le worker in marbles whose file eats
slowly into a block of porphyry? Would you seek to know the utmost power
of language, or the strongest pressure that a phrase can bring to bear
against rebellious lucre, against the miserly proprietor squatting
in the recesses of his country lair?--listen to one of these great
ambassadors of Parisian industry as he revolves and works and sucks like
an intelligent piston of the steam-engine called Speculation.

"Monsieur," said a wise political economist, the
director-cashier-manager and secretary-general of a celebrated
fire-insurance company, "out of every five hundred thousand francs of
policies to be renewed in the provinces, not more than fifty thousand
are paid up voluntarily. The other four hundred and fifty thousand are
got in by the activity of our agents, who go about among those who are
in arrears and worry them with stories of horrible incendiaries until
they are driven to sign the new policies. Thus you see that eloquence,
the labial flux, is nine tenths of the ways and means of our business."

To talk, to make people listen to you,--that is seduction in itself.
A nation that has two Chambers, a woman who lends both ears, are soon
lost. Eve and her serpent are the everlasting myth of an hourly fact
which began, and may end, with the world itself.

"A conversation of two hours ought to capture your man," said a retired
lawyer.

Let us walk round the commercial traveller, and look at him well. Don't
forget his overcoat, olive green, nor his cloak with its morocco collar,
nor the striped blue cotton shirt. In this queer figure--so original
that we cannot rub it out--how many divers personalities we come across!
In the first place, what an acrobat, what a circus, what a battery,
all in one, is the man himself, his vocation, and his tongue! Intrepid
mariner, he plunges in, armed with a few phrases, to catch five or six
thousand francs in the frozen seas, in the domain of the red Indians
who inhabit the interior of France. The provincial fish will not rise
to harpoons and torches; it can only be taken with seines and nets and
gentlest persuasions. The traveller's business is to extract the gold
in country caches by a purely intellectual operation, and to extract
it pleasantly and without pain. Can you think without a shudder of the
flood of phrases which, day by day, renewed each dawn, leaps in cascades
the length and breadth of sunny France?

You know the species; let us