us from neighboring parishes."[40] At Bolbone in Languedoc[41] daily at the convent gate is “general almsgiving to 300 or 400 poor people, independent of that for the aged and the sick, which is more numerously attended.”  At Lyons, in 1787, “30,000 workmen depend on public charity for subsistence;” at Rennes, in 1788, after an inundation, “two-thirds of the inhabitants are in a state of destitution;"[42] at Paris, out of 650,000 inhabitants, the census of 1791 counts 118,784 as indigent.[43] — Let frost or hail come, as