SAVINGS?

Posters, funerals..

The Chamber recently voted to post a speech by Mr. Herriot. I read that it would cost two hundred thousand francs because it is a speech of a joyous length.
I do not guarantee this figure: it is the secret of the Administration... What I am sure of is that, year in and year out, hundreds of thousands of francs are spent on posters.

Since May 11, a certain number of speeches have been delivered by posters to the admiration of taxpayers, speeches that celebrate more or less the opposite of what was celebrated in the speeches of the previous legislature.
We would make an amusing collection of political ineptitudes and contradictions, if we could obtain the complete series of these official posters from a century ago.

Do they serve any purpose? It seems to me that they serve no purpose. I have been able to observe the attitude of the inhabitants of many regions in the face of these costly vanities; It always seemed to me that people paid no attention to them, and often regarded them with a look of amusement…

To inform the population, newspapers are enough. Posters only convince the members of the party that is posting: it is water in the river.
Bah! says my friend Jacquelar, who is an influential voter of the left bloc... it is not much in the enormous post-war budget!

Not much, I would agree. And yet, with the little that "poster mania" costs annually, we could help several Branlys and several Curies in their research. When I think in what filthy conditions these great men worked!...
Now, the work of a Curie, the work of a Branly, is worth more than the greatest number of speeches, posted or not, that were delivered in the two Chambers, between 1800 and 1924.

Less frequent than the postings, national funerals also constitute vain expenses. Most of the time, they are granted to politicians, but it does not matter, I consider them all to be useless. First, they are ugly and ridiculous; they make people smile much more than they impress; they add nothing to the greatness of a man of genius and become pitiful when they draw attention to one of the innumerable puppets who made their way through intrigue or rhetoric.

I am sure that a Hugo, a Pasteur, a Renan, would have preferred that, IN THEIR HONOR, we help a scholar, a poet, a poor philosopher or even several scholars, poets and philosophers.

Yes, it would have a great effect and a considerable impact if, in honor of great men, we rewarded other great men!
There are still the centenarians, bicentenarians, tricentenarians who have been raging, since the Armistice, more abundantly than at any time... Some of them have cost a lot: if we had had the idea of ​​detaching only a part of the costs to relieve the miseries of scholars or artists, I would excuse what these official commemorations have of jovially absurd.

I remember a centenary when I had been specially called to deliver a speech on behalf of the men of letters, concurrently with the president of the Society of the latter: everywhere the group of politicians occupied the place of honor; at the banquet, the eminent colleagues of the glorified man of letters (!?) had no place at the table of honor, where sat the minister, mayor, district councilors, prefect... and tutti quanti.
Fauchois told us, speaking of the "centenarian" man: If he were here, he would occupy the lower end of the table!
The minister, a man of wit, knew this well and could not help laughing about it...
Small expenses... Yes, but in the end, small expenses accumulated end up making billions and overturning a budget.

If you had the patience, dear reader, to regularly leaf through the Official, you would see these small expenses popping up in every corner and you would end up finding them very dreadful…

Isn’t there a proverb that says, or something like it, “It’s the little rains that spoil the big roads”?

J.-H. ROSNY Aîné, of the Académie Goncourt.