throughout France was diminished three-fifths,
but the Consulate restored to them their rights,
and secured them a large capital for the losses
they had suffered. Count Frochot was
appointed to draw up a project for the complete
government of the nineteen hospitals and
refuges of Paris; and that report is the basis of
the present administration of those charities.
They were placed under one administration in
the first year of the present century.

The Minister of the Interior now appoints,
on the recommendation of the Prefect of the Seine,
a director in chief of the administration of public
charity. The gentleman now holding this office
is M. Husson, who states in his last report that
the patrimony of the poor is no longer increased
as it used to be by private bequests, so that the
administrators are compelled to ask, year by
year, for larger subventions. The budget of
Paris charities shows now an annual expenditure
of about a million in English money, of which
little more than a tenth part is provided by
endowment. There are taxes for the good of
the poor on admissions to theatres, on sale of
graves, and so forth, the deficiency being at last
made up by a municipal subvention of some
three hundred and sixty thousand pounds.

The central and chief offices of the public
charity of Paris are on the Quai Pelletier, in the
Avenue Victoria. It has four divisions and
eight departments. The four divisions in which
more than a hundred people are employed, are
that of the secretaries; that of finance; that
which has charge of the hospitals and asylums;
that which has charge of out-door relief and
pauper children. There is also a central office,
at which twelve physicians and six surgeons
attend to examine the poor who apply for
admission to the hospitals or asylums. These
hospitals are the Hôtel-Dieu, the Charité, the
Saint Antoine, the Necker, the Cochin, the
Beaujon, the Lariboisière, the Saint Louis, the
Midi, the Lourcine, the Hospital for Sick
Children (with six hundred beds, and a hundred
extra in the Forges, a supplementary establishment),
the Sainte Eugénie, the Maison
d'Accouchement, the Cliniques, the Maison Municipale
de Santé, and the Berck; seventeen
hospitals, making up altogether six thousand eight
hundred and seventeen beds. The asylums are
the Bicêtre for old men, that for old women,
Boulevard de l'Hôpital, that for male incurables,
that for female incurables, the Enfants-Assistés,
the Ménages la Rochefoucauld, the Sainte
Perine, the Boulard Asylum, the Reconnaissance,
the Devillas, and the Lambrechts, twelve
asylums, making up more than ten thousand five
hnudred beds.

Under control of the same department of
public charity are certain establishments of
supply: a central bakery, a central meat
establishment, a central wine- cellar, a central
druggist's, and the provision department at the
Halle. Montyon's charity for the poor leaving
the hospitals, and the Spinning Works for the
Indigent, are also under direction of the Central
Committee.

Then there is, in each of the twenty
arrondissements of Paris, a Public Charity Office, or
Bureau de Bienfaisance, with twelve administrators
under the presidency of the mayor, and
an unlimited number of ladies, doctors, sisters
of charity, and so forth, working in concert with
it. In each arrondissement, varying in number
according to the extent of its poverty, are poor
houses served by sisters of charity. In all the
arrondissements there are said to be ninety
thousand returned by the last census as the
poor. About a thousand paid officials are
employed in almsgiving, at an expense of about
fifty-eight thousand a year. In aid of all this
public machinery the private charity of Paris
establishes and maintains public nurseries,
reformatories, and other valuable institutions.

The Bureau of Benevolence does not touch
causes of poverty; it simply gives bread, meat,
clothes, fuel, and medicine, to those who are in
sore want of them. In arrondissements where
the rich are many and the poor are few, the help
is bountiful; where the rich are few, and the
poor many, the average of aid to each pauper
may be only a third as much. It is two pounds
eighteen shillings a head in the ninth
arrondissement, but in the thirteenth only fifteen
and sixpence. Very little is done in concert
with employers of labourer otherwise to convert
beggars into workers. " It appears," says Mr.
Jerrold, "to have become the settled conviction
of the Paris municipal authorities, that poverty
can be obliterated by driving a boulevard
through its head-quarters." But the poor thus
driven out of sight of visitors are not lost sight
of by the authorities. A system recently
introduced, of giving them, when sick, gratuitous
medical attendance in their own homes, was
taken advantage of chiefly for women and
children by more than half the registered
population of the poor within a single year. The
average cost to the town of each patient so
attended is about thirteen shillings; of a patient
in hospital the average cost is two pounds.
The home tending helps to keep alive family
feeling, but it must be on many accounts less
efficient. Nearly two hundred doctors are
engaged in attendance on the sick poor at their
homes, but while in one arrondissement there
will be a doctor to every hundred patients, in
another there will be only a doctor to every
four hundred.

Seventeen thousand children under the age
of twelve are maintained at the charge of the
Department of the Seine, as much as possible
not in the asylum but in country cottages,
where they are put out to be nursed and
brought up in artificial homes. Nearly three
thousand four hundred deserted children and
foundlings were gathered off the streets of
Paris in the year eighteen 'sixty-one, and charge
also was taken of about four hundred orphans;
but seven hundred of this little brigade of
children died within the twelvemonth. Of the
abandoned infants half the number die at nurse.
Poverty is said to be the cause of by far the
largest number of these desertions.