and yielding a surplus to the Treasury, and all men were called upon to admire this astonishing elasticity, the ever abounding wealth of the people. In 1882, however, the tone changed. M. de Freycinet's scheme had proved to be much too crushing; it was also running beyond the control of those who started it; money was urgently required in ever increasing amounts, but the market was already gorged with undigested state loans, and the unsecured note circulation of the Bank of France had become a dangerous agent of inflation. Then amid gloomy forebodings the nation entered upon a period of acknowledged deficits. It became necessary to put some check upon the extravagant expenditure, but it had likewise become impossible to stop short altogether. As the State could not borrow fast enough any longer, it was decided to throw part of the public works outlay on to the railway companies. It is not within the scope of these essays to describe minutely how this shifting of the load was carried out. The companies are leaseholders of their properties, and, in fact, quasistate concerns enjoying Government guarantee upon their capital under certain conditions. By modifying these conditions, so as to release the companies from part of their obligations to the nation, they were persuaded to take over the work of constructing the provincial non-remunerative railways embraced in De Freycinet's "relief" works project, and their own bonds were to be issued in payment for the works instead of those of the nation.

But obviously this readjustment has brought no solid alleviation to the difficulties of the State. Rather has its task been aggravated, for it has sent the railway companies into the market as competitors for the small and rapidly diminishing amount of free capital which France has left, and has thereby increased the difficulty of providing for the still growing deficits of the annual budgets. The fiasco of the State loan for £14,000,000 nominal issued in the middle of February last, indicates but too accurately how deep the slough is into which France is falling just as the grumblings of popular discontent, and the clamours for further assistance from the State to distressed industries, displays the true character of the powers by which the administration is guided. And with all the subterfuges that the deft brains of financiers can devise the budget of France continues to be the most formidable in the world. The expenditure estimated under the head of "ordinary" for the year 1884 exceeds £120,000,000, of which nearly £52,000,000 stands for debt annuities and expenses of the Chambers of Deputies. Upwards of £44,000,000 are required for the interest and amortisation of the inscribed debt alone-so far have the nation's burdens mounted since 1872. An additional £33,000,000 is absorbed by the ministries of war and marine and by the colonial establishments' excessive votes of credit. And beyond these dead weights which are in themselves, roughly speaking, equivalent to a

tax of 388. per head upon the population, there is the “extraordinary" budget, estimated to reach an outlay of £10,280,000 after the railway construction expenditure has been deducted. France must therefore raise at least £130,000,000 this year, and when the "supplementary credits" have been voted the total must be several millions more. The preliminary estimates for 1885 tell the same sad story. Let us therefore now try to ascertain to what all this is tending. From the brief history here given it will be gathered that the mere debt load of the French people has increased nearly threefold within the last fifteen years. But there may have been compensating advantages. Wages, for example, have undoubtedly risen from 75 to 100 per cent. in the course of the present generation and almost throughout France. At first sight, therefore, the working classes seem well able to bear the additional dead weight thrown upon them. They would undoubtedly be so had the rise in wages been the result of genuine expansion of trade, had prosperity at home and abroad marked the progress upwards. I have, however, just pointed out that the Government itself has in recent years been the main instrument in keeping wages high. Its relief works employed multitudes of people who would otherwise have either got no work at all, or have been forced to compete with each other in the open market and send wages down. Other debt-creating agencies—some, like the Credit Foncier with its £95,000,000 of mortgage bonds afloat in the market, quasi-state institutions—have followed the example of the supreme Government and fostered prosperity by means of debt. They and the Government together have been helped to do so by judicious use of the State-controlled Bank of France. This institution has endeavoured to keep money cheap and credit on its legs by a steady increase of its note circulation. In 1869 the bullion held by the Bank equalled the notes in circulation, and silver had not depreciated. In 1884 the note circulation, which in the interval has risen from about £40,000,000 to between £118,000,000 and £120,000,000 has still only about £40,000,000 in gold, and an equal amount in depreciated silver behind it. The notes have therefore been used to inflate prices and wages, and consequently living has become dearer for all classes of the community than it was before the war. The additional taxes are therefore not more easily borne than the lighter burden of twenty years ago.

Nor has any compensating advantage accrued from increase of population. At best the population of France grows in numbers very slowly. Allowing for the million and a half taken away by Germany the population of France has, we may say, made no progress at all since 1860. Its numbers are smaller now than they were fifteen years ago, while the load of taxation has almost doubled-in mere debt charges it has much more than doubled. Equally stationary has been

the export trade of France. The average of recent years has indeed been lower than for the years immediately succeeding the war. Imports have, on the other hand, augmented much, but not because the country has been internally prosperous. The increase is the consequence of bad harvests, and indicates a further denudation of the wealth of the people.

France may, therefore, be considered to exist under conditions that have not materially changed within the past ten years, so far as new developments of its resources are concerned. The higher wages of its population, therefore, represent little more than an artificial stateinduced prosperity born of augmented debt and an inflated paper currency. The statements constantly made before the parliamentary commission lately established in France to examine the position of the working classes proves this. The representative, for example, of the carpentry trade stated that men's wages had doubled since 1845, but 10,000 men out of the 20,000 comprising his guild were out of work in Paris alone.

Here, therefore, we have a purely artificial industrial condition, and upon this unnatural structure the French Government has built. a pile of debt which demands about £6 per annum per family for its service. This is reckoning the family at five, as in England, although that is probably too high. Putting Paris alongside London for the sake of comparison with the preceding essay, I find that in addition to his payment of £6 to the State Treasury for debt charges, the head of a family of five in that city must find £7 10s. towards the charges of the debt of Paris. Reckoning per head, imperial debt takes 23s. from the workman per annum, and Parisian debt 34s.; or together, £2 17s. The rest of France, of course, has no such load to endure, and that of Paris is mitigated by its being the greatest resort of the wealthy in Europe next to London, and by the fact that it owns the water supply. Still, here we have the weakest spot, and these figures tell us in a general way the secret of that Parisian unrest and discontent which ever and anon threatens France. Adding together all the charges paid out of taxes, local and imperial, the Parisian œuvrier has to find on the average about £7 7s. per annum out of his earnings. Now, assuming that he is fully employed, the average earnings of the Parisian artisan is under rather than above 30s. per week, or £75 per annum. Debt charges alone consequently cost the Parisian workman about a fortnight's income, and his entire share of the public burdens, if he be unencumbered with wife and family, represents about five weeks' earnings. In proportion as his family increases the power of the workman to live under his load becomes less. Even if his wife works she can do comparatively little to help him, for the average earnings of females is not above half-a-crown a day, or 15s. per week. Outside Paris if the burdens are less the wages

are likewise much smaller, so that the condition of the rural labourer, for example, with his eighteenpence a day and his food, is not a whit better than that of the workman of the capital.

A nation in such a position must be miserable and restless. However much their enlightened guides tell them that they ought to be satisfied with poverty and hunger, they will not become so. Those who speak in such fashion, whether moved by hypocrisy or an unctuous ignorance, ought to struggle against the spread of the art of reading, which is an insuperable obstacle at present in the way of the spread of their doctrine of the comfortable. The poor learn nowadays even in France, and the poor think and compare notes. As yet they content themselves with pressure for State aid, look to their rulers to make life bearable, and change Ministries in the hope that the load will thereby be eased. By-and-by they will in all probability take the law into their own hands, and seek relief once more by way of revolution. Bankruptcy and revolution are, in a word, the ultimate solution of the economic problem which is now working itself out in France. Expedients, accidents may stave off the evil day, but it is coming, and an accident may hasten it. In vain do her rulers try to divert the popular mind by little wars and filibustering expeditions, imitative of England. Hunger only mounts higher among the ranks of the community; the paralysis of trade grows, and discontent ripens towards rebellion.

It therefore appears to me to be useless to discuss palliatives and expedients in the case of France. Her position is one where the mischief has developed past efficient remedy. To say to her rulers, cease to contract debt" is to mock them. They must borrow or perish. Here and there, perhaps, expenditure might be reduced, but not to an extent that could do permanent good. The corruption must work itself out in the way familiar to France, and before many years are over, it seems probable that she will afford the world the most startling example it has ever seen of the blessedness of living and prospering by the multiplication of public debts. For her at all events debt is the mother of chaos.

The dangers so rampant in France, however, exist elsewhere in a state of development not yet past hope. In the United States the mortgaging of human labour through the reckless construction of railways is undoubtedly menacing to the well-being of the community. Misery is on the increase among the working classes in her mushroom cities; her miners and workers in iron and steel live, for the most part, a life more degraded than that of a beast of burden. Throughout her vast territories, the speculator in lands, in railroads, in manufactories lays his hand heavily on the people, levying tolls upon the products of industry usually far beyond the value of the benefits that may arise from his usually corrupt and

always self-seeking activity. Many of our colonies are likewise over-weighted by debts piled up under the specious name of progress; and it is to be noted that in all these countries, as in France, in the older nations of Europe and at home, one consequence has followed this system. The State, the bureaucratic entity, has become more and more the only God of society. To the "State" all men look for the assistance they require to enable them to bear the load they must perforce carry. The "State" is the universal father, the producer of good fortune, the redresser of social inequalities, the source of material well-being. In the North American communities this is as conspicuously true as in Europe, and to this habit of dependence upon an earthly providence we owe the retrogressive fiscal policy of Canada, as well as the crushing tariff of the Union. Nations are no longer free, in short, but they seek to disguise their slavery by persuading themselves that the bureaucrats and elected representatives who exploit them are merely the executors of the popular will. This habit of legalising despotism by so-called constitutional methods is, I take it, the worst effect that has yet flowed from the modern passion for public debt, for corporate liabilities of some kind. It will break more than one promising community in pieces before it is destroyed, and everywhere it retards the progress of true freedom. Its subservience to this corruption-breeding habit makes me distrust the tendency of much of our modern so-called English Radicalism nearly as fully as the mouthings of the job-loving American or Australian professional politicians. All are alike blind leaders of the blind.

A great deal might be said upon this side of the question under discussion, as well as upon the indications of bondage and decay peculiar to different communities, but on neither of these points have I space to enlarge. I must, therefore, devote the remainder of this essay to a brief indication of the remedies, palliatives, or cures for the debt-curse from which nations suffer. Is it possible to utilize in any way for the permanent good of the community this system of laying mortgages on future generations. To some extent I trust it may be. To me it becomes more and more a conviction that the only efficient counteractive to the slave-creating tendencies of this generation is the elevation of the wealth producer. We have in this country decreed that the working man shall be educated-though the decree is marred by the customary excessive interference of the bureaucracy, and if educated he must likewise have fair play in the struggle for existence. will not do much longer for the wealthy few to say to the men by whose labour they live at ease—we have decided to lay this and that additional load upon you. The workers must, in short, be

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