The Gold Hoarders
ARMAND DE RICHELIEU, who divides his time between France and New York, looks with considerable skepticism on recent attempts by the French government to diminish gold hoarding. To invite hoarders to turn in their gold on the promise that only one fourth of it will be '’amputated” seems to him naive.
by ARMAND DE RICHELIEU
SOME years ago there shone in the southeast of France a small township which was blessed with a most progressive municipal council.
The members of this worthy body had long since discarded the outworn exhortations of religion; yet, while they scoffed at the principles of faith, they determined to preserve what they called the normative policies of the Church, deeming that whatever the starting point, the same destination can be reached provided the inductive method be applied instead of the superseded Aristotelian deduction.
According to this scheme they proclaimed as an unassailable truth that conformity to the average was the hallmark of civic virtue — that the lower the level, the easier it should be to secure it. There would henceforth be nothing so offensive as mountain peaks to obstruct the view and attract the lightning of celebrity; a smooth and even plain would extend to the very depths of the horizon.
There chanced one day to visit the borough a traveling circus. The clowns were there, the equestrienne with her spangles, the strong man and his bulging muscles, the conjurer with his bag of familiar tricks.
So delighted were the city fathers with the prospect of a democratic entertainment that instead of letting the circus manager erect the usual tent in the market square, they decided to allow the performance to take place in the old seventeenthcentury (heater which one of the courtiers of Louis XIV had built to display the arrogance of classical orthodoxy.
On the last night a frightful thing occurred. Some of the scenery caught fire and almost immediately the whole structure was ablaze; the crowd rushed for the exits, but the doors had been constructed to open inwards and thereby provide an easy entrance. In their mad rush the people jammed the gates to and themselves against them, thereby making flight impossible. Some few, however, who had stayed in the rear and not given way to panic, bethought themselves of windows on the top floor that looked out on a formal garden. They climbed up the stairs and, desperate as the flames were lapping them round, flung themselves out into the air and, as luck would have it, fell on the soft earth below. A few, of course, ’were injured by the fall but most came out unscathed.
When the story was known, the families of the victims of the disaster appealed to the city fathers, stating that it was wholly unfair that the members of the audience who had sought the legitimate channels of egress should have been penalized for so doing and lost their lives as a result of their deference to regulations, while those bold Haunters of propriety had been saved who presumed to make an exit through apertures designed solely for light and ventilation.
The Solons of the municipal council assembled to take cognizance of this basic question, and they unanimously found that it bore upon the very foundations of democratic equality: that it was most improper those should be rewarded who had disregarded both police regulations and the spirit, of conformity which is the essence of the good society.
They solemnly decreed that all those who were proved guilty of having saved their lives by propulsion through the air and by making use of improper channels of departure should be penalized by the amputation of at least one of their limbs.