Son: Father, make up your mind; we must leave Paris. Nobody can any
longer live there--no work, and everything dear.
Father: You don't know, my son, how much it costs one to leave the place
where he was born.
Son: The worst thing of all is to perish from want.
Father: Go you, then, and search for a more hospitable country. For
myself, I will not leave the place where are the graves of your mother,
and of your brothers and sisters. I long to obtain with them that repose
which has been denied me in this city of desolation.
Son: Courage, father; we shall find employment somewhere else--in
Poitou, or Normandy, or Brittany. It is said that all the manufactures
of Paris are being removed by degrees to these distant provinces.
Father: And naturally so. Not being able to sell firewood and
provisions, the people of these provinces have ceased to produce them
beyond what their own wants call for. The time and capital at their
disposal are devoted to making for themselves those articles with which
we were in use to furnish them.
Son: Just as at Paris they have given up the manufacture of elegant
dress and furniture, and betaken themselves to the planting of trees,
and the rearing of pigs and cows. Although still young, I have lived
to see vast warehouses, sumptuous quarters of the city, and quays once
teeming with life and animation on the banks of the Seine, turned into
meadows and copses.
Father: While towns are spread over the provinces, Paris is turned into
green fields. What a deplorable revolution! And this terrible calamity
has been brought upon us by three magistrates, backed by public
ignorance.
Son: Pray relate to me the history of this change.
Father: It is short and simple. Under pretext of planting in Paris three
new branches of industry, and by this means giving employment to the
working classes, these men got the commune to prohibit the entry into
Paris of firewood, butter, and meat. They claimed for themselves the
right of providing for their fellow-citizens. These commodities rose at
first to exorbitant prices. No one earned enough to procure them, and
the limited number of those who could procure them spent all their
income on them, and had no longer the means of buying anything else. A
check was thus given to all other branches of industry and production,
and all the more quickly that the provinces no longer afforded a market.
Poverty, death, and emigration then began to depopulate Paris.
Son: And when is this to stop?
Father: When Paris has become a forest and a prairie.
Son: The three magistrates must have made a large fortune?
Father: At first they realized enormous profits, but at length they fell
into the common poverty.
Son: How did that happen?
Father: Look at that ruin. That was a magnificent man-sion-house
surrounded with a beautiful park. If Paris had continued to progress,
Master Peter would have realized more interest than his entire capital
now amounts to.
Son: How can that be, seeing he has got rid of competition?
Father: Competition in selling has disappeared, but competition in
buying has disappeared also, and will continue every day to disappear
more and more until Paris becomes a bare field, and until the copses of
Master Peter have no more value than the copses of an equal extent of
land in the Forest of Bondy. It is thus that monopoly, like every other
system of injustice, carries in itself its own punishment.
Son: That appears to me not very clear, but the decadence of Paris is
an incontestable fact. Is there no means, then, of counteracting this
singular measure that Peter and his colleagues got adopted twenty years
ago?
Father: I am going to tell you a secret. I remain in Paris on purpose. I
shall call in the people to my assistance. It rests with them to replace
the octroi on its ancient basis, and get quit of that fatal principle
which was engrafted on it, and which still vegetates there like a
parasitical fungus.
Son: You must succeed in this at once.
Father: On the contrary, the work will be difficult and laborious.
Peter, Paul, and John understand one another marvellously. They will do
anything rather than allow firewood, butter, and butchers' meat to
enter Paris. They have on their side the people, who see clearly the
employment which these three protected branches of industry afford.
They know well to what extent the cowfeeders and wood-merchants give
employment to labour; but they have by no means the same exact idea of
the labour which would be developed in the open air of liberty.
Son: If that is all, you will soon enlighten them.
Father: At your age, my son, no doubts arise. If I write, the people
will not read; for, to support their miserable existence, they have not
much time at their disposal. If I speak, the magistrates will shut
my mouth. The people, therefore, will long remain under their fatal
mistake. Political parties, whose hopes are founded on popular passions,
will set themselves, not to dissipate their prejudices, but to make
merchandise of them. I shall have to combat at one and the same time the
great men of the day, the people, and their leaders. In truth, I see a
frightful storm ready to burst over the head of the bold man who shall
venture to protest against an iniquity so deeply rooted in this country.
Son: You will have truth and justice on your side.
Father: And they will have force and calumny on theirs. Were I but young
again! but age and suffering have exhausted my strength.
Son: Very well, father; what strength remains to you, devote to the
service of the country. Begin this work of enfranchisement, and leave to
me the care of finishing it.