The Right Honorable the Earl Granville to Richard Lyons, 1st Viscount Lyons, September 8, 1870
Earl Granville to Lord Lyons
My Lord: I have received your excellency’s dispatch of the 26th August, representing that great distress might be caused among numerous British subjects, and that those who had not the means of paying their passage to England might be placed in a very awkward, not to say perilous, situation, by a decree issued by the French government on the 24th of that month, ordering the immediate expulsion from Paris of persons without means of subsistence, whose presence might be considered dangerous, which decree was likely to be followed by still more stringent measures. Your excellency further says that, as the cases are likely to be extremely numerous, you think it right, instead of acting under the present authority contained in the circular of the 1st of April last, and directing the council to provide for the conveyance of such persons to England, to call my attention to the matter without delay, suggesting at the same time that the most practical way of insuring economy and satisfactory investigation would be to intrust the committee of the British charitable fund with the management of a sum granted for the purpose of assisting such indigent persons to return to England.
I lost no time in communicating with the board of treasury. But I am only able to-day to inform your excellency that, although in principle the relief of persons who have gone abroad for their own purposes, and who suffer by war or by other general calamities, appears to that department to be a charge rather on private charity than on public funds, yet their lordships do not desire to exclude from consideration the most extreme cases, in which persons unexpectedly thrown out of employment in a foreign country, and obliged by the government to depart, are left absolutely without means, either of their own or from charitable sources.
The board of treasury say, therefore, that they are prepared to sanction the relief from public funds in cases of this kind, where it clearly appears that no other resource is left; and I have, accordingly, to authorize your excellency to give relief in conformity with the views of that department in urgent cases.
I am, &c.,