Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/457

Rh "On the tea, coffee, pepper, brass, tin, diamonds" (here the Common Council heaved a sigh), "and other articles which Issoire can not produce, we will raise the income which the city needs. And the great charm of this tax is, that the people will not feel it at all, for it will all be paid by outsiders, by these merchants from Clermont and Lyons who send their goods to our town. They own the goods, they bring them here, they pay the octroi, for we need not buy of them until the goods are safe inside the city gates. By a single stroke in financial policy, we shall keep our factories running, our workingmen contented, and make the merchants in our rival cities pay all our expenses. As for the other articles which we buy in Clermont, we can make them here, if only we can have the octroi to help us. Extend the octroi to everything, and Issoire will become a microcosm, a little world within a world. We shall do everything for ourselves. There is no excuse for buying anything in Clermont so long as there is a foot of land in Issoire on which a factory can be built. We shall have woolen-factories, and powder-factories, and iron-foundries, and distilleries, and cotton-factories, and wine-vaults, and chair-factories, and stone-quarries, and gold-mines, and flouring-mills, and paper-mills, and saw-mills, and wind-mills, and gin-mills, and—"

But here the mayor began to grow a little incoherent. He had been out late the night before, explaining the advantages of the octroi at the club in the Café de la Comédie, and his private secretary pulled his coat in warning that he should bring his speech to a close.

The mayor's recommendation was accepted in part. A few of the Council had been in favor of issuing some kind of cheap money—some sort of brass or paper token, which they could make by machinery whenever the treasury became empty. But the majority had seen this kind of money before, and they firmly resisted the suggestion. By way of compromise, they agreed to extend the octroi to twenty-seven articles—mostly articles of food or clothing which had been brought in from Clermont or from the mountains of the Puy-de-Dôme. The workman Jacques was dismissed with a pair of boots, for which the mayor himself paid. Jacques left the council-chamber satisfied, and the crisis was averted.

And now money flowed in again to Issoire. The farmers who brought in onions paid a little, the boy who pulled water-cresses a little, the milkmen a little, the vine-growers a good deal more, but most of all came in from the merchants of Clermont, who in spite of all discouragement still persisted in carrying cheap goods to Issoire.

Prices went up; a sure index of prosperity. It was easy to pay one's debts—easier still to make new ones; but the great thing was