It is a well-known fact that individuals become poor simply because they spend their money. So with cities. What is true of the individual is doubly true of the community, itself but an aggregation of individuals. Nations, as well as individuals, grow rich by doing their own work. Commerce, as is well known, is a great drain on the resources of a town as of a nation. Now, if in some way we can keep the money of a town within its limits, the town can not fail to grow rich. As Benjamin Franklin once observed, "A penny saved is twopence earned." The great problem in municipal economics is this: How shall we keep the town's money from going out of it? How shall we best discourage buying—especially the buying of articles from dealers outside?
To meet this problem, the wisdom of the fathers devised the octroi.
In view of the prospective introduction of the octroi into America (and I trust that I am violating no confidence in saying that this is the real object of the present visit to Europe on the part of one of America's foremost statesmen), it is worth while to examine carefully its nature and advantages.
Years ago, before the octroi came to Issoire, the city was noted chiefly for the barter of farm products. The farmers used to bring in grains, hides, cheese, and other produce, which they would exchange for clothing, sugar, coffee, tobacco, and the various necessaries of existence. The merchants used to load the grain into wagons which were driven across the country to the city of Clermont. Here the grain was exchanged for clothing, food, and all manner of necessaries and luxuries which were made in Clermont, or which had been brought thither from the great city of Lyons. There were long processions of these wagons, and all through the autumn and winter they went in and out. And the Issoire people were very proud of them, for neither coming nor going were they empty, and the teamsters of Issoire were the most skillful in the whole basin of the Loire.
But the mayor of the city and other thoughtful people saw cause for shame rather than for pride in the condition of Issoire's industries. It was ruinous thus steadily to carry away the wealth of the land and to exchange it for perishable articles. When a wagon-load of boots, for example, had been all worn out, then the boots were gone. The money that had been paid for them was gone, and, so far as Issoire was concerned, it was as much lost as if money and boots had been sunk in the bottom of the sea. The money that was paid out, I say. Not so with the money that was paid in. If those boots had been bought in Issoire, the money that they cost would still be in town, still be in circulation, and would go from one to another in the way that money is meant to go. This drain must be stopped, and the octroi could stop it. So
