The Imperial Government is embarrassed by the price of bread
in the great cities. The harvest being a bad one, bread has risen to about twenty sous the loaf, and the people cannot afford to pay more than sixteen. Accordingly, they complain, and petition, and write menacing letters to the municipalities, and give ominous hints of the reduction which hanging a baker or two might produce in the price of bread. The Government, therefore, orders the price to be diminished, and the municipalities make up the difference to the tradesmen. The system is strongly condemned in England, but it seems in practice to be only an excessively clumsy poor-law. The communes may as well give out-door relief in bread as give it in money, and the true objec- tion is not so much economic as political. The people are taught by it to believe that the Administration can govern prices, and visit a bad harvest on the head of those who assume the place of Providence.
