And yet the needs for which this work provides have never been so great nor so imperative. In ten years,[3148] the number of foundlings increased from 23,000 to 62,000; it is, as the reports state, a deluge: there are 1097 instead of 400 in Aisne, 1500 in Lot-et-Garonne, 2035 in la Manche, 2043 in Bouches-du-Rhône, 2673 in Calvados. From 3000 to 4000 beggars are enumerated in each department and about 300,000 in all France.[3149] As to the sick, the infirm, the mutilated, unable to earn their living, it suffices, for an idea of their multitude, to consider the régime to which the political doctors have just subjected France, the Régime of fasting and bloodletting. Two millions of Frenchmen have marched under the national flag, and eight hundred thousand have died under it;[3150] among the survivors, how many cripples, how many with one arm and with wooden legs! All Frenchmen have eaten dog-bread for three years and often have not had enough of that to live on; over a million have died of starvation and poverty; all the wealthy and well-to-do Frenchmen have been ruined and have lived in constant fear of the guillotine; four hundred thousand have wasted away in prisons; of the survivors, how many shattered constitutions, how many bodies and brains disordered by an excess of suffering and anxiety, by physical and moral wear and tear![3151] Now, in 1800, assistance is lacking for this crowd of civil and military invalids, the charitable establishments being no longer in a condition to furnish it. Under the Constituent Assembly, through the suppression of ecclesiastical property and the abolition of octrois, a large portion of their revenue had been cut off, that assigned to them out of octrois and the tithes. Under the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, through the dispersion and persecution of nuns and monks, they were deprived of a body of able male and female volunteer servants who, instituted for centuries, gave their labor without stint. Under the Convention, all their possessions, the real-estate and the debts due them, had been confiscated;[3152] and, in the restitution to them of the remainder at the end of three years, a portion of their real-estate is found to have been sold, while their claims, settled by assignats or converted into state securities, had died out or dwindled to such an extent that, in 1800, after the final bankruptcy of the assignats and of the state debt, the ancient patrimony of the poor is two-thirds or one-half reduced.[3153] It is for this reason that the eight hundred charitable institutions which, in 1789, had one hundred thousand or one hundred and ten thousand occupants, could not support more than one-third or one-half of them; on the other hand, it may be estimated that the number of applicants tripled; from which it follows that, in 1800, there is less than one bed in the hospitals and asylums for six children, either sick or infirm. V. Old and New.