onored
jest as to the "handle of the basket." The women who formerly picked up
their forty sous to buy a lottery ticket now take fifty francs to put
into the savings bank. And the smug Puritans who amuse themselves in
France with philanthropic experiments fancy that they are making the
common people moral!

Between the market and the master's table the servants have their secret
toll, and the municipality of Paris is less sharp in collecting the
city-dues than the servants are in taking theirs on every single thing.
To say nothing of fifty per cent charged on every form of food, they
demand large New Year's premiums from the tradesmen. The best class of
dealers tremble before this occult power, and subsidize it without a
word--coachmakers, jewelers, tailors, and all. If any attempt is made
to interfere with them, the servants reply with impudent retorts, or
revenge themselves by the costly blunders of assumed clumsiness; and in
these days they inquire into their master's character as, formerly, the
master inquired into theirs. This mischief is now really at its height,
and the law-courts are beginning to take cognizance of it; but in vain,
for it cannot be remedied but by a law which shall compel domestic
servants, like laborers, to have a pass-book as a guarantee of conduct.
Then the evil will vanish as if by magic. If every servant were obliged
to show his pass-book, and if masters were required to state in it the
cause of his dismissal, this would certainly prove a powerful check to
the evil.

The men who are giving their attentions to the politics of the day
know not to what lengths the depravity of the lower classes has gone.
Statistics are silent as to the startling number of working men of
twenty who marry cooks of between forty and fifty enriched by robbery.
We shudder to think of the result of such unions from the three points
of view of increasing crime, degeneracy of the race, and miserable
households.

As to the mere financial mischief that results from domestic peculation,
that too is immense from a political point of view. Life being made to
cost double, any superfluity becomes impossible in most households.
Now superfluity means half the trade of the world, as it is half the
elegance of life. Books and flowers are to many persons as necessary as
bread.

Lisbeth, well aware of this dreadful scourge of Parisian households,
determined to manage Valerie's, promising her every assistance in the
terrible