Part 6 (1/2)

This reminded me of what used to be said of Secretary Seward by his enemies, that he was 'honest enough himself, but cared nothing about honesty in other people.'

'I don't mean that exactly,' said my friend. 'What I mean is, that Carnot III. is not clever enough to know whether the people around him are or are not honest. His grandfather was. Carnot I. would have cut a great figure in our present Senate, and in the party of the ”sick at heart”--the respectable gentlemen, I mean, who are always consenting, under the stress of some ”reason of State,” to vote for one or another piece of rascality, though it makes them ”sick at heart” to do so.

Carnot I. voted in this way for the murder of Louis XVI., and he takes pains to tell us that all his colleagues in the Convention who voted for it did so in dread of the mob in the galleries. Just in the same way he was sharp enough to join Napoleon during the Hundred Days, because he saw that his best chance of saving his own head and staying in France was to keep out the Bourbons. This Carnot III. is, I dare say, more honest and less calculating--for he is certainly more dull--than his grandfather. Perhaps he may turn out to be the Louis XVI. of the Republic.'

How much has actually been spent on the works here to make Calais a great seaport, it is not easy to ascertain; but the lowest estimates stated to me seem to be quite out of proportion with the results actually achieved.

My conversation on this point with my friend from Picardy is worth recording.

'Ten years ago,' he said, 'the amount to be spent on Calais was set down at eleven millions of francs. I feel quite sure that at least twice this sum has been actually spent here since the work began in 1881.'

'Why do you feel sure of this?'

'Because twice the first estimate has been avowedly spent everywhere in France on the whole scheme. Calais alone figures this year in the budget for sixteen millions and a half! You were in France, were you not, in 1880, and you must surely remember the songs that used to be sung in the streets:--

”C'est Leon Say, c'est Freycinet, C'est Freycinet, c'est Leon Say.”

'These two men, both of them men of business, both financiers (though the ”white mouse”[1] is a bit of a visionary) and both men of ability, deliberately adopted, in 1879, after a single conversation with Gambetta, a scheme improvised by him, who was neither a man of business nor a financier, but a declamatory Bohemian, for keeping up the war expenditure by committing France to the creation of a complete ”commercial outfit.”

[1] This is the popular nickname of M. de Freycinet.

'The Republicans won the elections in 1877 by frightening France into a belief that a Conservative victory at the polls would be followed by a new German invasion. I am not sure, mind you, that this was an idle scare. For under the Conservative administration of our affairs we had cleared off in six years' time the frightful burdens imposed upon us by the war, by the senseless Parisian revolution of 1870, and by the Communist insurrection of 1871; and it is likely enough that Bismarck may have made up his mind to attack us if he saw us persist in a sane and sensible public policy. Be that as it may, Gambetta, Leon Say, and Freycinet, between them, did his work for him by plunging the country back into the financial mora.s.s from which the Conservatives had rescued it. They carried the new chamber with them into Gambetta's scheme for doing systematically and successfully what had been clumsily attempted in the Ateliers Nationaux of 1848. France was to be made a republic by spending nearly the amount of the German War indemnity on the construction of railways, ca.n.a.ls, and ports all over the country. The sum stated in the outset was four thousand five hundred millions of francs--rather a pretty penny you must see!'

'I remember it,' I replied, 'and I remember thinking, when the scheme was first developed, that the adoption of it was a wonderful evidence of the financial vigour and vitality of France.'

'Thank you,' he replied rather bitterly. 'It was just such a proof of vigour and vitality that Dr. Sangrado used to get from his patients with his lancet. It was a great political manoeuvre, no doubt, and it commended itself to all the hungry politicians in France so promptly and so warmly, that within three years' time, in 1882, M. Tirard, who was then Finance Minister, and who is now on the box of the Carnot coach, had to admit that the expenditure then contemplated in carrying out this great idea could not possibly fall short of nine thousand one hundred and fifty millions of francs! This, observe, was seven years ago. To-day it has swelled, at the least, into eleven and perhaps to twelve thousand millions of francs. Why not? Gambetta, Leon Say, and Freycinet proclaimed the millennium of civil engineers and local candidates. What becomes of equality and fraternity if the smallest hamlet in the recesses of the Jura is not as much ent.i.tled to a local railway at the public expense as the largest port on the Bay of Biscay?

Once let it be understood that the Government means to spend ten thousand millions on public works, and all the voters are ready to believe the Government has found the philosopher's stone. n.o.body but the tax-gatherer will ever make them understand where the money comes from.

And between the tax-gatherer and the taxpayer, a truly clever finance minister can always interpose successfully, for a certain length of time, the anodyne banker with a new form of public loan! We are the sharpest and thriftiest people alive in private affairs, and in public matters the most absolute fly-gobblers in the whole world!'

I tried to console my friend by informing him that this particular kind of political financiering is not unknown in my own country. The scheme of Gambetta appears to me to be simply a development, on a grand scale, of the 'log-rolling principle,' on which, year after year, a measure known as the 'Rivers and Harbours Bill' is engineered, with more or less friction, through the Congress of the United States. It is regularly and diplomatically fought over between the two houses until an agreement about it is come to between the opposing forces, described by a recent American writer as 'the plutocracy at one end and the mobocracy at the other end' of our national legislature. In short, it has now become an 'inst.i.tution,' and like other inst.i.tutions it has its legendary hero, in a western legislator who is reputed to have re-elected himself for a number of years by 'putting through' successive appropriations for the 'improvement' of a stream which rose in an inaccessible mountain and emptied itself into an unfathomable swamp.

'That is very well,' said my friend gravely, 'very well indeed, but you have to do this thing every year, while Gambetta and Leon Say and De Freycinet committed France to it once for all and irremediably. And on what scale do you do this sort of thing?'

I was forced to own that, upon this point, Was.h.i.+ngton so far lags shamefully in the rear of Paris. Our grandest 'log-rolling' in finance is, to the colossal operations of Gambetta, Leon Say, and De Freycinet, as is the ordinary iron lamp-post of New York to the Eiffel Tower.

The 'Rivers and Harbours Bill,' in 1886, was only saved after a desperate struggle at the very end of the session, by a compromise over an 'ancient and fish-like' ca.n.a.l job in the North-West, the original promoter of which, long since pa.s.sed beyond the hope, if not beyond the desire of hydraulic improvements, audaciously baptized it with the name of Father Hennepin, one of the glories of France in the New World. And yet the amount involved in the Bill did not exceed fourteen million dollars, or a beggarly seventy million francs.

'At that rate,' said my friend, 'it would take your great country more than a century to match what we have covered in ten years. And yet you are thought an enterprising people, and, what is more to the point, your treasury shows an annual surplus, while ours shows an annual deficit; and you have nearly twice our population, have you not, and more than ten times our area of territory?

'If I were to ”improve” the roads and ponds on my property on the principle on which France has been ”improving” her railway systems and her ports, I should bring up in bankruptcy. Where else can the country bring up? Nothing, so far, has saved us but the woollen stocking of the peasants. Come to my place in Picardy, and I will show you a dozen old fellows who go about dressed in blouses--who work like day-labourers--no! much better and harder than day-labourers now do.

They will never tell you what they are thinking about; they will never tell me, though we are the best of friends; but you will see what they are--close at a bargain, shrewd, devoted to their farms and families.

Well, they live on a third--yes, some of them on a quarter--of their incomes; they know just where every penny they have spent on the ground for twenty years has gone, and just what it has brought back to them, and every man of them can put his hand, if need be, on ten, twenty, thirty, forty thousand francs. That is the woollen stocking. But the most beautiful woman in the world can only give what she has. The woollen stocking holds no more than it holds. You can find the bottom of it if you keep on long enough--and then? And mark you, if I tell the shrewdest of these old fellows that the Government is spending ten thousand millions of francs on building railways from nowhere to nowhere, and digging ports in quicksands, what will he do? He will begin to think it is very hard that he can't get a railway built or a port dug. Do you wonder I am a pessimist?'

'But if this is the way in which they look at things, why do they clamour for Boulanger?'

'They don't clamour for Boulanger. That is to say the peasants, the rural people. It is in the towns--here in Calais, for example, at Boulogne, at Amiens--that they clamour for Boulanger. In the towns they read all manner of trash and listen to all manner of lies. You can get up a legend in the French towns for anybody or anything as easily to-day as in the middle ages--perhaps more easily. Look at this legend of Boulanger. It is a real legend to-day. You may be sure of that, and that is the real danger of it. The people who are fighting against it to-day are the people who made it. They wanted, they could not get on without, a great man. Ferry went to pieces, as you know, in 1885. Tonkin and the dead Courbet killed him. So they invented Boulanger. They made him War Minister. They put him on his black horse. They let him drive out the princes. Look at those five men seated there in front of that cafe. They are doubtless decent well-to-do shopkeepers, master mechanics--no matter what--I will wager you that of these five men, three believe Boulanger to be the first soldier of France, and that two of them believe the Government has driven him into exile to prevent the Germans from declaring war! That is enough to make them Boulangists.'

'Then they want war with Germany?'

'Yes, in this part of France I think they do. But the legend is just as effective where they do not want war with Germany. Last year I was in the country of Grevy, not far from Mont-sous-Vaudrey. There the peasants dread nothing so much as another war. They want peace there at any price. Well, then, a very shrewd old farmer told me he wanted to see Boulanger made Chief of the State. Why? Why because, as he said, Boulanger is the first general in Europe, and the Germans know it, and they go in fear of him; so that if Boulanger is made Chief of the State, they will think twice before they attack us! What do you say to that?'