During the last half century, other countries have acquired knowledge relative to alms-houses for the poor, and have adopted the results of the inquiries and experience of their neighbours. This has not been the case with our own establishments: their very origin was erroneous. They were the products of a philanthropy which proposed entirely to remedy all human misery. They were founded in villages, and proportioned each to the existing wants of the village. Their resources seldom permitted the adoption of the first condition of good administration, namely, classification. And even when we find a spacious building, we see heaped, pell-mell, children by the side of the old and infirm, and the sick mixed with able-bodied idlers. Even whole families are found in this assemblage of the good and bad, the sick and the healthy, the useful and the mischievous. In such establishments provision ought to have been made for the education of the children, the cure of the sick, the support of the aged, and the employment of the able-bodied. Each class of inmates required a separate treatment. The instant this principle is neglected, and classification abandoned, the institution not only loses its utility, but becomes actually mischievous. But each single establishment was governed by a single authority, unfit for the management of several dissimilar classes of inmates. In general, one uniform system was applied to them all. A further obstacle to the success of these establishments was the frequent change of their governors. As they were ill-paid and often subject to disagreeable contests with the local authorities, it was difficult to get good officers, and still more so to keep them. (p. 221.) Unfavourable as our representation of these establishments has been, the picture of the treatment of the poor in the other parts of the canton is still more gloomy and painful. In these districts (superintendence being absent) all that is not left to accident is regulated by habit, or by a routine without apparent motives. In such places no regular system is to be looked for. The most usual modes of affording relief are allowances in money, or payment of board. In some places, as in Emmenthal, the parochial charges are thrown on the large estates, and the proprietors are forced in turn, and gratuitously, to maintain the paupers who are allotted to them. In many other places it has long been the custom to send round the poor to be maintained in turn by the settled inhabitants (bourgeois), some of whom, though forced to receive paupers, are themselves in indigent, or even in distressed circumstances.