passion lurks, for instance, at the bottom of every heart, be it a girl’s heart, a provincial’s, a diplomatist’s; everybody longs to have money without working for it; you may hedge the desire about with restrictions, but the gambling mania immediately breaks out in another form.  You stupidly suppress lotteries, but the cook-maid pilfers none the less, and puts her ill-gotten gains in the savings bank.  She gambles with two hundred and fifty franc stakes instead of forty sous; joint-stock companies and speculation take the place of the lottery; the gambling goes on without the green cloth, the croupier’s rake is invisible, the cheating planned beforehand.  The gambling houses are closed, the lottery has come to an end; ‘and now,’ cry idiots, ‘morals have greatly improved in France,’ as if, forsooth, they had suppressed the punters.  The gambling still goes on, only the State makes nothing from it now; and for a tax paid with pleasure, it has substituted a burdensome duty.  Nor is the number of suicides reduced, for the gambler never dies, though his victim does.”

“I am not speaking now of foreign capital lost to France,” continued Couture, “nor of the Frankfort lotteries.  The Convention passed a decree of death against those who hawked foreign lottery-tickets, and procureur-syndics used to traffic in them.  So much for the sense of our legislator and his driveling philanthropy.  The encouragement given to savings banks is a piece of crass political folly.  Suppose that things take a doubtful turn and people lose confidence, the Government will find that they have instituted a queue for money, like the queues outside the bakers’ shops.  So many savings banks, so many riots.  Three street boys hoist a flag in some corner or other, and you have a revolution ready made.

“But this danger, however great it may be, seems to me less to be dreaded than the widespread demoralization.  Savings banks are a means of inoculating the people, the classes least restrained by education or by reason from schemes that are tacitly criminal, with the vices bred of self-interest.  See what comes of philanthropy!

“A great politician ought to be without a conscience in abstract questions, or he is a bad steersman for a nation.  An honest politician is a steam-engine with feelings, a pilot that would make love at the helm and let the ship go down.  A prime minister who helps himself to millions but makes France prosperous and great is preferable, is he not, to a public servant who ruins his country, even though he is buried at the public expense?  Would you hesitate between a Richelieu, a Mazarin, or a Potemkin, each with his hundreds of millions of francs, and a conscientious Robert Lindet that could make nothing out of assignats and national property, or one of the virtuous imbeciles who ruined Louis XVI.?  Go on, Bixiou.”