Everybody in France who has got any money is eager to lend it to M. Thiers at five per cent. No doubt; but who is to pay the five per cent.? It is to be "raised" by duties on this and that. Then certainly the persons who get the five per cent. will have to pay some part of these duties themselves, on their own tea and sugar, or whatever else is taxed; and this taxing will be on the whole of their trade, and on whatever they buy with the rest of their fortunes; [23] but the five per cent. only on what they lend M. Thiers. It is a low estimate to say the payment of duties will take off one per cent. of their five. Practically, therefore, the arrangement is that they get four per cent. for their money, and have all the trouble of customs duties, to take from them another extra one per cent., and give it them back again. Four per cent., however, is not to be despised. But who pays that? The people who have got no money to lend, pay it; the daily worker and producer pays it. Unfortunate "William," who has borrowed, in this instance, not a plane he could make planks with, but mitrailleuses and gunpowder, with which he has planed away his own farmsteads, and forests, and fair fields of corn, and having left himself desolate, now has to pay for the loan of this useful instrument, five per cent. So says the gently commercial James to him: "Not only the price of your plane, but five per cent. to me for lending it, O sweetest of Williams." Sweet William, carrying generally more absinthe in his brains than wit, has little to say for himself, having, indeed, wasted too much of his sweetness lately, tainted disagreeably with petroleum, on the desert air of Paris. And the people who are to get their five per cent. out of him, and roll him and suck him,--the sugar-cane of a William that he is,--how should they but think the arrangement a glorious one for the nation? So there is great acclaim and triumphal procession of financiers! and the arrangement is made; namely, that all the poor labouring persons in France are to pay the rich idle ones five per cent. annually, on the sum of eighty millions of sterling pounds, until further notice. But this is not all, observe. Sweet William is not altogether so soft in his rind that you can crush him without some sufficient machinery: you must have your army in good order, "to justify public confidence;" and you must get the expense of that, beside your five per cent., out of ambrosial William. He must pay the cost of his own roller. Now, therefore, see briefly what it all comes to. First, you spend eighty millions of money in fireworks, doing no end of damage in letting them off. Then you borrow money, to pay the firework-maker's bill, from any gain-loving persons who have got it.