igence that a
passing traveler would perhaps have thought it hopeless to attempt to
instil them. But to continue.

"The establishment of the basket-maker was an example set before these
poverty-stricken folk that they might profit by it. And if the road was
to be a direct cause of the future wealth of the canton, all the primary
forms of industry must be stimulated, or these two germs of a better
state of things would come to nothing. My own work went forward by slow
degrees, as I helped my osier farmer and wicker-worker and saw to the
making of the road.

"I had two horses, and the timber merchant, the deputy-mayor, had three.
He could only have them shod whenever he went over to Grenoble, so I
induced a farrier to take up his abode here, and undertook to find him
plenty of work. On the same day I met with a discharged soldier, who
had nothing but his pension of a hundred francs, and was sufficiently
perplexed about his future. He could read and write, so I engaged him
as secretary to the mayor; as it happened, I was lucky enough to find a
wife for him, and his dreams of happiness were fulfilled.

"Both of these new families needed houses, as well as the basket-maker
and twenty-two others from the cretin village, soon afterwards twelve
more households were established in the place. The workers in each of
these families were at once producers and consumers. They were masons,
carpenters, joiners, slaters, blacksmiths, and glaziers; and there was
work enough to last them for a long time, for had they not their own
houses to build when they had finished those for other people? Seventy,
in fact, were build in the Commune during my second year of office. One
form of production demands another. The additions to the population
of the township had created fresh wants, hitherto unknown among these
dwellers in poverty. The wants gave rise to industries, and industries
to trade, and the gains of trade raised the standard of comfort, which
in its turn gave them practical ideas.

"The various workmen wished to buy their bread ready baked, so we came
to have a baker. Buckwheat could no longer be the food of a population
which, awakened from its lethargy, had become essentially active. They
lived on buckwheat when I first came among them, and I wished to effect
a change to rye, or a mixture of rye and wheat in the first instance,
and finally to see a loaf of white bread even in the poorest household.
Intellectual progress, to my t