Page:The Slippery Slope.djvu/65

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DUQUESNOY ON "SECOURS À DOMICILE "
45

furnishes a valuable report upon "secours à domicile." The needs of the indigent class, he says, are, "first and foremost, education, primary, moral, religious, and technical; secondly, work; thirdly, relief … but mendicity must be repressed, and even if that is not the duty of 'bienfaisance,' it has a corresponding duty not to encourage the evil by refusing relief; but to multiply relief without discrimination is to increase the class of the poor. Almsgiving is rarely beneficial, for whoever has two arms and does not work, does not give back to society that which he receives from her, and is guilty if he has not put forth all his efforts to avoid the necessity for begging. One must force the professional beggar to work and help others to get situations; one must encourage those who earn more than their needs to lay by for old age, and he pleads with all earnestness for the creation of a 'Caisse d'Epargne et de Prévoyance.'" We find that at that time there were already trades unions in Paris with sick benefit, the germ of the modern French friendly societies. The pauperism of Paris, however, appears to have been enormous. Statistics taken at the time of the report of Duquesnoy (1793) show a mean number of 116,000 paupers in a population of 547,000. The means of diminishing the excessive number of the indigent population would be, he considered, to turn the Mont de Piete into a savings bank. To show under one direction the advantages of saving and the heavy charges which overwhelm those who have not known how to economise would be for the working class a means of moral education of certain effect.

M. Pastoret's report of a little later date, cited by M. Mauger, deals seriatim with the public institutions of Paris, showing the enormous reforms that were made immediately after the Revolution. He ends his report upon the Salpêtrière, the