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. To answer the demands made upon one in the streets by those who are evidently unused to begging would require daily a small fortune.
At evening all Paris, almost, seems to be abroad in search of charity.
Young men stop you in the streets to ask assistance, and respectably dressed women, duly veiled, entreat the passers on the sidewalks to buy sole ornament, which is their last resource against starvation.
Charity is, or soon will be, utterly unavailing against the destitution.
The number of persons who were in the national workshops was one hundred and five thousand.
Since the insurrection there has been a regular system of furnishing those of them who wished with pecuniary relief at their homes.
The number claiming it is now more than two hundred thousand.
The distributer in one small district says that when he began it was estimated that there were forty-two persons to be aided in his district; at his second distribution there were seventy-one, and at his third, which took place five days after the first, eighty-eight.
So that the number of public paupers — for these unfortunates are nothing else --had been more than doubled in five days. Where is the government to find means to sustain this load of misery? ...
The letter of August 3d was devoted mainly to
M. Proudhon's reply to the speech of
M. Thiers in the Assembly.
The subject under consideration was socialism or the rights and duty of property.
The Assembly was packed with people anxious to hear this “insatiable radical,” who had been mentioned as “the Robespierre of a new terror,” but whom
Dana characterizes as “not so great a man though a better one.”
... He is a logician with the French passion for theatrical effect.
Robespierre was a man of profound sincerity.
Proudhon is a man of unequalled skill in dialectics.
Robespierre was a man of ideas.
Proudhon is a man of mental conception.
Robespierre spoke to convince; Proudhon to startle.
But the man of '48 is of his times, as the man of ‘93
