1 92 SCIENCE SKE TCHES. 



were worth twenty francs a pair, and the leather in 

 them cost but one franc, the nineteen francs left 

 were the product of labor, and should rightfully be 

 returned to the laborer. Now, in Clermont, where 

 boots were made by pauper labor, the boots sold 

 for ten francs, and the leather in each pair was 

 worth but fifty centimes. In Clermont, therefore, 

 the rightful share of labor, even if labor had its 

 due, which it never has in this world, was only 

 nine and a half francs ; that is, to labor belonged 

 nine and a half francs on each pair of boots in 

 Clermont, and nineteen francs in Issoire. The lot 

 of the laborer was therefore twice as delightful in 

 Issoire as in Clermont, this difference being due to 

 the beneficent influence of the octroi. 



And the Common Council, who were friends of 

 labor, decided that hereafter the price of boots 

 should be twenty francs to workingmen, but that 

 nineteen francs of this should be paid as a bounty 

 from the public treasury. But, " always taking 

 out of a meal-bag and never putting in, soon comes 

 to the bottom," as Benjamin Franklin once said, 

 and there have been few shrewder observers of 

 French politics than he. One morning, when the 

 treasurer put his hand into the strong-box to get the 

 nineteen francs to pay for one more pair of boots, 

 he found it empty. There were only a bad franc, 

 a fifty-centime note, and half a dozen copper sous 

 and two-centime pieces ; nothing more. He had 

 come to the bottom. 



Here was a crisis ! The mayor and the Common 

 Council were called together in haste. The work- 

 man Jacques, who wanted the boots, was waiting 



