All orders ask for the suppression of begging. The demand is commonly accompanied by one looking to some humane provision for the poor, sometimes by a request for a regular poor-law, or even for regulation of wages. The people of the parish of Pecqueuse ask that there be public works always going on, where the poor may earn wages calculated on the price of grain; and, what is more significant, the Third Estate of Paris makes a similar request for public work-shops.[Footnote: _A. P._, v. 11, Sections 17, 18. _A. P._, v. 287, Section 28.] Yet the universal cry for the suppression of mendicity, and the form in which it was made, show that begging was considered a great evil on its own account, whether mendicant monks or less authorized persons were the beggars. The begging monks, indeed, were either to be abolished, or their maintenance in their own monasteries was to be provided for in the general readjustment of ecclesiastical benefices. Another common request is that letters in the post-office be not tampered with. All readers who are familiar with the history, and particularly with the diplomatic history of the last century, know how common was the practice of breaking open and taking copies of political correspondence. The letters of Franklin and Silas Deane, and of many less prominent persons, were continually opened in the mail, both in France and in England. Regular ambassadors were driven to the habitual use of bearers of dispatches; and even these might be waylaid and robbed, by the agents of friendly governments disguised as highwaymen. [Footnote: Ciphers were in common use, and governments employed decipherers. Great skill had been attained in opening letters and closing them again so that they might not appear to have been tampered with. "This institution, if well directed, has the property of serving as a compass to those who hold the reins of government," writes, with a fine jumbling of metaphors, one who has been a clerk in the post-office. Sorel, i. 77. The _Facsimiles of MSS. in European Archives relating to America_, now in process of publication by Stevens, furnish numerous examples of these practices.] But it is astonishing to find that the evil had gone so far as to excite the fears of private persons for the maintenance of that privacy of which all decent Frenchmen, with their strong feeling of the sanctity of the family and their great dread of ridicule, are peculiarly jealous.[Footnote: _T._, Agenois, _A. P._, i. 690.]