Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/458

442 that the money was kept in town. To go from hand to hand, from hand to hand, and then from hand to hand again, as in the endless round of the fairy tale—that is what money is for. Factories sprang up as if by magic, and down the long white highways multitudes of the crushed and down-trodden of other cities were seen tramping along to share the prosperity of Issoire. Five hundred soldiers in red and blue uniforms had taken the place of the dozen gendarmes, the dome of the church was gilded anew, and the poet wrote a sonnet in which Issoire was compared to the island of Calypso, and the mayor to Ulysses.

But the weather was never so pleasant that nobody had the rheumatism. Never was country so happy that the grumblers all kept still. There were some complainers even at Issoire. Those who lived on incomes and endowments said that with the rise of prices it was every day harder to make both ends meet. One wealthy man who wore Clermont-made boots, and had furnished his sons with private tutors, and saddle-horses and gold watches, now found it almost beyond his means to keep them in ordinary clothing. But he soon removed to Clermont, and others of the same sort went with him. With them, too, went the widows and orphans who lived on endowments, and the old soldiers who had government pensions.

But the mayor said: "Let them go; it is a good riddance. They belong to the non-producing class, a class that hangs like a millstone on the neck of labor."

But, in spite of all adverse influences, many people from Issoire visited Clermont in fine weather for pleasure or for trade. It was pleasant to wander about the larger town, the home of their ancestors, to be a part in the bustle of its streets, and to breathe its metropolitan air. There were better opera-houses there and picture-galleries, and there was a special charm in the shops where prices far below those at Issoire were ostentatiously fixed on elaborately displayed wares. And so—almost before the owner knew it—many an Issoire wagon was loaded down with cheap goods from Clermont. But, although the octroi was paid at the city gates, the real purpose of the octroi was evaded. The money, in the first place, was spent outside the city. Worse than this, the octroi, instead of being paid by the agents of the Clermont merchants—as the law intended—was collected, as the mayor of Issoire now said, "off our own people." For, if the octroi is to be collected in this way, "off our own people," it would be just as easy and a good deal cheaper and fairer to collect the tax in the usual way, in direct proportion to the value of each man's income or capital.

Another ordinance was clearly necessary. The wagon-maker at Issoire had long since gone out of the business. The prices of