BOOK-KEEPING BY THE FRENCH METHOD.
The Annual Report of French finance, presented by the Minister of that department, M. Magne, to the Emperor, this time contains some remarks which are important, if true. For example, take these:-
“The excellence of our financial system principally reposes on two valuables guarantees – control and publicity; control, which prevents the smallest sum that leaves the hands of the tax-payer from entering into the public treasury, or from passing from one office to another and thence into the hands of the employment made of it being proved by responsible agents, verified judicially and on documents by fixed magistrates, and definitively sanctioned in the legislative accounts; and publicity, which every year places before the eyes of the great bodies of the State and the public the periodical table of the receipts of the taxes, the special accounts of the Ministers, the labour of the commissions of control, the declarations of the Court of Accounts, and the general statement of the Finance Department.”
Of this general statement of the Finance Department, which, though general, goes into the most minute particulars of expenditure and fiscal economy, M. Magne speaks in the following observable terms:-
“Thanks to that important document – the indispensable manual for all those who wish to obtain a practical knowledge of our finances, and which I every year endeavour to render more and more clear and complete – it may be said, with all truth, that in France the management of the public money takes place in the broad light of day, and that its results have a character of certainty which cannot give rise to the elightest dispute.”
Can the public money be one of those things which they manage better in France? is the question which one is incited to ask by the above information. I wonder, one says to oneself, anything to do with the maintenance of half a million soldiers, and a navy nearly as big as our own, at a rate so much less expensive as it is than that of British armaments? What becomes of all the money? is the demand which we are continually bearing on every side. Suppose the Chancellor of the Exchequer had to answer it after the French fashion, might be not soon begin to see a faint prospect of abolishing the penal Income-Tax at some period between this and the Millennium?
What delightful results might be produced by the adoption of the French method of “control” in the dockyards and arsenals, and at the Horse Guards and the Admiralty, if it would only work! But there’s the rub; that is to say, perhaps our official wheels would get clogged by friction. The only control of military and naval extravagance that we have ever attempted has been experted by means of a checkstring of red-tape, always getting into a harl, tying itself into knots, and entangling everybody. This celebrated texture is one of those products of our administrative industry on which Louis Napoleon would, of course, retain a prohibitive duty, if there existed among his subjects any demand whatever for such an inferior article. It is manufactured entirely for home consumption like British wine; and we can only wish that it was as likely, as that fluid humbug is, to be superseded by the importation of a better thing from France.
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