The herald and mail. [volume] (Columbia, Tenn.) 1873-188?, 1877-07-13
French HOardings, and French Pro-
ductiOns,

We hear recently a great deal of the
example of France, and Prof. Price is
among those who point admiringly to her
in this crisis. Now. as every one knows,
the savings of people in England, Ger
many and America, are deposited in
banks, whence they are loaned and be-
come utilized as capital in France the
peasants heard their savings in cid
stockings and secret corners. To with
draw from either of the countries so large
an amount as that of the indemnity paid
Germany would greatly disturb trade;
but the peasants, patriOtically unearth-
ing their hoardings of secret gold in ex-
change for government bonds, enabled
the state, to the surprise of all, to pay
her heavy penalty without distress or
financial disturbance. But this was an
exceptional position. We are scarcely to
argue therefrom that boarding is the
true principle: that a nation is better
off because its work-people hide their
savings, withdrawing them from public
use rather than placing them in banks
where they may become active capital.
Prof Price attributes the successful pay
ment bv France of the German indem-
nity 10 "the practice of one Of the very
greatest of economical virtues-she had
saved" Now, it was solely due to the
manner i'm which her savings had been
held. The fact seemed to
have dazzled every body. The
example of the French peasant is now
held up on all sides-that he lives the
narrowed and most restricted of lives;
that his excessive economical spirit not
only limits his comforts, but keeps him
ignorant, superstitious, dull, spiritless,
hopeless, (the tragedy of the French
peasant-life is only too we'll told in the
pictures of Millet;) that he has neither
intellectual life nor any grace of art of
refined civilization-these facts are moth
ing to the economist the peasant has
drudged and boarded he has refused
himself and his family ease and comfort,
and boarded; he knows neither art, nor
literature, nor science, but he has
boarded; he lives lie scarcely better
than that of the beast of the field, but
he has boarded his savings have nOur-
ished no industries, nor rewarded any
art, nor promoted any intellectual end,
and he himself has done his best by mere
restriction to limit the productive re-
sources of his land; but having saved
and toarded with the instinct with which
a dog hides bone, he is held up for ad-
miration This sort of thing fully ex-
plains the shudder with which people
generally hear the name of political
economy. 1t is true, there must be
economy there must be saving, but
there is economy and economy. The real
cause of the more prosperous condition
of France is not starved existence, but
sustained and unspeculative production.
There is less concentration there, less
IL \
sion and old-fashioned relation of pro-
duction to consumption. This equable
and uniform production is like stream
that is fed by ten thousand springs and
many afiuents; it flows steadily OF,
calm, perennial, benefcent, but our spec
ulative and spasmodic production is too
much like mountain river, that in one
season comes down in food and deluges
the land, at another subsidies into a
rivulet, and all the land is parched.-
Popular Science Monthly.