Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/800

782 alms by systematic intimidation. Previous attempts to cure the evil had failed, and the public had lost all faith in further projects, and therefore no support was to be expected for Rumford's scheme. "Aware of this," he says, "I took my measures accordingly. To convince the public that the scheme was feasible, I determined first, by a great exertion, to carry it into complete execution, and then to ask them to support it."

He describes the military organization by which he distributed the army throughout the country districts to capture all the strolling provincial beggars, and how, on January 1, 1790, he bagged all the beggars of Munich in less than an hour by means of a well-organized civil and military battue, the New-Year's-Day being the great festival when all the beggars went abroad to enforce their customary black-mail upon the industrious section of the population. Though very interesting, I must not enter upon these details, but can not help stepping a little aside from my proper subject to quote his weighty words on the ethical principles upon which he proceeded. He says that "with persons of this description, it is easy to be conceived that precepts, admonitions, and punishments would be of little avail. But, where precepts fail, habits may sometimes be successful. To make vicious and abandoned people happy, it has generally been supposed necessary, first, to make them virtuous. But why not reverse this order? Why not make them first happy and then virtuous? If happiness and virtue be inseparable, the end will as certainly be attained by one method as by the other; and it is most undoubtedly much easier to contribute to the happiness and comfort of persons in a state of poverty and misery than, by admonitions and punishments, to improve their morals."

He applied these principles to his miserable material with complete success, and referring to the result exclaims, "Would to God that my success might encourage others to follow my example!" Further examination of his proceedings shows that, in order to follow such example, a knowledge of first principles and a determination to carry them out in bold defiance of vulgar ignorance, general prejudice, and polite sneering, are necessary.

Having captured the beggars thus cleverly, he proceeded to carry out the above-stated principle, by taking them to a large building already prepared, and where "everything was done that could be devised to make them really comfortable" The first condition of such comfort, he maintains, is cleanliness, and his dissertation on this, though written so long ago, might be inscribed in letters of gold over the portals of our Health Exhibition of to-day.

Describing how he carried out his principles, he says of the prisoners thus captured: "Most of them had been used to living in the most miserable hovels, in the midst of vermin and every kind of filthiness, or to sleep in the streets, and under the hedges, half naked and