Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/469

Rh full of paupers and 'rats' from Clermont and Jonas? How is it that the census shows that Issoire is actually poorer to-day than she was ten years ago, that her pauper roll is ten times as large, and the only citizens who have grown rich are the city officers and the members of Issoire's iniquitous Equitable Confidence Societies? If the octroi is to benefit the laborers of Issoire, why don't you put it on the outside fellows who swarm in Issoire, and not on the Issoire laborers' food and clothing? It seems to me, sir, that when a city begins to fix things to help one set of men and then another, rather than to consider the common good of all, it is on dangerous ground. Once started on this sort of thing, everybody clamors for his share. Every man too lazy to work, and every man whose business does not pay, seems to think that the rest of the town owe him a living."

Warming up with the subject, he continued:

"Take this millstone business of yours, for example. It is all folly to talk of the wealth in your stone-quarries, if you have to hire their owners to work them. If we can buy millstones in Clermont for less than it costs to cut them in Issoire, it is money in our pockets to leave them in the ground. If any line of business needs to be constantly propped up, and can not live except at the expense of its neighbors, it is no industry at all. It is a beggary. And this octroi of yours has made a beggar or a brigand of every industry in Issoire!"

But the mayor waved his hand and smiled, and said that some men were never satisfied. They would grumble about the golden pavements of the New Jerusalem, if they could not turn them into legal tender. Then he referred to a conspiracy among men suborned by Clermont gold, to flood the streets of Issoire with cheap bread and meat and potatoes and clothing. He asked all who wanted to be slaves to Clermont to rise and be counted. He showed that, of all people on earth, the people of France were the happiest; of all people in France, those of Issoire were most favored; and of those in Issoire, the best of all were the workingmen, the especial guardians of the Issoire idea.

Meanwhile the extension of the octroi to 3,873 articles had greatly increased the wealth of the city, and the city treasurer's strong-box was so full that he had to make a second one, and to hire three trusty Clermont men to watch it day and night, and then three men from Jonas to watch the first three. What should be done with the money to keep it in circulation, for, if it remained locked up, the wheels of industry would soon begin to creak, and creaking is a sign that wheels need oiling?

The mayor had proposed to divide it among the several Equitable Confidence Societies, in order to encourage industry, and thus enable these companies to raise, still higher the high wages