But she is titled _Cheftaine_, with also its pretty ringing sound of the Middle Ages; she has seventeen days holiday every year, and she has her silver cross and fifty low masses! There are eight hundred of these disinterested creatures in the city of Lyons; and it will be admitted that the great silk centre of France knows how to manage its affairs with prodigious economy. It would be impossible, in a short chapter dealing with organised philanthropy in France, to mention even a tenth of the private institutions and associations that abound. In Paris alone there are thirty orphanages for boys and a hundred and twenty for girls, the deficiency on the side of the boys being supplied by innumerable patronages, or boys’ clubs. There are forty-three societies for infancy, eighty-seven _crèches_,—an excellent institution invented nearly fifty years ago by M. Marbeau,—two hundred and ten infants’ schools, first established by a Protestant clergyman in the Vosges, and now spread all over France. In 1895, 37,253 children were placed in the country, entailing an expense of 9,336,711 francs, and every year the number increases. Each denomination has its private and organised charities, and the late Maxime du Camp awards the palm of incomparable perfection in this path to the children of Israel. The Rothschild hospital, the Rothschild asylum for old ages of both sexes, the children’s school, and school for girls of Madame Coralie Cahen, are the best of their kind in Paris. When one reads the story of Jewish charities in Paris, one is stupefied by the senseless outburst of mad and wicked anti-semitism which rages in France to-day. The Baron Henri de Rothschild has instituted a sort of mothers’ refuge up in the poor and populous quarter of Belleville, where he gives advice to mothers, and supplies them with a litre of sterilised milk daily. Believe me, when you dive below the surface of Paris, you will find it to be something nobler than a city of pleasure. Poverty and misery abound because, alas! they are inseparable from existence; but there is no city in the world where poverty is more endurable than in Paris, none where it is sweetened with a surer and more efficacious fraternity. Between the classes there is not that intolerable arrogance and impertinence which constitute the blight of British philanthropy. In England I have seen charitable women go into poor men’s cottages with the air of tamers entering a menagerie. They ask unendurable questions, fling open windows without consulting their victims, pooh-pooh everything said to them, order this, command that, till I have marvelled at the long-suffering of the poor, and wondered that they restrained themselves from flinging their torturers out of the window. And I have remarked that these busybodies, under the guise of philanthropy, rarely brought the victims of their implacable sense of Christian duty anything but their arid advice. Now, whatever the failings of the French are, I can