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by rail to Nocera, and then by a carriage to La Cava, sleep there, and the next day take a carriage from the Hôtel de Londres to Pæstum and back again. It is fifty-six miles, but may be done in a day with fresh horses, and the inn at La Cava is excellent, that at Salerno only tolerable.

La Cava is worth a few days' stay; the inn looks north, but has fireplaces.

Tuesday, February 4— Ampère, Tocqueville, and I walked to a suppressed convent of Camaldoli on a mountain overlooking Meta. Thence down the mountain side into the plain, the finest walk that we have takenfour hours.

We talked of the difficulty of conjecturing the future Constitution of France.

Every form of Government,' said Tocqueville, 'has been tried and discarded. Absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. Perhaps the most important element in a mixed Government, aristocracy, has suffered the most.

'Wherever the French went they attacked its wealth and destroyed its privileges; and when the Sovereigns came back, the only part of our institutions which they retained were those which were opposed to the aristocracy. Even in England you assisted it with the Reform Act.'

The Poor Law Amendment Act,' I answered, 'was a heavier blow to the aristocracy than the Reform Act. The Reform Act principally affected the aristocracy of wealth.

'It deprived mere money of its political power. The Poor Law Amendment Act dethroned the country gentlemen.

'It found the country justices each in his own circle the master of the property of the ratepayers, and of the incomes of the labourers. It left them either excluded from influence in the management of their own parishes, or forced to accept a seat in the Board of Guardians, and to debate and vote among shopkeepers and farmers.'

Whatever,' said Tocqueville, 'be the destinies of France in other respects, one thing is certain-we must have a Poor Law. There is something not very unlike it now in the large towns.

'Probably in Paris as much is spent in charity as in London. At some periods of the year one-fourth of the population have received relief, but in the country there is nothing, and in the towns it is ill regulated.

'It is unfortunate that Thiers, who on most points has so practical a mind, should have taken so absurd a course upon this. His scheme is a large expenditure on public works, ateliers nationaux, over all France.'

'Is he,' said Ampère, 'likely to be converted?' 'I fear not,' said Tocqueville.

'There is one point, however, on which I have not been able to make up my mind. It is the great question as to the right to relief. Whether we should or should not say, that as a matter of law nobody shall starve. If we give this right we must of course make this relief dis

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Effects of a Poor Law.

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agreeable; we must separate families, make the workhouse a prison, and our charity repulsive.

'If we refuse the right we may give to it some of the attributes of real charity, and make it a bond between the poor and the rich. Then the evil effects of a Poor Law on the industry, frugality, and providence of the labourer are much increased by the certainty, that, whatever be his conduct, neither he nor his family can starve.'

'I am not sure,' I answered, 'that a large amount of charity, unaccompanied by the right to relief, and also unaccompanied by the restrictions by which that right ought to be impeded, would not be as injurious to industry and frugality as the right itself, to be exercised only on disagreeable conditions. Everyone would hope to get his share of the eleemosynary fund. And two great benefits would be lost. One is the security which millions enjoy who never exercise their right, but have always the satisfaction of possessing it. It is like a dwarf wall between a road and a precipice, which comforts a thousand travellers, not one of whom it actually saves from falling over.

'Another is the repression of mendicity. Where there is no right to relief, it seems cruel to order the poor to refrain from begging, or the rich to refrain from giving. When a London beggar tells me that he is starving, I disbelieve him, for I know that he has only to apply to the relieving officer; but if there was no right to relief, I should have to choose between making inquiries, which I have no time for, or giving to a man who in all proba

bility is an impostor, or refusing a man who may perish for want of assistance.'

'Even the right to relief,' said Ampère, 'is not a perfect security. I am told one hundred persons die every year in London of want.'

'I have no doubt,' I answered, 'that one hundred persons die there every year directly from want, and many thousands from diseases produced by want. They are persons whom illness, or misfortune, or misconduct, has thrown out of employment, who live, far from all the educated classes, in the horrible lanes and courts which are to be found in every great town; whom pride, or prejudice, or aversion to the restraints of a workhouse has prevented from applying for public relief, and who, after selling all their little property, have been surprised by cold and hunger in their cellars and garrets.

'Death by starvation often comes on, at last, suddenly. I saw a good deal in 1848 of a Captain Herbert, who was Poor Law Inspector at Kenmare in Ireland during the famine. Every morning corpses were found under the hedges along the roads leading to the town. They were always emaciated, the stomachs generally flat, so that the backbone could be felt through them.

Money was found in the pockets of almost all of them. These were the bodies of persons who were travelling to Kenmare in order to emigrate, begging their way and keeping their little fund untouched for the purposes of the voyage; until they fell down from weakness, or lay down from fatigue and died in the night.'

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The convent consists of a church and some neat cottages in which the monks lived separately. As we left it, I said that 'the two things which I should feel the most disagreeable in Catholicism, are its asceticism and its confession. I should detest incurring any useless privation or pain, and when in the confessional, should be always hesitating between the humiliation of disclosure and the guilt of concealment. Roman Catholics are liable to one sin more than Protestants.'

'What you call,' answered Tocqueville, 'the asceticism of the Catholics was in its origin a reaction against the sensualities of Paganism. And the passions which prompt us to enjoyment are so strong that I do not regret that some degree of abstinence is inculcated by eligion.'

'As for confession,' said Ampère, 'practically no humiliation is felt. After the longest confession both the penitent and the priest forget all that has been said, as soon as they quit the box. They meet the same evening in society without the least embarrassment.'

'After all,' continued Tocqueville, 'you are not free from asceticism. What can be more ascetic than your Sunday? You think it your duty to give up on that day certain pleasures which in themselves you consider innocent. You do not think it wrong to go to a play on Saturday, but you think that it is meritorious to abstain from one on Sunday. You think that you please God by making to Him that little sacrifice on His peculiar day. What is this but asceticism, confined indeed to one day in the week, but still involving the principle