the market; they kept no deposit with the Bank of France; they guaranteed nothing.  They did not even condescend to explain to shareholders the exact limits of their liabilities when they informed them that the directors in their goodness, refrained from asking any more than a thousand, or five hundred, or even two hundred and fifty francs.  It was not given out that the experiment in aere publico was not meant to last for more than seven, five, or even three years, so that shareholders would not have long to wait for the catastrophe.  It was in the childhood of the art.  Promoters did not even publish the gigantic prospectuses with which they stimulate the imagination, and at the same time make demands for money of all and sundry.”

“That only comes when nobody wishes to part with money,” said Couture.

“In short, there was no competition in investments,” continued Bixiou.  “Paper-mache manufacturers, cotton printers, zinc-rollers, theatres, and newspapers as yet did not hurl themselves like hunting dogs upon their quarry—­the expiring shareholder.  ‘Nice things in shares,’ as Couture says, put thus artlessly before the public, and backed up by the opinions of experts (’the princes of science’), were negotiated shamefacedly in the silence and shadow of the Bourse.  Lynx-eyed speculators used to execute (financially speaking) the air Calumny out of The Barber of Seville.  They went about piano, piano, making known the merits of the concern through the medium of stock-exchange gossip.  They could only exploit the victim in his own house, on the Bourse, or in company; so they reached him by means of the skilfully created rumor which grew till it reached a tutti of a quotation in four figures——­”

“And as we can say anything among ourselves,” said Couture, “I will go back to the last subject.”

“Vous etes orfevre, Monsieur Josse!” cried Finot.

“Finot will always be classic, constitutional, and pedantic,” commented Blondet.

“Yes,” rejoined Couture, on whose account Cerizet had just been condemned on a criminal charge.  “I maintain that the new way is infinitely less fraudulent, less ruinous, more straightforward than the old.  Publicity means time for reflection and inquiry.  If here and there a shareholder is taken in, he has himself to blame, nobody sells him a pig in a poke.  The manufacturing industry——­”

“Ah!” exclaimed Bixiou, “here comes industry——­”

“——­ is a gainer by it,” continued Couture, taking no notice of the interruption.  “Every government that meddles with commerce and cannot leave it free, sets about an expensive piece of folly; State interference ends in a maximum or a monopoly.  To my thinking, few things can be more in conformity with the principles of free trade than joint-stock companies.  State interference means that you try to regulate the relations of principal and interest, which is absurd.  In business, generally