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 entitled 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. Nobody 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
'institution,' and like other institutions 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, Washington 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 Ei