pregnant on entering it are always so on their arrival at the depot.
The prisons are generally unhealthy; frequently, the majority of the
prisoners are sick on leaving it," and many become rascals on coming in
contact with rascals.--Moral contagion and physical contagion, the
ulcer thus increasing through the remedy, centers of repression becoming
centers of corruption.

And yet with all its rigors the law does not attain its ends.

"Our towns," says the parliament of Brittany,[5335] "are so filled with
beggars it seems as if the measures taken to suppress mendicity only
increase it."--"The principal highways," writes the intendant, "are
infested with dangerous vagabonds and vagrants, actual beggars, which
the police do not arrest, either through negligence or because their
interference is not provoked by special solicitations."

What would be done with them if they were arrested? They are too many,
and there is no place to put them. And, moreover, how prevent people who
live on alms from demanding alms? The effect, undoubtedly, is lamentable
but inevitable. Poverty, to a certain extent, is a slow gangrene in
which the morbid parts consume the healthy parts, the man scarcely able
to subsist being eaten up alive by the man who has nothing to live on.

"The peasant is ruined, perishing, the victim of oppression by the
multitude of the poor that lay waste the country and take refuge in the
towns. Hence the mobs so prejudicial to public safety, that crowd of
smugglers and vagrants, that large body of men who have become robbers
and assassins, solely because they lack bread. This gives but a faint
idea of the disorders I have seen with my own eyes[5336]. The poverty
of the rural districts, excessive in itself, becomes yet more so
through the disturbances it engenders; we have not to seek elsewhere for
frightful sources of mendicity and for all the vices."[5337]

Of what avail are palliatives or violent proceedings against an evil
which is in the blood, and which belongs to the very constitution of the
social organism? What police force could effect anything in a parish in
which one-quarter or one-third of its inhabitants have nothing to
eat but that which they beg from door to door? At Argentre,[5338] in
Brittany, "a town without trade or industry, out of 2,300 inhabitants,
more than one-half are anything else but well-off, and over 500 are
reduced to beggary." At Dainville, in Artois, "out of 130 houses sixty
are on t