offensive,
revolting, and difficult to enforce. None the less, Englishmen familiar
as Senior with the ruinous operation of the old Poor Law, Frenchmen
confronted like Tocqueville by the terrible theory of the _droit au
travail_, the alarming experience of the _ateliers nationaux_, were
inclined to regard that admission of the right to subsistence--limited
to those actually born--which is the fundamental principle of the
present Poor Law, as a most valuable, if not an indispensable, guarantee
of social security; a signal instance of that practical English wisdom,
which refuses to push admitted principles, sound or false, to
consequences undeniably logical, but practically dangerous.

It might be thought that in a Christian, and especially a Roman Catholic
country, the danger of starvation could never be very practical--that
men, and still more women and children, bearing in their forms and faces
the stamp of actual want, of pinching hunger, would never be denied. But
Senior's experiences of the Irish famine pointed to a different
conclusion. Death by famine is at last rapid, sudden, and unexpected. On
the road to Kenmare, from which many Irish emigrants were despatched to
America, corpses were daily found with collapsed stomachs _and money in
their pockets_. Hoping to reach the port, keeping their money to pay
their passage, death had overtaken them unawares; and this in the face
of organized measures of relief, the largest and most liberal that
public or private charity has ever provided. In cases of prolonged and
extreme distress, but for the Poor Law, hundreds would die of want
almost unawares, before want had overcome their reluctance to beg. And
if actual starvation were rare, yet in the absence of a recognized right
to food and shelter, the fear of starvation must be ever present. This
spectral horror, Tocqueville evidently thought, haunted the imagination
of the French operative; and had much to do with the popularity of
Socialism in a country of diffused property and general thrift, and with
the ferocity of Socialistic or Red Republican insurrections. Charity,
however liberal, is an uncertain and--to their credit be it spoken--to
the majority of French operatives, a repulsive and degrading resource.
It cannot exorcise the hideous spectre of actual famine, which, though
remote, seems ever to threaten them, their wives and their children; and
which in times of distress and depression looms terribly near, distinct,