But this comparison between the value and the intrinsic merit of different kinds of labour forms no part of my present subject.  All I have to do here is to show, that if M. Lamartine and those persons who commend his line of argument have seen on one side the salaries gained by the providers of the comedians, they ought on the other to have seen the salaries lost by the providers of the taxpayers:  for want of this, they have exposed themselves to ridicule by mistaking a displacement for a gain.  If they were true to their doctrine, there would be no limits to their demands for government aid; for that which is true of one franc and of 60,000 is true, under parallel circumstances, of a hundred millions of francs.

When taxes are the subject of discussion, you ought to prove their utility by reasons from the root of the matter, but not by this unlucky assertion—­“The public expenses support the working classes.”  This assertion disguises the important fact, that public expenses always supersede private expenses, and that therefore we bring a livelihood to one workman instead of another, but add nothing to the share of the working class as a whole.  Your arguments are fashionable enough, but they are too absurd to be justified by anything like reason.

V.—­Public Works.

Nothing is more natural than that a nation, after having assured itself that an enterprise will benefit the community, should have it executed by means of a general assessment.  But I lose patience, I confess, when I hear this economic blunder advanced in support of such a project—­“Besides, it will be a means of creating labour for the workmen.”

The State opens a road, builds a palace, straightens a street, cuts a canal, and so gives work to certain workmen—­this is what is seen:  but it deprives certain other workmen of work—­and this is what is not seen.

The road is begun.  A thousand workmen come every morning, leave every evening, and take their wages—­this is certain.  If the road had not been decreed, if the supplies had not been voted, these good people would have had neither work nor salary there; this also is certain.

But is this all?  Does not the operation, as a whole, contain something else?  At the moment when M. Dupin pronounces the emphatic words, “The Assembly has adopted,” do the millions descend miraculously on a moonbeam into the coffers of MM.  Fould and Bineau?  In order that the evolution may be complete, as it is said, must not the State organise the receipts as well as the expenditure? must it not set its tax-gatherers and tax-payers to work, the former to gather and the latter to pay?

Study the question, now, in both its elements.  While you state the destination given by the State to the millions voted, do not neglect to state also the destination which the tax-payer would have given, but cannot now give, to the same.  Then you will understand that a public enterprise is a coin with two sides.  Upon one is engraved a labourer at work, with this device, that which is seen; on the other is a labourer out of work, with the device, that which is not seen.