;[4225] they only make the matter worse. When the municipality
of Paris expends twelve thousand francs a day for the sale of flour at
a low price in the markets, it keeps away the flour-dealers, who cannot
deliver flour at such low figures; the result is that there is not flour
enough in the market for the six hundred thousand mouths in Paris; when
it expends seventy-five thousand francs daily to indemnify the bakers,
it attracts the outside population, which rushes into Paris to get
bread cheap, and for the seven hundred thousand mouths of Paris and the
suburbs combined, the bakers have not an adequate supply. Whoever comes
late finds the shop empty; consequently, everybody tries to get there
earlier and earlier, at dawn, before daybreak, and then five or six
hours before daybreak in February, 1793, long lines of people are
already waiting at the bakers' door, these lines growing longer
and longer in April, while in June they are enormously long.[4226]
Naturally, for lack of bread, people fall back on other aliments, which
also grow dearer; add to this the various contrivances and effects of
Jacobin politics which still further increase the dearness of food of
all sorts, and also of every other necessary article: for instance,
the extremely bad condition of the roads, which renders transportation
slower and more costly; the prohibition of the export of coin and
hence the obtaining of food from abroad; the decree which obliges each
industrial or commercial association, at present or to come, to "pay
annually into the national treasury one-quarter of the amount of its
dividends;" the revolt in Vendee, which deprives Paris of six hundred
oxen a week; the feeding of the armies, which takes one-half of the
cattle brought to the Poissy market; shutting off the sea and
the continent, which ruins manufacturers and extensive commercial
operations; the insurrections in Bordeaux, Marseilles and the South,
which still further raise the price of groceries, sugar, soap, oil,
candles, wine and brandy.[4227]--Early in 1793, a pound of beef in
France is worth on the average, instead of six sous twenty sous; in May,
at Paris, brandy which, six months before, cost thirty-five sous, costs
ninety-four sous; in July, a pound of veal, instead of five sous, costs
twenty-two sous. Sugar, from twenty sous, advances to four francs ten
sous; a candle costs seven sous. France, pushed on by the Jacobins,
approaches the depths of misery, entering the