What remedies have been applied?
What have been their results?
The abuses in the administration arise both from the principle of the law, and from the character and social position of its administrators: from the law, because it abandons all administration to the communes; from the administrators, because they neglect improvement, distribute relief without discrimination or real inquiry, and generally provide only against the exigences of the moment.
The separate parishes, being, for the most part, too small to establish schools and workhouses, want means of coercion, and are in general more busied in providing relief for those actually indigent than in diminishing their number, either as regards the present or future generations. Besides, although the practice is not sanctioned by law, many parishes, in order to prevent the return of their bourgeois who are domiciled elsewhere, forward to them relief without being able to ascertain their conduct.
The government has long felt that these abuses could not be remedied except by a law founded on a principle totally different from that of abandoning the administration to the parishes: but from a mistaken solicitude for the poor, it always hesitated to take this course.
What has been the influence of the system?
1. Statistically?
2. Morally?
1. Has the number of the indigent augmented, diminished, or remained stationary?