- Naturally, each department, district, canton and commune strives to
retain its own supplies, for charity begins at home.[73] Especially in
a village, the mayor and members of a municipality, themselves
cultivators, are lukewarm when the commune is to be starved for the
benefit of the capital. They declare a less return of grain than
there really is; they allege reasons and pretexts. They mystify or
suborn the commissioner on provisions, who is a stranger, incompetent
and needy; they make him drink and eat, and, now and then, fill his
pocket book. He slips over the accounts, he gives the village
receipts on furnishing three-quarters or a half of the demand, often
in spoilt or mixed grain or poor flour, while those who have no rusty
wheat get it of their neighbors. Instead of parting with a hundred
quintals they part with fifty, while the quantity of grain in the
Paris markets is not only insufficient, but the grain blackens or
sprouts and the flour grows musty. In vain the government makes
clerks and depositaries of butchers and grocers, allowing them five or
ten per cent. profit on retail sales of the food it supplies them
with at wholesale, and thus creates in Paris, at the expense of all
France, an artificial drop in prices.
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