sacred characters, and equally under the immediate protection of Heaven*.

But in the same degree as the State provides regular relief, mendicity is venial or culpable; and where the state provides no relief, it is the crime of the State, and not of the individual. The punishment of mendicity in England and in Scotland by several statutes previous to the establishment of the compulsory assessment, and in France by a series of ordonnances from 1693 to 1784, may in this view be considered as cruelty.

The licenses granted for mendicity in France are an acknowledgement of the defect of their provision for the relief of indigence. The Depôts de Mendicité have not diminished the number of beggars. "In the towns," says the Baron Dupin, "mendicity may be imputed to idleness and relaxed manners; but in the country, in the dead season, there exist want and misery, and no means of relief." The mendicants who take advantage of the license are not comprehended under any enumeration of the indigent in France, nor are those of the rural population who are driven to mendicity for want of regular provision. Yet in the country in general the indigent amount to one-fourteenth, in the towns in France to one

tenth of the whole population*, and in Paris to one-seventh; and in the latter city, one-third of those who die annually are buried at the public expense. In England it appears, that the average number of persons relieved for three years previous to 1818, was permanently 516,963, and occasionally 423,663; total 940,626, out of a population of 10,150,615; being 9 in each hundred of the population; which is less than the enumerated indigency in France, exclusive of that not enumerated§. In that country, the extre

* De Gerando, Visiteur du Pauvre, pages 50, 51. + Dupin, page 425.

In the Edinburgh Review, No. 51, page 300, from the figures quoted in the text, the writer, by an unaccountable mistake, infers, that the number of persons relieved from the poors'-rates appears to have been 94 in each 10 of the population; and in the following page he reasons upon this gross error as an authentic fact. "Such is the extraordinary picture, exhibited on the highest authority, of the richest, the most industrious, and most moral population that probably ever existed. More than nine-tenths of its whole amount occasionally subsisting on public charity."

I searched the subsequent Numbers in vain for a retraction of this error, which the deserved celebrity of the Journal would tend to spread among the numerous class of its readers, who are too apt to take such assertions on trust. But I have since 1822 learnt that it has been corrected by a notice in a Glasgow newspaper ! ! !

§ An inquiry expressly made in the several parishes surrounding and including the large market-town of Newbury in Berkshire-a county almost exclusively agricultural-produced, on the 17th of November, 1821, a result of a fourteenth of the population as then receiving parochial relief.

mities of indigence are too far removed from the heart of charity to partake of the warm blood which flows into the arteries. The agrarian division and the law of descent paralyse the efforts of the charitable and excellent men in that country, who wish to extend and increase the system of domiciliary relief, but who consider it as a matter rather to be hoped for than expected.

In the scale of civilization, with which I concluded the second part of this work, I placed England, Scotland, and France at the head, because in those countries a system of relief for the poor is made a regular object of their Legislatures. That State has best attained its object, wherein indigence is more equally relieved, and mendicity least frequent. If, as I think, the superiority be on the side of England and Scotland, where the funds are raised and applied locally, I conclude, in direct contradiction to the abstract principle laid down by the Legislative Assembly in a former page, "that the public relief for indigence is best derived from local and municipal funds, locally applied."

I believe too that it will be found that the comforts of the poor follow the same scale of civilization with that arranged for the modes of relief. "Intimately acquainted," says Mr. Wakefield*, "with the circumstances, comforts, and

* Vol. ii. page 811.

wants of the people in both countries, I have no hesitation in saying, that an English, in comparison with an Irish, labourer, knows not what poverty indicates." I fear that the state of the peasantry in France is also superior to that in Ireland.

But in times of the defective supply of provisions let us compare the situation of the English labourer with that of the peasantry in other countries; or rather, let me state authentic facts respecting other countries, and then let my English readers judge if any comparison can be drawn. In the winter of 1816-1817, the misery to which the lower classes of society in Italy were reduced, owing to the general failure of the primary articles of food, fell under my own observation: the poor were reduced to eat vegetable substitutes; the consequence was, an infectious fever by which numbers perished.

"Here (at the Porta St. Giovanni in Rome) as I was making my memoranda, in May 1817, I found a poor wretch who was seeking if by chance he could find any thing which could be eaten among the refuse vegetables which the gardener had thrown over the walls. . . . . This may serve to show to what a state the people here are reduced by the failure, or at least the great deficiency, both of the vintage and harvest last year*"

* Wood's Letters of an Architect, 1828, vol. ii. p. 25.

Similar causes in France and Ireland produced similar effects, which have respectively attracted medical observation. "The continual rains of 1816 destroyed or prevented the ripening of nearly all the grain sown in the departments of the Ain, the Jura, the Doubs, the Haute Saône, the Vosges, and a part of the Saône and Loire, &c. from which cause a dreadful famine arose, which continued the first six months of 1817. The sufferers subsisted during the months of January, February, and March, on potatoes, oatbread, pollard, or bran, and other inferior articles; the absolutely destitute were compelled to beg.

"At length all resources being exhausted, and every article of food having reached a price till then unheard of, the three following months presented scenes of the most appalling character; the meadows and fields were covered with our starving fellow-creatures, who were, so to speak, contending with the cattle for the herbage. Hunger at this period reduced them to live solely on herbaceous vegetables, such as goats-beard, wild sorrel, nettles, thistles, bean-tops, leaves of trees, &c.; these herbs were chopped up, boiled, and mashed: when they were too old and tough to eat in that state, they expressed the juice, and according to their means, they either used these pulps or juices alone, or mixed with a little coarse meal.