We have
passed suddenly from winter to summer.
'I own,' he continued, 'that it fills me with alarm. Among the
innumerable schemes that are afloat, some must be ill-founded, some must
be swelled beyond their proper dimensions, and some may be mere swindles.
The city of Paris and the Government are spending 150,000,000_l_. in
building in Paris. This is almost as much as the fortifications cost. It
has always been said, and I believe with truth, that the revolutionary
army of 1848 was mainly recruited from the 40,000 additional workmen whom
the fortifications attracted from the country, and left without
employment when they were finished. When this enormous extra-expenditure
is over, when the Louvre, and the new rue de Rivoli, and the Halles, and
the street that is to run from the Hotel de Ville to the northern
boundary of Paris, are completed--that is to say, when a city has been
built out of public money in two or three years--what will become of the
mass of discharged workmen?
'What will become of those on the railways if they are suddenly stopped,
as yours were in 1846? What will be the shock if the Credit Foncier or
the Credit Mobilier fail, after having borrowed each its milliard?
Everything seems to me to be preparing for one of your panics, and the
Government has so identified itself with the state of prosperity and
state of credit of the country that a panic must produce a revolution.
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