SOCIAL SOLIDARITY IN FRANCE 173
relief took the ground that this optional law should remain. M. Guyot, senator of the Rhone, brought in a counter-bill in which this idea was embodied. But the advocates of obligatory, com- pulsory assistance declare that the optional laws are inadequate. They refer to the fact that during the experimental period, when gratuitous medical relief was optional with local administrations, its action was irregular, unequal, and uncertain. There were some departments which introduced it with vigor and afterward refused to continue free medical relief, and within departments there were communes which refused to co-operate.
Nothing short of a uniform and compulsory law, under which the central administration is actually required to exercise initiative and control, will prove adequate. Many local bodies are reluctant to introduce a new tax unless constrained by supreme authority. Other municipalities would be quite willing to accept the new burden, but they refuse to pay the debts of their neighbors; they are aware that, unless there is a universal law requiring uniform relief in all communes, the liberal communes would attract to themselves the infirm, incurable, and aged from surrounding places where the burden is declined. As poor persons feel age and infirmity coming on, they would move into places where pensions are assured, and gain a legal settlement in time to avail themselves of the bounty. The inadequacy of the optional method was argued by M. Henri Monod, a man of high authority :
If relief of the aged and infirm exists in an optional form and has some degree of efficacy in the large cities, it is almost nothing in the rural com- munities. In the presence of extreme cases the only means left to the adminis- trators of relief to spare these unfortunates the tortures of hunger and cold is to class them with vagabonds and mendicants and place them in a depot de mendicite.
The authority of M. Sabrau, president of the general council of the asylums of Lyons, is invoked as a witness of the insufficiency of optional legislation. Commenting on the results of an investi- gation made by the minister of the interior in 1898, he said :
The impression produced by this investigation is that the relief of aged and incurable indigents is imperfect, and that the conseih gcneraux would favor a complete system. We sum up this part of our report by saying: Under our laws relief of the aged and incurable is purely optional ; it is prac-
