Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/452

436 it was enacted by the Common Council of Issoire that "whosoever brings a pair of new boots into Issoire shall be compelled to pay ten francs" which was the cost of a pair of boots at Clermont. The purpose of this order was not to raise money, but to have boots made at Issoire, that the wearing out of these necessary articles should not wear out, at the same time, the wealth of the town.

"People will have boots," the mayor said; "they can not afford to bring them in from Clermont, and so they will make them at Issoire, and all the boot-money will remain at home. It is as though, so far as the city is concerned, Issoire gets her boots for nothing. To be sure, Clermont has a good water-power, and her nearness to the mountains makes the price of hides and tan-bark lower, but this has nothing to do with the question. Natural advantages amount to nothing when artificial advantages can be given by a mere stroke of the pen. The laws of political economy are not of universal application. Depend upon the octroi to make all things equal."

A new boot-factory was now built at Issoire, and boots were offered for sale at twenty francs a pair. The cost of boots at Clermont was ten francs, and the octroi charges at the city gate amounted to ten francs more. Buying at twenty francs would save the purchaser a trip to Clermont and back, and, as trade is apt to flow in the direction of least resistance, after a little the Issoire boot industry became fairly established. There was some grumbling at high prices. Some of the laboring classes went barefooted, while the doctor and the schoolmaster put their children into wooden shoes, or sabots, such as peasant children wear. But the mayor and the Common Council took shares in the new factory, and, being members of the company, they got their boots at the old rate, besides having a part in the large dividends which the business soon began to yield. Employment was given to more workmen, who came over from Clermont; the hum of machinery took the place of the creaking of farm-wagons, the rich began to grow richer, the poor went barefooted, and the people of moderate means felt able to run into debt because they lived in a progressive town. The wives of the members of the Common Council bought diamonds, and the members presented the mayor with a gold-headed cane. Soon other boot-factories, were started, and still others, though, strangely enough, the more boots were produced, the more barefooted children were seen in the streets.

By and by the tanners decided that they too must ask for help from the octroi. It was as bad, they said, for the factories to send to Clermont for leather as for the merchants to send for boots. In either case, the money went out of the town, and was gone forever. So the octroi was levied on leather as well as on boots.