Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/55

Rh the declining consumption of sugar has been made the subject of recent debate in the Chamber of Deputies, where the question was pertinently asked by one of the deputies (M. Méry) if the object of the existing governmental policy in respect to sugar "was mainly to produce it or to have and enjoy it." The Agricultural Society of France has also recently unanimously indorsed a demand of the French sugar makers and refiners that the Government should increase the present bounty on the export of sugar to an extent equivalent to the combined or aggregate bounties allowed in Austria and Germany.

So much, then, for nearly half a century's experience on the part of the leading continental nations of Europe in attempting to regulate the production, price, and consumption of sugar through a system of bounties.

Practical experience in respect to the employment of bounties also leads to a deduction, which may be almost regarded in the nature of a principle, that when bounties are employed for the promotion of some public good, the object sought eventually becomes subordinate to the opportunity which an unnatural and unprincipled perversion of the bounty provisions affords for the promotion of private rather than public interests. The following illustrations, though somewhat comical in their nature, serve to sustain this proposition:

In the early years of the present century the State of Connecticut, having in view the promotion of its agricultural interests, offered a premium on the destruction of the crow; to be paid on the production of the head of the bird to the proper authorities. Thereupon the sons of the farmers, desirous of earning a little money, then much more difficult to obtain than at present, diligently searched the woods for the nests of crows, from which at the proper time the eggs were transferred to sitting hens, by whom they were hatched and the resulting offspring brought up until their heads became available for presentation and procurement of the bounty. A summary of the general results of such experience would be somewhat as follows: First, a perversion of the legitimate industry of the hen; second, an elementary lesson for young persons in perpetrating frauds against the State; third, an impairment of the agency of a bird, whose habits have been proved by subsequent scientific investigations to be beneficial rather than detrimental to the interests of the farmers. Again, in the early history of one of the Northwestern States of the Federal Union a bounty was offered, at the request of the farmers, for the heads of little burrowing animals known as "gophers," which attracted little attention till the experience of several years showed that the disbursements of the State on this account had become abnormal and were rapidly increasing.