hly familiar with the French finances,
tells me that M. Leroy-Beaulieu has underestimated the amount. He puts
it himself at an annual average for the past decade of 700,000,000
francs. Thanks to the device adopted, I am sorry to say, by M. Leon Say,
in 1879, of transferring to what is called the 'extraordinary budget' of
each year numerous items which should properly find a place in the
'ordinary budget' of each year, it is not very easy to get at a precise
and definite basis for estimating the real amount of these annual
deficiencies.

M. Amagat, a Republican deputy for the Department of the Cantal, who has
distinguished himself and earned the hostility of the Carnot Government
by his cool and methodical treatment of these financial matters,
denounces this device as 'deplorable,' and as keeping alive the most
strange 'illusions' among well-meaning French Republicans about the real
condition of the national finances.

Precisely! But the device was adopted expressly to keep alive these
'illusions,' in order that the 'illusions' might keep alive the
politicians who adopted the device.

It served M. Leon Say, who knew better, in 1879. It serves M. Rouvier,
who, perhaps, does not know better, in 1890. The new Chamber met on
November 12, 1889. A fortnight had hardly passed when M. Rouvier, as
Minister of the Finances, the 'Minister of ill-omen' as M. Amagat calls
him, rose in his place and, without a blush, affirmed that the budget
for 1889 showed an excess of receipts over expenditure of 'forty
millions of francs!' This bold statement was promptly telegraphed from
Paris, by the correspondents of the foreign press in that city, to the
four corners of the globe. What did it mean? It meant simply this: that,
thanks to the financial success of the Government investment of the
public money in a grand raree show at Paris, called a 'Universal
Exposition,' such an excess of income over outlay appeared in what is
called the 'ordinary budget.' As to the 'extraordinary' budget--oh! that
is quite another matter.

It is as if an English householder should divide his yearly accounts
into 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary' accounts, putting under the
'ordinary' accounts his cab and railway fares, his club expenses, his
transactions on the turf, and his ventures at Monte Carlo, but remitting
to the 'extraordinary' accounts such unconsidered trifles as house-rent,
domestic expenses, the bills of tailors and milliners, and taxes, local
and