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THE

POPULAR SCIENCE

MONTHLY.

AUGUST, 1888.

THE OCTROI AT ISSOIRE: A CITY MADE RICH BY TAXATION.

BY DAVID STARR JORDAN,

PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF INDIANA.

IF you look on a good map of France, you will find, a little

south of the center, a small, squarish area, painted red, and bearing the name of Puy-de-Dôme. This Puy-de-Dôme is a strange region, made up of fertile valleys separated from each other by ragged hills which were once volcanoes in Palæozoic times. These volcanoes have long since retired from active life, and are black and dismal now, their faces scored by lava-furrows, like gigantic tear-stains dried on their rugged cheeks. In their craters are ponds of black water full of perch and trout-as black as the rocks above which they swim. The highest of these hills the people call the Puy-de-Dôme-the Cathedral-peak. There is an observatory on the top of it, and all the country that you can see from the mountain-summit makes up the "department" of Puyde-Dôme.

On the south side of the department, near what one might call the "county line," you will find, if your map is a good one, the little city of Issoire. Issoire is a very old town. The Romans knew it. They found it when they invaded Gaul, 1900 years ago, and they called it Iciodorum. They found it again in the year 287, when they came up to convert the Gauls to Christianity, a thing which they had neglected to do upon their first visit. The Romans brought with them a pious monk, St. Austremoine by name, and the people of Iciodorum captured him, and he was duly roasted in accordance with their heathenish customs. So, as the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, Issoire came in

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time to be famous as having the largest church and the best parish schools in the whole province of Auvergne.

Issoire has a long, long history, which is duly set forth in Joanne's "Guide-Book," but which I have luckily forgotten. Its story is one of castles and robbers and chivalry, with here and there a fair dame and an ancestral ghost, perhaps, but of this I am not so certain. Once Issoire fell into the hands of the famous knight, Pierre Diablenoir, the Duke of Alençon. After plundering all the shops, burning the houses, killing most of the people, and scaring the rest off into the woods, he set up in the public square a large column bearing this simple legend: "Ici fut Issoire!" ("Here was Issoire "). Were it not for this touching forethought, we might be to this day as ignorant of Issoire's location as we are of the site of Troy.

But the years went on, the wars were ended, the rain fell, the birds sang, the grass grew, the people came back, and Issoire arose from its ashes. To-day it is as dull and cozy a town as you will find in all France. It has now, according to Joanne, a population of 6,303 souls, and a considerable trade in grain, shoes, millstones, brandy, and vinegar. The streets of Issoire are narrow, and the houses are crowded closely together, as if struggling to get as near as possible to the church for protection. The city lies in the fertile valley of the little river Couze, surrounded by grain-lands and meadows. Toward the north a long white highway, shaded by poplars, leads out across the meadows and hills toward the larger city of Clermont-Ferrand, the capital of the department of the Puy-de-Dôme. Issoire is inclosed by an old wall, and, where the highway enters the town, it passes through a ponderous gate, which is always closed at night, as if to ward off an attack from some other Duke of Alençon.

I strolled out one midsummer afternoon on the road leading to Clermont. When I came to the city gate I first made the acquaintance of the octroi. A little house stands by the side of the gate, and here two or three gendarmes-old soldiers dressed in red coats with blue facings-watch over the industries of the town. Wheelbarrow loads of turnips, baskets of onions or artichokes, wagonloads of hay, all these come through the city gate, and each pays its toll into the city treasury. One cent is collected for every five cabbage-heads, or ten onions, or twelve turnips, or eight apples, or three bunches of artichokes, and other things pay in proportion. This payment of money is called the octroi. The process of its collection interested me so that I gave up all idea of a tramp across the fields, sat down on an empty nail-keg, and devoted myself to the study of the octroi.

The octroi is an instrument to advance the prosperity of a town by preventing the people from sending their money away.

It is a well-known fact that individuals become poor simply because they spend their money. So with cities. What is true of the individual is doubly true of the community, itself but an aggregation of individuals. Nations, as well as individuals, grow rich by doing their own work. Commerce, as is well known, is a great drain on the resources of a town as of a nation. Now, if in some way we can keep the money of a town within its limits, the town can not fail to grow rich. As Benjamin Franklin once observed, "A penny saved is twopence earned." The great problem in municipal economics is this: How shall we keep the town's money from going out of it? How shall we best discourage buying-especially the buying of articles from dealers outside? To meet this problem, the wisdom of the fathers devised the octroi.

In view of the prospective introduction of the octroi into America (and I trust that I am violating no confidence in saying that this is the real object of the present visit to Europe on the part of one of America's foremost statesmen), it is worth while to examine carefully its nature and advantages.

Years ago, before the octroi came to Issoire, the city was noted chiefly for the barter of farm products. The farmers used to bring in grains, hides, cheese, and other produce, which they would exchange for clothing, sugar, coffee, tobacco, and the various necessaries of existence. The merchants used to load the grain into wagons which were driven across the country to the city of Clermont. Here the grain was exchanged for clothing, food, and all manner of necessaries and luxuries which were made in Clermont, or which had been brought thither from the great city of Lyons. There were long processions of these wagons, and all through the autumn and winter they went in and out. And the Issoire people were very proud of them, for neither coming nor going were they empty, and the teamsters of Issoire were the most skillful in the whole basin of the Loire.

But the mayor of the city and other thoughtful people saw cause for shame rather than for pride in the condition of Issoire's industries. It was ruinous thus steadily to carry away the wealth of the land and to exchange it for perishable articles. When a wagon-load of boots, for example, had been all worn out, then the boots were gone. The money that had been paid for them was gone, and, so far as Issoire was concerned, it was as much lost as if money and boots had been sunk in the bottom of the sea. The money that was paid out, I say. Not so with the money that was paid in. If those boots had been bought in Issoire, the money that they cost would still be in town, still be in circulation, and would go from one to another in the way that money is meant to go. This drain must be stopped, and the octroi could stop it. So

it was enacted by the Common Council of Issoire that "whosoever brings a pair of new boots into Issoire shall be compelled to pay ten francs," which was the cost of a pair of boots at Clermont. The purpose of this order was not to raise money, but to have boots made at Issoire, that the wearing out of these necessary articles should not wear out, at the same time, the wealth of the town.

"People will have boots," the mayor said; "they can not afford to bring them in from Clermont, and so they will make them at Issoire, and all the boot-money will remain at home. It is as though, so far as the city is concerned, Issoire gets her boots for nothing. To be sure, Clermont has a good water-power, and her nearness to the mountains makes the price of hides and tan-bark lower, but this has nothing to do with the question. Natural advantages amount to nothing when artificial advantages can be given by a mere stroke of the pen. The laws of political economy are not of universal application. Depend upon the octroi to make all things equal."

A new boot-factory was now built at Issoire, and boots were offered for sale at twenty francs a pair. The cost of boots at Clermont was ten francs, and the octroi charges at the city gate amounted to ten francs more. Buying at twenty francs would save the purchaser a trip to Clermont and back, and, as trade is apt to flow in the direction of least resistance, after a little the Issoire boot industry became fairly established. There was some grumbling at high prices. Some of the laboring classes went barefooted, while the doctor and the schoolmaster put their children into wooden shoes, or sabots, such as peasant children wear. But the mayor and the Common Council took shares in the new factory, and, being members of the company, they got their boots at the old rate, besides having a part in the large dividends which the business soon began to yield. Employment was given to more workmen, who came over from Clermont; the hum of machinery took the place of the creaking of farm-wagons, the rich began to grow richer, the poor went barefooted, and the people of moderate means felt able to run into debt because they lived in a progressive town. The wives of the members of the Common Council bought diamonds, and the members presented the mayor with a gold-headed cane. Soon other boot-factories were started, and still others, though, strangely enough, the more boots were pro- . duced, the more barefooted children were seen in the streets.

By and by the tanners decided that they too must ask for help from the octroi. It was as bad, they said, for the factories to send to Clermont for leather as for the merchants to send for boots. In either case, the money went out of the town, and was gone forever. So the octroi was levied on leather as well as on boots.

Then the guild of butchers put in similar claims. To buy raw hides of the herdsmen out on the Puy-de-Dôme was a part of the same suicidal policy. The octroi was therefore assessed on all imported skins. The butchers established their own stock-yards within the city walls, and were saved from the pauper competition of the mountain cattle. Then the mountain herdsmen drove the cattle on to Clermont, and Issoire was left in peace.

But some of the boot-makers complained that this policy was injuring their business by greatly raising the price of hides, whether produced in Issoire or at Clermont. So the mayor sent a letter to the Issoire "Gazette," a long letter which the schoolmaster had helped him to compose, and in which he showed conclusively that the purpose of the octroi was to make things, not dearer, but cheaper. Said he: "The ultimate result of the octroi is always in the end to reduce prices. The sole purpose of the octroi on hides, for example, is to educate our people in the art, so to speak, of raising hides. By this education, they may, by superior intelligence, experience in the business, and the acquirement of knowledge on the subject, be enabled to produce cowhides in such abundance, by new and improved methods, that they may sell them much cheaper than they do now, sell more of them, and yet realize a larger profit on each hide than they can do at present. If there is a fair prospect that this can be accomplished, who shall say that it is not a part of wise statesmanship to attempt this result? Cattle-raising is now carried on in the most primitive way, by driving the cattle about as though they were wild beasts from place to place on remote and uninhabited hills. The octroi will tend to encourage each householder in Issoire to keep his own cow, produce his own leather, thus diversifying his business and giving him some new product to sell every year, some new demand for labor."

And the thoughtful men of Issoire, the leaders of public opinion, saw the force of this argument, and they were satisfied to submit to temporary inconvenience for the sake of the industrial education of the people.

But the boot-trade was already growing slack. The market had supplied boots for all, but the people perversely refused to take them. The shop-windows were full of boots, temptingly displayed in rows of assorted sizes; nevertheless, every person in . Issoire, except those engaged in boot-making, seemed bent on wearing his last year's boots rather than pay twenty francs for a new pair. The high price of leather and hides since the exclusion of the mountain cattle began to reduce the profits in bootmaking, and so some of the factories threw a poorer article on the market, without, however, any corresponding reduction in price. And people found that it was cheaper to go to Clermont again

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