II. Salvatore Gaziano, who directs investment strategy at the firm SoldiExpert, says that the oil does indeed flow, but that carrying and refining it costs a fortune: freight rates for the largest tankers have soared because of the risks at sea, refineries between the Middle East and Russia are out of service, and what is lacking above all are finished products, diesel in particular, whose strategic stocks are now at their lowest. Meanwhile, at the bankers' tables, shares in Repsol have risen more than ninety-one per cent since the start of the year, Eni more than sixty-two, Saipem, which is merging with Subsea7, more than ninety-eight; the Americans ExxonMobil and Chevron around fifty. TotalEnergies, whose shares have gained more than forty-one per cent, is considering, as the same Gaziano reports, whether to move its primary listing to the tables of New York.

III. I recognize the thing, for I have often seen it in the waters. The source does not fail; the conduit fails. Water abundant at the spring is of no use to the City unless the channel is sound, the distribution tanks full, the pipes of honest gauge. So it is now: oil pours out of the Persian Gulf more abundantly than before the war, and yet the oil that drives wagons and engines is lacking. Between the source and the use lies the work, and it is the work that now limps: ships that will not carry through danger except at a great price, refineries standing broken, storehouses standing empty.

IV. Gaziano relates that for years this branch of business was treated like an awkward relation, judged too foul, and reduced to a mere three per cent of the world's whole valuation. This I observe: opinion and decrees refine no oil. A broken refinery is not repaired by edict, nor is a storehouse filled by a resolution. Appius Claudius brought water into the City before the people thirsted, not after. Of the aqueducts I once wrote: "With so many indispensable structures carrying so many waters, compare, if you will, the idle pyramids or the other useless, though renowned, works of the Greeks." I say the same of refineries and oil depots: the works are necessary, they look sordid, and they are praised only when they are missing.

V. Now to the measures. When I inspected the waters, I found one thing written in the records and another flowing in the pipes. A like error is being made now in the bankers' forum. Shares that rise ninety per cent do not measure plenty; they measure scarcity; the emptier the storehouses, the fuller the owners' strongbox. I do not blame this profit: the companies, as Gaziano says, had cut their debt and kept strict discipline in their accounts, and so they enjoy the fruit of their own thrift. But a magistrate who takes the joy of the tables for the health of the provinces does exactly what a curator does who measures the water at the source and supposes the City has drunk.

VI. The report is also silent where a curator would ask first. How large the stocks of diesel are, in which provinces they are shortest, by what routes the oil from the Persian Gulf is carried and who holds them: no one writes it. Nor does any magistrate or consumer speak; only the banker. Without numbers no one governs the waters, nor the oil.

VII. On TotalEnergies, briefly. A listing can migrate across the Ocean; the refineries, pipelines and ports remain in Gaul. If the seat of profit moves elsewhere while the works stay at home, let the magistrate ask who will tend them, who will repair them, and whom they will obey when war presses.

VIII. The remedy is old. Let the public stocks of oil be measured every month and the figures posted openly; let the refineries be inspected by the magistrates themselves, not through hired consultants, for "I think nothing so unbecoming to a man of any worth as to discharge a delegated duty on the instructions of his assistants"; let what is broken be repaired before anything new is built; let the storehouses, like the water tanks, be filled before the war, not during it. Oil is carried not by decrees but by pipes.