He describes the military organisation by which he distributed the army throughout the country districts to capture all the strolling provincial beggars, and how, on Jan. 1, 1790, he bagged all the beggars of Munich in less than an hour by means of a well-organised civil and military _battue_, New Year’s Day being the great festival when all the beggars went abroad to enforce their customary black-mail upon the industrious section of the population. Though very interesting, I must not enter upon these details, but cannot help stepping a little aside from my proper subject to quote his weighty words on the ethical principles upon which he proceeded. He says that ‘with persons of this description, it is easy to be conceived that precepts, admonitions, and punishments would be of little avail. But where precepts fail, _habits_ may sometimes be successful. To make vicious and abandoned people happy, it has generally been supposed necessary, _first_, to make them virtuous. But why not reverse this order? Why not make them first _happy_ and then virtuous? If happiness and virtue be _inseparable_, the end will as certainly be attained by one method as by the other; and it is most undoubtedly much easier to contribute to the happiness and comfort of persons in a state of poverty and misery than, by admonitions and punishments, to improve their morals.’ He applied these principles to his miserable material with complete success, and, referring to the result, exclaims, ‘Would to God that my success might encourage others to follow my example!’ Further examination of his proceedings shows that, in order to follow such example, a knowledge of first principles and a determination to carry them out in bold defiance of vulgar ignorance, general prejudice, and, vilest of all, polite sneering, is necessary. Having captured the beggars thus cleverly, he proceeded to carry out the above-stated principle by taking them to a large building already prepared, where ‘everything was done that could be devised to make them _really comfortable_.’ The first condition of such comfort, he maintains, is cleanliness, and his dissertation on this, though written so long ago, might be quoted in letters of gold by our sanitarians of to-day.