, it is only because they have been diverted from another.

This being the case, it is clear that the tax-payer, who has contributed
one franc, will no longer have this franc at his own disposal. It is
clear that he will be deprived of some gratification to the amount of
one franc; and that the workman, whoever he may be, who would have
received it from him, will be deprived of a benefit to that amount. Let
us not, therefore, be led by a childish illusion into believing that the
vote of the 60,000 francs may add anything whatever to the well-being
of the country, and to national labour. It displaces enjoyments, it
transposes wages--that is all.

Will it be said that for one kind of gratification, and one kind of
labour, it substitutes more urgent, more moral, more reasonable
gratifications and labour? I might dispute this; I might say, by taking
60,000 francs from the tax-payers, you diminish the wages of labourers,
drainers, carpenters, blacksmiths, and increase in proportion those of
the singers.

There is nothing to prove that this latter class calls for more sympathy
than the former. M. Lamartine does not say that it is so. He himself
says that the labour of the theatres is _as_ fertile, _as_ productive as
any other (not more so); and this may be doubted; for the best proof
that the latter is not so fertile as the former lies in this, that the
other is to be called upon to assist it.

But this comparison between the value and the intrinsic merit of
different kinds of labour forms no part of my present subject. All I
have to do here is to show, that if M. Lamartine and those persons who
commend his line of argument have seen on one side the salaries gained
by the _providers_ of the comedians, they ought on the other to have
seen the salaries lost by the _providers_ of the taxpayers: for want of
this, they have exposed themselves to ridicule by mistaking a
_displacement_ for a _gain_. If they were true to their doctrine, there
would be no limits to their demands for government aid; for that which
is true of one franc and of 60,000 is true, under parallel
circumstances, of a hundred millions of francs.

When taxes are the subject of discussion, you ought to prove their
utility by reasons from the root of the matter, but not by this unlucky
assertion--"The public expenses support the working classes." This
assertion disguises the important fact, that _public expenses always_
supersede _private expenses_, and that t