Besides the mechanic and artisan, whose payment follows in a certain measure the progressive price of provisions, there are other categories of men, assuredly not less interesting, whose pecuniary level has never risen or fallen even by a five-franc piece, and who at the present time are compelled to live on the appointed salary which has been attached to their place for an unlimited number of years.
Everywhere in the towns rents have doubled, and even trebled. The system of railways has disseminated local production, which formerly had a local and limited sale, over all parts of France, and even abroad, without any proportionate incomings to compensate for the increase of prices attendant on so great an increase of sale. The latter, it need hardly be said, involves a like increase of production.
In a country like France, where the agricultural riches are immense and the landed property infinitesimally parcelled out, the means of transport, which have increased tenfold within the last thirty years, have carried riches, or at least competency, into the villages and other country parts. To such a degree is this true that there is not now a peasant in France who cannot maintain himself by his strip of land. Formerly he would have carried into the town, on market days, the produce of his land and live stock. Now he rarely takes the trouble to do this, and almost always strikes a bargain with buyers who purchase en masse and pay him a high price. Thus, with hardly any expenditure,[[70]] he can live on his little property, his aim being to save all he can and to sell as dearly as possible.
But in the cities and small towns how to live is a more difficult problem. The clerks, secretaries, and small functionaries of every kind, who could formerly support and educate their families in a respectable way, have no longer the possibility of doing so on the meagre and rigidly-fixed salaries dispensed to them by the state. The sea itself is no longer a resource. The railway carries off the produce of the tides to Paris and the other large towns, which purchase the whole and throw away thousands of kilos of spoilt fish every week.
Again, these small official situations generally involve the necessity of being respectably, or even well, dressed. A professor, for example, or a magistrate, an employé of the registration or other government offices, belongs, by education or by the functions he discharges, to a class of persons who must make a good appearance, under pain of being neglected, unnoticed, or even altogether tabooed.
At Paris, where there is an abundance of everything, and into which the provinces pour the overflow of their riches, life, for certain persons, is materially impossible. The octroi absorbs all, and, under pretext of making the capital a rich and beautiful city, peoples it with poor by rendering their means wholly inadequate to meet the increasing exigencies of expenditure.
Thus, while living is difficult to them in the provinces, because the country sends all its produce to the great towns, in the towns they cannot live at all. The imposts there are enormous; while the fact that the necessaries of life are abundant is accompanied by no diminution of price, but the contrary.
Still, nothing is done; and these meritorious persons, obliged to conceal a very real poverty beneath an outward show that eats into their slender resources, and who, unlike so many around them, are disenchanted of the dream that the world is all their own, suffer uncomplainingly. Perhaps they are weary of complaining; in any case they do not noisily insist and threaten, but, at the utmost, plead, and certainly wait until hope and energy wither in the blight of continued disappointment. Hundreds of thousands of persons thus exist, and those who may be called the intellectual essence of the nation: professors, magistrates, men occupied in the various departments of art, and who prepare the intellectual prosperity of a generation to come. These men, especially such of them as have a family dependent upon them, drag on life year after year so miserably remunerated that how they contrive to live, and to strain the two ends to meet by any honorable means, is simply a mystery. In vain may each capable member of the family put a shoulder to the wheel and effect prodigies of economy. With every noble effort they find their life growing harder, and the cost of life increasing in proportions of which it is impossible to see the limit.
In the times through which France is passing even the wealthy, and those who are regarded as the favored ones of fortune, reduce their expenses under the influence of a certain feeling of apprehension which is not easy to define, unless a reason for it may be found in the frequent government changes and general instability of political affairs in this country. They instinctively restrain their expenditure to what they regard as the necessaries of life, and indulge in few of the luxuries of patronage involving outlay. And thus the hardness of the times makes itself so severely felt in all the liberal professions that in the study of the professor or literary author, as in the atelier of the artist, the pressing cares of life not unfrequently absorb the mind so as to eclipse and benumb the powers of imagination and invention. The father and bread-winner anxiously asks himself how, even with marvels of economy and self-denying privation, he is to provide for the present needs and future career of his children.
The question we are considering is for the moment drowned amid the tumult of political strife. It must, however, assert itself with increasing urgency in proportion as misery, in the full acceptation of the word, shows itself as the inevitable consequence of the progressive increase of prices in things of absolute necessity, without such compensation as corresponds with it or even approximates to it.