he result is melancholy. Thinking to purge the
city, the population is blanched like plants raised in cellars. A sewer
is a mistake. When drainage, everywhere, with its double function,
restoring what it takes, shall have replaced the sewer, which is a
simple impoverishing washing, then, this being combined with the data
of a now social economy, the product of the earth will be increased
tenfold, and the problem of misery will be singularly lightened. Add the
suppression of parasitism, and it will be solved.

In the meanwhile, the public wealth flows away to the river, and leakage
takes place. Leakage is the word. Europe is being ruined in this manner
by exhaustion.

As for France, we have just cited its figures. Now, Paris contains one
twenty-fifth of the total population of France, and Parisian guano being
the richest of all, we understate the truth when we value the loss on
the part of Paris at twenty-five millions in the half milliard which
France annually rejects. These twenty-five millions, employed in
assistance and enjoyment, would double the splendor of Paris. The
city spends them in sewers. So that we may say that Paris's great
prodigality, its wonderful festival, its Beaujon folly, its orgy, its
stream of gold from full hands, its pomp, its luxury, its magnificence,
is its sewer system.

It is in this manner that, in the blindness of a poor political economy,
we drown and allow to float down stream and to be lost in the gulfs the
well-being of all. There should be nets at Saint-Cloud for the public
fortune.

Economically considered, the matter can be summed up thus: Paris is
a spendthrift. Paris, that model city, that patron of well-arranged
capitals, of which every nation strives to possess a copy, that
metropolis of the ideal, that august country of the initiative, of
impulse and of effort, that centre and that dwelling of minds, that
nation-city, that hive of the future, that marvellous combination of
Babylon and Corinth, would make a peasant of the Fo-Kian shrug his
shoulders, from the point of view which we have just indicated.

Imitate Paris and you will ruin yourselves.

Moreover, and particularly in this immemorial and senseless waste, Paris
is itself an imitator.

These surprising exhibitions of stupidity are not novel; this is no
young folly. The ancients did like the moderns. "The sewers of Rome,"
says Liebig, "have absorbed all the well-being of the Roman peasant."
When the Campagna of Ro