ffel 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' canal job in the North-West, the original
promoter of which, long since passed 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.