THE FATE OF ICIODORUM. 215 
further was done, by organized labor toward tak- 
ing possession of its own. 
A new election was at hand, and the mayor’s 
party issued a call to the workingmen to rally to 
his support. 
“ All who believe in the grandeur and splendor 
of France, that honesty is the best policy, that 
the tricolor should ever wave victoriously over the 
most glorious land the sun shines on, and that the 
Issoire idea of a perpetual octroi is the best secur- 
ity for the defence and development of home 
interests and the elevation of home labor; all 
who would reduce city taxes and prevent the ac- 
cumulation of money not needed for city uses, by 
the perpetuation and extension ofthe octroi; those 
who are opposed to all schemes tending to de- 
throne this policy and to reduce Issoire’s laborers 
to the level of the underpaid and oppressed work- 
ers of Clermont and Jonas, — are called to join in 
the re-election of Mayor de Roncevalle and of his 
supporters in the Common Council.” 
The mayor spoke from the steps of the Hétel 
de Ville in defence of the octroi, on the success 
of which agency he justly based his claim for 
re-election. 
He showed how the octroi had changed Issoire 
from a dull and peaceful agricultural village with 
few industries, and those only the ones for which 
the town possessed special advantages, into a mi- 
crocosm in which a little of everything was made 
and sold. Issoire was no longer a town where 
nothing happened, and in which the procession of 
grain-wagons, the same yesterday, to-day, and 
