338 Fundamental Principles of 



lishment, with one committee for the general manage- 

 ment of all its affairs, and one treasurer. This unity 

 appears essentially necessary, not only because, when 

 all the parts tend to one common centre, and act in 

 union to the same end, under one direction, they are 

 less liable to be impeded in their operations or disor- 

 dered by collision, but also on account of the very 

 unequal distribution of wealth, as well as of misery and 

 poverty, in the different districts of the same town. 

 Some parishes in great cities have comparatively few 

 poor, while others, perhaps less opulent, are over- 

 burdened with them ; and there seems to be no good 

 reason why a house-keeper in any town should be called 

 upon to pay more or less for the support of the poor 

 because he happens to live on one side of a street or 

 the other. Added to this, there are certain districts in 

 most great towns where poverty and misery seem to 

 have fixed their head-quarters, and where it would be 

 impossible for the inhabitants to support the expense 

 of maintaining their poor. Where that is the case, as 

 measures for preventing mendicity in every town must 

 be general in order to their being successful, the enter- 

 prise, from that circumstance alone, would be rendered 

 impracticable were the assistance of the more opulent 

 districts to be refused. 



There is a district, for instance, belonging to Munich 

 (the Au), a very large parish, which may be called the 

 St. Giles's of that city, where the alms annually received 

 are twenty times as much as the whole district con- 

 tributes to the funds of the public institution for the 

 poor. The inhabitants of the other parishes, however, 

 have never considered it a hardship to them that the 

 poor of the Au should be admitted to share the public 

 bounty, in common with the poor of the other parishes. 



