expenditure. . . . It pays and feeds 500,000 soldiers and 500,000 civilians! For these purposes the 500 millions of expenditure, which were enough during the Consulate, rose to 800 in the Empire—to 970 under the Restoration—to 1500 under Louis Philippe—and to 1800 millions under the Republic."
To meet the demands of the Socialists, as urged by Louis Blanc, the Government had established ateliers nationaux in the outskirts of Paris, to which the workmen flocked in such numbers that factories in which they had been doing serviceable work before had to be closed down. In these national workshops the men were not paid high wages, but in addition to their pay in coin, their families were provided with food by the State, and in the workshops they did no more than they liked. They talked, argued, smoked, drank, and armed for a prospective riot. M. Emile Thomas, who has written the history of these ateliers nationaux, tells us that in one mairie, that containing the faubourg Saint Antoine, a mere supplemental bureau enrolled, from March 12 to 20, more than 1000 new applicants every day. The number who had been enrolled on May 19 amounted to 87,942, and a month later it amounted to 125,000 persons.
These national workshops not only encouraged the employed to do as little work as they chose, for they could not be discharged on account of idleness or incompetence, or docked of their pay, but further they furnished a huge army of men determined to force their will on the Assembly, ready at any moment to fly to arms, throw up barricades, and turn the streets of Paris into a field of battle.
Fifty years after the outbreak of the Revolution and the establishment of the Second Republic, I found the temper of the average Frenchman much as described by Mr. Nassau Senior.
"La politique," says the peasant, shrugging his shoulders, "n'est que la chasse aux places."
A Monsieur de Borredon, son of a great cultivator of truffles in Périgord, was staying with me in 1894, and was greatly astonished when he learned that I had put my second son to work as a common engineer on the S.E.R., and that my third son was labouring as an ordinary miner in one of the great arsenic works on the Tamar. He exclaimed: "There is the great difference between you English and we French. You work and push your
