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be owned to comprehend within its ranks nearly 1 in 3 of the whole population of the metropolis.

But no one considers any man as a pauper merely because he has obtained medical relief, for himself or members of his family, from a public dispensary; and the best comparison practicable between the pauperism, properly so called, of the capitals of France and England, will be made by contrasting the out relief of the one, with the secours à domicile alone, of the other. If, then, we omit the administrations hôpitalières from the Parisian account, and the medical, parochial, and other charities from the London account, we shall obtain this comparison.

It must be remembered that, in London, the destitution of the able-bodied poor is relieved, to a considerable extent, in workhouses, and that, in Paris, such destitution is only relieved by secours à domicile; so that the comparison of secours à domicile as administered in Paris, with out-door relief as administered in London, certainly much exaggerates the relative amount of the Parisian pauperism.

The amount raised and administered for some years past in Paris, as secours à domicile, has exceeded 2,000,000 francs annually. M. Vée, in his essay on the pauperism of Paris, explains how this sum is applied, and shows how much is received by each class of the indigent poor among whom it is divided. He deals with the figures of the year 1843, in which the whole sum raised was about 1,900,000 francs; and the indigent families among which it was divided, were about 30,000. Of that sum no less than 200,000 francs was appropriated to the expenses of administration, and of maintaining the buildings called maisons de secours.* Making this deduction, there remains a sum of 1,700,000 francs for distribution as out-door relief. Of this sum, about 500,000 francs receives a special and exclusive application. It is principally expended in relief of blind and paralytic persons, of men upwards of seventy-four years of age, and of sick persons supplied with relief in medicine at their own houses. †

* Vée, Du Paupérisme et des Secours Publics dans la Ville de Paris, p. 52. Paris, 1849.

† Vée, ib. p. 57.

This privileged class numbers from 5000 to 6000 families. The sum remaining for general distribution, and which, perhaps, upon the whole, is the fittest for comparison with our out-door relief of the poor, amounts, therefore, only to 1,200,000 francs, and this sum is to be divided among 24,000 families. It follows that a sum equal to only about 48,000l. is all that is yearly divided, by public charity, among at least four-fifths in number of those who receive out-door relief in Paris.*

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In London the out-door relief of a single year is probably about 450,000l., if we assume the in-door and out-door relief to be 741,7221., as it was in 1850. The families among whom this out-door relief was divided, cannot be so many as 100,000 in all likelihood they are not more than 80,000, so that not less than from 47. to 5l. must be received, on the average, by each family; instead of the much smaller sum, which, as M. Vée shows, is received by each of the pauper families constituting the vast majority of the receivers of outdoor relief in Paris.

The data now before my reader, sufficiently furnish the means of estimating the relative burden of the relief thus administered in the two capitals.

If we go back sixty-five years, and compare the pauperism of London and Paris prior to the great social change which was produced in France by the Revolution, we shall find that "la bonne ville de Paris" suffered more from pauperism than London did at the same time. But it is probable that during the greater part of the last century, France suffered nearly, if not quite as much, from pauperism, as England did. The Dixme Royale of Marshal Vauban, published under Louis XIV., and the Travels of Arthur Young, published in 1794, include between them a period during which the pauperism and social misery of the French people had increased rather than diminished; and the extent of that

*Private charity unquestionably adds very largely in Paris, as it does in London, to the contributions of the ordinary relief given under public administration. M. Vée, p. 58. speaks of the amount distributed by the Bureaux de Bienfaisance, to each indigent family, as "des contributions dérisoires."

pauperism and misery, at the time when Vauban wrote, is conclusively shown by his own unimpeached testimony.

In London, the medium payment for the poor, by the parishes, which in 1783, 1784, and 1785, might be fairly said to constitute the metropolis, was 200,762l. 8s. 7d.*, or less than one-third of what is now expended in mere relief to the poor, and the medium poor-rate paid by England and Wales was then 2,167,749l. 13s. 8d.*; so that, at that time, the whole official pauperism of London was not more than one-tenth of the aggregate then found in the country at large. But, in 1788, in the single Parisian parish of St. Etienne du Mont, there were 21,000 indigent poor to relieve; and when, in 1791, the Municipal Commission de Bienfaisance first essayed to establish la Charité administrative, their relief-list contained the names of 120,000 indigent poor, out of the then 550,000 inhabitants of Paris. Since that time, Paris has doubled its population; and, in doing so, has reduced the absolute number of its official paupers by nearly one-half. It now contains a million of inhabitants, of whom less than 70,000 are persons receiving relief from the Bureaux de Bienfaisance †: 238,000 persons yearly receive out-door relief in London, and each of them receives such relief to an extent about three times as great as is bestowed on those who are relieved by the Bureaux de Bienfaisance in Paris.

Unfavourable to us as is the above contrast, we must remember that London does not stand in a similarly unenviable position, if compared with the rest of England. The average expenditure for relief of the poor throughout London, for the year ended 25th March, 1847, was 1s. 54d. in the pound, on the rated value of the property assessed; the corresponding average of England and Wales, during the same year, was 1s. 7d.; and, in number of poor, the official pauperism of London is only 1 in 8 on the population,

* These are the figures of Mr. Colquhoun, and of Sir Frederick Eden, State of the Poor, vol. i. pp. 459-464.

†The recipients of secours à domicile who, in 1831, had been 101,805, out of a population of 680,000, were reduced to 62,705 in 1826; were only 66,148 in 1844, and in 1847 were 65,000.

whereas that of the whole country appears to be at least 1 in 6 on the population.

Such, then, is the condition of a large portion of the society of London. Millions, who have visited the World's Exhibition, during the last summer, have gazed with admiration on the prodigious industry and opulence of this capital of the commercial world.

Not Babylon,

Nor great Alcairo, such magnificence
Equall'd in all their glories!

But it has been only a few who, while in the very midst of all that wealth or luxury can seek, have known that they were constantly within a step of innumerable abodes of the most squalid destitution and misery; and that, nevertheless, the pauperism of London is not nearly so grievous as that which presses on a great part of the length and breadth of England.

CHAP. III.

PAUPERISM OF AGRICULTURAL AND MANUFACTURING DISTRICTS.

Strait mine eye hath caught new pleasures
While the landskip round it measures;

Russet lawns and fallows gray

Where the nibbling flocks do stray

Tower'd cities please us then,
And the busy hum of men.

MILTON.

BEFORE entering into the consideration of a proper remedy for the great and varied evils of the existing pauperism of England, it will be worth while carefully to ascertain the incidence of the burden on agricultural and manufacturing districts respectively. The result of such an inquiry may enable us the better to determine, whether or not a great part of those evils, may justly be attributed, exclusively, to the law of settlement and removal of the poor. I the more willingly enter on this task, from the conviction that the comparison has not, as yet, been satisfactorily instituted, and that a sincere and earnest endeavour, to find out the truth, will, at least, be of some use in enabling others to discover it, if I should myself fail in the attempt.

Unless there be something very rotten in our laws or institutions, something which directly tends to produce in England an anomalous and abnormal condition of its pauperism, it is on the densely peopled regions of manufacturing and commercial industry that the burden of relieving the poor will be found to press with the greatest weight. In countries, where our law of settlement and removal of the poor is unknown, whether destitution is provided for by compulsory legal relief, levied as a tax on ratepayers, or by some other organisation of public charity, the fair fields of agriculture enjoy a comparative exemption from the burden.

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