The other at once burst out excitedly:
"Oh, I understand; it's Protection you want, isn't it? A tax, a prohibitive duty on foreign wheat, so that French corn may go up to double its present price. Then you'd have France in a state of starvation, the four pound loaf at a franc, and all the poor folks dying from hunger! How dare you, a man of progress, advocate such a monstrous state of affairs?"
"A man of progress, a man of progress," repeated Hourdequin in his cheery, pleasant fashion. "Yes, certainly, I'm a man of progress, but I have to pay so dearly for progress that I soon sha'n't be able to afford myself the luxury any longer. Machinery, chemical manures, and all the other new contrivances are all very fine things in their way, I've no doubt, and it's very easy to argue in their favour, but there's just this fault about them, that, in spite of all the logic in the world, they are bringing us to ruin."
"Because you are too impatient, and because you expect science to give you immediate and complete results, and because you grow so discouraged by the necessary preliminary experiments that you even doubt what has been formally proved, and finally fall back into a condition of denying everything."
"Possibly that may be so. I may have only been making experiments. Well, suppose the Government decorates me for what I have already done, and lets some other folks continue the course!"
Hourdequin burst out into a hearty laugh at his own jocoseness, which he seemed to think quite conclusive.
"You wish the working-man to die of hunger, then?" Monsieur Rochefontaine sharply continued.
"Excuse me, I wish the peasant to be able to live."
"But I, who employ twelve hundred hands, can't raise their wages without becoming bankrupt. If corn rose to ninety francs, my workmen would die off like so many flies."
"Well, do you suppose that I don't employ men? With corn at forty-six francs we have to go with empty stomachs, and poor fellows are lying starving at the bottom of every ditch all over the country-side." Then he added, laughingly: