Making Paupers

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 37, 10 September 1903, Page 18

Making Paupers

History has an uneasy habit of repeating itself at times. The spoliation of the patrimony of the poor in modern Itaiy has had the same results—pauperism and beggary—as it produced in England in the days when Henry VIII. plundered the English monasteries and drove out the monks. Here is an extract from the London ' Pilot ' which may be usefully read in connection with what appears on page 2 of this issue :—

' There is no provision whatever made by the State in Italy for its poor. We are so accustomed to our almshouses, workhouses, etc., at home that it takes some little time for the English person abroad to grasp the fact that, whereas the " Paternal Government of Italy" (I speak as an enlightened Protestant) has spent much time in steadily endeavoring to suppress the religious Orders and annexing a considerable part of their properties, it has hitherto as steadily declined to accept the inevitable legacy left them by the same religious Orders —viz., the tens of thousands' of the poor and aged and decrepit, who, past all hope of gaining a subsistence for themselves, received their daily or weekly dole at the convent doors, and " per l'amore di Dio c San Francesco " were kept from absolute starvation and misery by the monks.'