Reflection:

1. In Paris, a good number of abandoned children were collected at night at the doors of churches and convents. Those who did not die at night from the cold or eaten by the rats, would probably die shortly by the ruthless conditions that they had passed. Most of them were children of female workers and seamstresses that were dismissed by employers who had abused them; of servants abandoned by their householders after having seduced them, or of girls arrived in the city in search of work. Keeping the child involved many difficulties to marry or to get a job; and consequently starvation for both mother and son. The actions of St. Vincent, St. Louise, the Ladies of Charity —AIC— and the Vincentians with these children, adolescents and young people, are known, giving them education, Christian instruction, learning a trade and a place to practice it. St. Vincent said that it would take 40,000 pounds a year. And he gives this solution: “do what you can.” The most important economic contribution was given by the Ladies. Without them, the work would have perished. Those sons and daughters of the nobility and of the upper bourgeoisie (with sufficient fortune) who were considered bastards  were placed a decent place in the administration or in the Church (bishops, abbots and priors); or the child was delivered to a matrimony by compensating for a sum of money.
2. In our modern society this situation seems to have been overcome, because the institutions take care of the children; but there are still places, in some less and in others more, where the “street children” lurk like little criminals, take drugs by absorbing cheap gasoline and learn to be thieves, or, sadder still, they have to leave school and college to work since childhood and provide some money needed to live badly at home.