I inspected the matter as a curator of the waters inspects, and first asked what I always ask: how much? In the part open to all, the paper gives no number, no measure, no year for comparison. The rest is closed to readers behind a price. Nor does it say who closed the strait, or who keeps it closed. A man who praises a pipe without a gauge is not measuring water; he is hoping for it. So I accept this historic fall as news, not yet as a measurement.

This much, however, the paper itself establishes: the sky was not cleared by edict, by decree of a senate, or by the virtue of laws. The same paper shows the Commission in Brussels asking the twenty-seven states to draw up their plans as though the sky would warm by three degrees, while still ordering them to keep the target of one and a half. These are words, and a double set of books. What the edicts had not done, a closed strait did. War, not law, reduced the smoke.

I take the explanation from the art of war, for the mechanism is the same. When Caesar could not take Uxellodunum, a town of the Cadurci on a very strong site, for all its grain and arms, he took away its water: he drove tunnels, cut the veins of the spring from which the townsmen drank, and turned them aside. When they saw their ever-flowing spring suddenly run dry, they surrendered. Whoever holds the spring holds the town. Today the provinces, and the kingdoms across the Ocean, drink their fire through a single narrows, and are astonished when someone blocks it.

Our ancestors built otherwise. Appius Claudius carried his water underground, so that an enemy could not easily cut it. The City drinks from many conduits, not one, so that if one water fails others take its place. I myself distributed the waters so that the reservoirs did not depend on a single line. This is prudence, not luxury. States that take their power through one foreign strait have built a single conduit and called it a market.

Now I will say what no one in the Forum will say. A fall born of scarcity is fasting, not temperance. No physician praises the diet of a man who grows thin from hunger. If anyone claims this lesser smoke for his own glory, he is signing another man's work, and the work of whoever closed the strait, whoever he may be. One reader joked in the paper's columns, thanking China and Hormuz. The joke is truer than many speeches. Cui bono? The paper itself says the sources of power that emit less smoke are gaining ground. Who pays the price, it does not say. But earlier French reports told of crowds marching through Gaul over the price of oil and the cost of living. This clear sky has been paid for in the streets of Gaul.

The remedy is ready to hand, and not new. First, measure and publish the figures: let no one judge a thing historic before he has seen the gauge. Next, multiply the conduits and provide sources of power at home, so that one narrows cannot leave a whole province parched. In the same paper another account lists the policies of many years that weakened the independence of Gaul in matters of power. That is a work to be restored, not a monument of praise to be raised. Lastly, attend to what has been delegated to you, and do not govern by other men's reports: "Since every charge delegated by the Emperor demands more than ordinary care." A sky that scarcity has cleared, plenty will cloud again, unless prudence keeps by reason what hunger compelled. Farewell.