Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/463

Rh what the laborer saved, not by what he could buy with his wages. "Every workingman" said he, "as statistics show, saves thirty per cent of his wages. In Clermont, therefore, the laborer lays up one franc per day, or three hundred francs per year. In Issoire, he lays up one franc fifty per day, or four hundred and fifty francs per year, a difference of one half in favor of the workman at Issoire as compared with the pauper labor of Clermont."

The workman Jacques read this aloud in the bar-room of the Lion d'Or, and pondered over it a good deal, for the logic was irrefutable, and yet after all these years he had not four hundred and fifty francs which he could call his own.

The mayor made a speech to the workingmen, congratulating them on his re-election, and assuring them that "for them and for them alone the octroi was brought to Issoire. It was the pride of Issoire that its workingmen were princes and not paupers. If they paid high prices for articles of necessity, it was only that they might get higher prices in return. You sell more than you buy, and what you sell, the strength of your own right arms, costs you nothing, and, when it is sold, is as much yours as it was before. It is God's bounty to the workingman. If these industries which the octroi has built up around you are left unprotected, you too would be left without defense. In the natural competition of trade, the rich grow richer and the poor poorer. Without the octroi we should behold here as at Clermont the spectacle of the chariot-wheels of Dives throwing dust into the eyes of Lazarus. But here in Issoire, Lazarus is, so to speak, already in Abraham's bosom. The workingmen of Issoire have no truer friend than Issoire's mayor, and to cherish their interests is the dream by day and by night of Issoire's Common Council."

But we must return to the boot-trade, on which the octroi was first established. The history of that industry is the history of all the others, for in one way or another all experienced the same changes and conditions.

The profits were large at first, and very soon the Issoire Citizens' Foot-wear Manufacturing Association had no longer a monopoly in boots and shoes. The original concern still retained the city contract for supplying boots to the laboring-men, but the others found the general trade no less profitable.

But soon an unexpected decline in boot consumption took place. People perversely wore their old boots, which had long passed the season of presentability. The children went barefooted or shuffled around in sabots. Even worse, many parents bought for their children a new kind of copper-toed shoe, which was made in Clermont—a shoe that could never wear out at all; one of the worst possible things for the shoe-trade in any country!

When it was found that boots and shoes enough to last for five