Let me tell you the story of an excellent man whom I knew. He tenderly loved his wife and children, and they all lived together, in France, in comfort and plenty, but with little of the luxury the wife coveted. Always short of money, though with a little management he might have been at ease, he ended by exiling himself to a distant colony, leaving his wife and children in the mother country. I don't know how the poor man can feel off there; but his family has a finer apartment, more beautiful toilettes, and what passes for an equipage. At present they are perfectly contented, but soon they will be used to this luxury--rudimentary after all. Then Madam will find her furniture common and her equipage mean. If this man loves his wife--and that cannot be doubted--he will migrate to the moon if there is hope of a larger stipend. In other cases the rôles are reversed, and the wife and children are sacrificed to the ravenous needs of the head of the family, whom an irregular life, play, and countless other costly follies have robbed of all dignity. Between his appetites and his rôle of father he has decided for the former, and he slowly drifts toward the most abject egoism. This forgetfulness of all responsibility, this gradual benumbing of noble feeling, is not alone to be found among pleasure-seekers of the upper classes: the people also are infected. I know more than one little household, which ought to be happy, where the mother has only pain and heartache day and night, the children are barefoot, and there is great ado for bread. Why? Because too much money is needed by the father. To speak only of the expenditure for alcohol, everybody knows the proportions that has reached in the last twenty years. The sums swallowed up in this gulf are fabulous--twice the indemnity of the war of 1870. How many legitimate needs could have been satisfied with that which has been thrown away on these artificial ones! The reign of wants is by no means the reign of brotherhood. The more things a man desires for himself, the less he can do for his neighbor, and even for those attached to him by ties of blood. * * * * * The destruction of happiness, independence, moral fineness, even of the sentiment of common interests--such is the result of the reign of needs. A multitude of other unfortunate things might be added, of which not the least is the disturbance of the public welfare. When society has too great needs, it is absorbed with the present, sacrifices to it the conquests of the past, immolates to it the future. After us the deluge! To raze the forests in order to get gold; to squander your patrimony in youth, destroying in a day the fruit of long years; to warm your house by burning your furniture; to burden the future with debts for the sake of present pleasure; to live by expedients and sow for the morrow trouble, sickness, ruin, envy and hate--the enumeration of all the misdeeds of this fatal régime has no end.