t will be solved.
In the meanwhile, the public wealth flows away to the river, and leakage takes place.
Leakage is the word.
Europe is being ruined in this manner by exhaustion.
As for France, we have just cited its figures.
Now, Paris contains one twenty-fifth of the total population of France, and Parisian guano being the richest of all, we understate the truth when we value the loss on the part of Paris at twenty-five millions in the half milliard which France annually rejects.
These twenty-five millions, employed in assistance and enjoyment, would double the splendor of Paris.
The city spends them in sewers.
So that we may say that Paris''s great prodigality, its wonderful festival, its Beaujon folly, its orgy, its stream of gold from full hands, its pomp, its luxury, its magnificence, is its sewer system.
It is in this manner that, in the blindness of a poor political economy, we drown and allow to float down stream and to be lost in the gulfs the well-being of all.
There should be nets at Saint-Cloud for the public fortune.
Economically considered, the matter can be summed up thus: Paris is a spendthrift.
Paris, that model city, that patron of well-arranged capitals, of which every nation strives to possess a copy, that metropolis of the ideal, that august country of the initiative, of impulse and of effort, that centre and that dwelling of minds, that nation-city, that hive of the future, that marvellous combination of Babylon and Corinth, would make a peasant of the Fo-Kian shrug his shoulders, from the point of view which we have just indicated.