A minister of the strictest probity, of the strongest desire to do what is just and wise, is never long able to resist the pressure of those around him, the force of example, the persuasions of local magnates, and the insistence of the crowd of hungry perquisite-hunters. It is such shocking and wicked waste of money as was this in Pistoia which impoverishes every town, and disfigures each with vulgar piles of brick and iron, and grotesque monuments of black metal, whilst a miserable woman at their gates pays four centimes duty on a pint of milk before she can take it past the guards to sell, and a wretched man, who owns a little road-fed flock of goats, is taxed two hundred francs a year before he may drive them into the streets to yield the little nourishment which they can afford to invalids and children. Should the law now under consideration pass, and the debts of the Communes be paid by the State, and monies be henceforth lent lavishly by the State to the Communes, this expenditure will increase tenfold, and the jobbery accompanying it will be multiplied in similar measure.
No one of the governing classes is guiltless in the matter; cabinets, senators, deputies, prefects, mayors, town councils, provincial councils, each and all, sin alike in this matricide, and seem to vie with each other in suggesting and executing the abominable projects which disgrace the close of the century.
In this day, in everything appertaining to municipal government, the greater is sacrificed to the lesser; the smug, the ordinary, the expedient, the venal are first of all considered; the kind of man who pushes to the front in affairs is bustling, sharp, keen, insensible, in whose own existence no necessity for anything except vulgar prosperity, as ugly as you will, is felt for an hour. To speak to such men of such impersonal desires as moved the makers of the great cities of old, is to speak in an unknown tongue, which they appraise as gibberish. They are, for the present time, the rulers of the world, and the material they are made of is the same clay, whether its shape take that of an emperor or a contractor, of a king or a beadle, of a minister or a vestryman. At the present hour the earth is given over to them.