All that is needed is to understand it.
-- Yes, but they do not understand it.
-- That is what amazes me.

For every one suffers from it.
-- You wished it so, Jacques Bonhomme.
-- You are jesting, my dear Mr.Collector; have I a vote in the legislative halls?
-- Whom did you support for Deputy?
-- An excellent General, who will be a Marshal presently, if God spares his life.
-- On what does this excellent General live?
-- My hogsheads, I presume.
-- And what would happen were he to vote for a reduction of the army and your military establishment?
-- Instead of being made a Marshal, he would be retired.
-- Do you now understand that yourself?
-- Let us pass to the fifth hogshead, I beg of you.
-- That goes to Algeria.
-- To Algeria! And they tell me that all Mussulmans are temperance people, the barbarians! What services will they give me in exchange for this ambrosia, which has cost me so much labor?
-- None at all; it is not intended for Mussulmans, but for good Christians who spend their days in Barbary.
-- What can they do there which will be of service to me?
-- Undertake and undergo raids; kill and be killed; get dysenteries and come home to be doctored; dig harbors, make roads, build villages and people them with Maltese, Italians, Spaniards and Swiss, who live on your hogshead, and many others which I shall come in the future to ask of you.
-- Mercy! This is too much, and I flatly refuse you my hogshead.

They would send a wine-grower who did such foolish acts to the mad-house.
Make roads in the Atlas Mountains, when I cannot get out of my own house! Dig ports in Barbary when the Garonne fills up with sand every day! Take from me my children whom I love, in order to torment Arabs! Make me pay for the houses, grain and horses, given to the Greeks and Maltese, when there are so many poor around us! -- The poor! Exactly; they free the country of this _superfluity_.
-- Oh, yes, by sending after them to Algeria the money which would enable them to live here.
-- But then you lay the basis of a _great empire_, you carry _civilization_ into Africa, and you crown your country with immortal glory.
-- You are a poet, my dear Collector; but I am a vine-grower, and I refuse.
-- Think that in a few thousand years you will get back your advances a hundred-fold.

All those who have charge of the enterprise say so.
-- At first they asked me for one barrel of wine to meet expenses, then two, then three, and now I am taxed a hogshead.

I persist in my refusal.
-- It is too late.