192 SCIENCE SKETCHES. 
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 
