The total expenditure of the commission of public charity may be taken approximately at 3,000,000 of Austrian livres, or 100,000l. sterling annually, for the city of Venice alone, which is now declared to contain a population of 112,000.
Mendicity is not permitted in the streets of Venice, and although distress does force mendicants to appear when they can escape the vigilance of the police, yet I do not believe that 20 beggars are to be met with in this large and populous city.
The poor in every parish in Venice have the benefit of a physician, a surgeon and medicines gratis; the expense of these is paid by the commune.
Every commune in the Venetian provinces is bound to support the poor and the indigent within its limits, whether they be natives of the commune or not. No commune or parish can remove from it a pauper, because he may have been born in another. Ten years’ residence entitles a man to a settlement in a different parish from that of his birth. When a commune to which a pauper does not belong affords him relief, it is always reimbursed by his own parish.
Every commune derives funds from local taxes; the communes of towns from taxes on certain articles of consumption; the communes in the country, where articles of consumption are not taxed, from an addition to the capitation tax, which is levied by the State, but all communes have, more or less, sources of revenue from land, houses, and charitable bequests, which are very frequent in these states.
The number of foundlings at present in the country under the age of 12 years is 2300. After that age the child is transferred from the family who have the charge of it, and apprenticed to learn some craft or trade, or servitude; but so kind-hearted are the people in the Venetian provinces, that in numerous instances, from attachment to the child which they have reared, they have begged, when the time arrived for its removal, to be allowed to keep it as their own.
Venice, March 24, 1834.
[21] This amounts to nearly one-half of the supposed population.