That is why in France when the wind blows down a tree on the national highway, or a peasant gives a stonebreaker two or three francs in preference to the unpleasant task of repairing the communal road himself, it is necessary for twelve or fifteen employees of the Home Office and Treasury to be put in motion, and for more than fifty documents to be exchanged between these austere functionaries, before the tree can be sold or the peasant receives permission to deposit two or three francs into the communal treasury. Should you have any doubts about this, you will find these fifty documents recapitulated and duly numbered by M. Tricoche in the Journal des Economistes.
This under the Third Republic, be it understood; for I do not speak of the barbarous methods of the ancient régime, that limited itself to five or six documents. No doubt scientists will tell you that at that barbarous period State control was only fictitious.
And if it were only this! After all, it would be but twenty thousand functionaries too many, and a thousand million francs more added to the budget. A detail for the lovers of "order" and levelling!
But there is worse at the bottom of all this. The principle kills everything.
The peasants of a village have a thousand interests in common: interests of economy, neighborhood, and constant intercourse. They are perforce compelled to unite for a thousand divers things. But the State cannot allow them to unite. It gives them school and priest, police and judge; that must suffice them, and should other interests arise they must apply in the regular way to Church and State.
Thus till 1888 it was severely forbidden to the villagers of France to unite, were it only to buy chemical manure or to irrigate their fields. It was only in 1888 that the Republic granted this right to peasants when it voted the law on unions, hampered by many a precaution and obstacle.
And we with our faculties blunted by State education rejoice at the sudden progress accomplished by agricultural syndicates, without blushing at the fact that this right of
