The answers are implied in our previous statements. The existing system favours imprudent marriage and illicit intercourse,--but, precisely because it encourages marriage, probably does not augment the proportion of illegitimate to legitimate births. But the final result is, that it encourages, in an extraordinary degree, the increase of the indigent population. The abuses which have followed this fatal system are too numerous to be here detailed. It is easy to conceive what must have been its results on a populace whom education, or rather the want of education, has deprived of all honourable feeling, and of all preference of independence to public charity. Idleness, carelessness, improvident marriage, and illicit intercourse, have been encouraged by the prospect of making others support their results. All means and opportunities of acquiring knowledge, or skill, or regular occupation, have been neglected. Thence have arisen not only a constantly increasing burden upon society, but obstacles to the development of the physical and intellectual faculties, to moral improvement, and in short to the advancement of civilization. _Experience has clearly proved, that the number of paupers increases in proportion to the resources created for them, and that the bourgeois population is least industrious and least active, and endeavours least to be useful to society in those parishes which have the largest public property and public revenue._ This state of things, and above all the constantly increasing burden in some parts of the country, and the demands urged by parishes on the State for protection against the claims and the insolence of the really and the pretended indigent, have determined the government to strive to remedy the evil at its source. We are still ignorant of the proposed principles of the new law. The plan, or at least the preparatory inquiry, is now going on in the offices of the Department of the Interior. It is nearly certain, however, that compulsory charity will be, if not entirely abolished, at least restricted to those poor who are incapable of work. But if assessment for the indigent is put an end to, the revenue of the properties appropriated to them will remain for their support. The administration of the poor-laws in the Canton of Berne is therefore on the eve of a radical reform. The same views are more fully developed in a long and very able supplement to these answers, which immediately follows them, and bears the same official character--(pp. 220-222, and 225.)