'If I were to "improve" the roads and ponds on my property on the principle on which France has been "improving" her railway systems and her ports, I should bring up in bankruptcy. Where else can the country bring up? Nothing, so far, has saved us but the woollen stocking of the peasants. Come to my place in Picardy, and I will show you a dozen old fellows who go about dressed in blouses--who work like day-labourers--no! much better and harder than day-labourers now do. They will never tell you what they are thinking about; they will never tell me, though we are the best of friends; but you will see what they are--close at a bargain, shrewd, devoted to their farms and families. Well, they live on a third--yes, some of them on a quarter--of their incomes; they know just where every penny they have spent on the ground for twenty years has gone, and just what it has brought back to them, and every man of them can put his hand, if need be, on ten, twenty, thirty, forty thousand francs. That is the woollen stocking. But the most beautiful woman in the world can only give what she has. The woollen stocking holds no more than it holds. You can find the bottom of it if you keep on long enough--and then? And mark you, if I tell the shrewdest of these old fellows that the Government is spending ten thousand millions of francs on building railways from nowhere to nowhere, and digging ports in quicksands, what will he do? He will begin to think it is very hard that he can't get a railway built or a port dug. Do you wonder I am a pessimist?' 'But if this is the way in which they look at things, why do they clamour for Boulanger?' 'They don't clamour for Boulanger. That is to say the peasants, the rural people. It is in the towns--here in Calais, for example, at Boulogne, at Amiens--that they clamour for Boulanger. In the towns they read all manner of trash and listen to all manner of lies. You can get up a legend in the French towns for anybody or anything as easily to-day as in the middle ages--perhaps more easily. Look at this legend of Boulanger. It is a real legend to-day. You may be sure of that, and that is the real danger of it. The people who are fighting against it to-day are the people who made it. They wanted, they could not get on without, a great man. Ferry went to pieces, as you know, in 1885. Tonkin and the dead Courbet killed him. So they invented Boulanger. They made him War Minister. They put him on his black horse. They let him drive out the princes. Look at those five men seated there in front of that cafe. They are doubtless decent well-to-do shopkeepers, master mechanics--no matter what--I will wager you that of these five men, three believe Boulanger to be the first soldier of France, and that two of them believe the Government has driven him into exile to prevent the Germans from declaring war! That is enough to make them Boulangists.' 'Then they want war with Germany?'