Economic Sophisms/217
<pagequality level="3" user="Zoeannl" />style="background: #ececec; text-align: left; padding-left: 0.5em; font-weight: bold;" class="table-rh"Template:Hwe of having sacrificed our own interests to those of the masses, as every good magistrate ought to do. (Loud and long-continued cheers.)
A VOICE: I have heard much talk of the poor; but under pretext of affording them employment, you begin by depriving them of what is more valuable than employment itself, namely, butter, firewood, and meat.
PETER, PAUL, and JOHN: Vote, vote! Down with Utopian dreamers, theorists, generalizers! Vote, vote! (The three motions are carried.)
SON: Father, make up your mind ; we must leave Paris. Nobody can any longer live there — ^no work, and everything dear.
FATHER: You don't know, my son, how much it costs one to leave the place where he was born.
SON: The worst thing of all is to perish from want.
FATHER: Go you, then, and search for a more hospitable country. For myself, I will not leave the place where are the graves of your mother, and of your brothers and sisters. I long to obtain with them that repose which has been denied ine in this city of desolation.
SON: Courage, father ; we shall find employment somewhere else—in Poitou, or Normandy, or Brittany. It is said that all the manufactures of Paris are being removed by degrees to these distant provinces
FATHER: And naturally so. Not being able to sell firewood and provisions, the people of these provinces have ceased to produce them beyond what their own wants call for. The time and capital at their disposal are devoted to making for themselves those articles with which we were in use to furnish them.
SON: Just as at Paris they have given up the manufacture of elegant dress and furniture, and betaken themselves to the planting of trees, and the rearing of pigs and cows. Although still young, I have lived to see vast warehouses, sumptuous
quarters of the city, and quays once teeming with life and Template:Hws