had enjoyed and face the modern conditions of success. It has proved its
claim to its ancient privileges by its triumphs ever since it
surrendered them. The history of its relations with the crown and with
the courts under the _ancien regime_ is a most curious, interesting, and
instructive chapter of the political and social, as well as of the
industrial, annals of France, and it has been admirably told by M.
Augustin Cochin in his book on the manufactory of St.-Gobain from 1665
to 1866.

A drive of less than an hour through a highly cultivated rolling
country, made attractive by well-grown trees and luxuriant hedgerows,
brought me to the clear, bright, prosperous-looking town of St.-Gobain.
Its two thousand inhabitants owe their well-being, in one form or
another, to the great company, and among the most comfortable as well as
the most picturesque dwellings in the place are the houses built by the
company, and conceded on very favourable terms to the families of men
employed in the works. Piles of timber attested the activity of the
forest administration. The people I passed, singly or in groups, saluted
the director's carriage in a friendly, good-natured way, which seemed to
show that here, at least, the 'irrepressible conflict' between capital
and labour has not yet passed into the acute stage. A fine old church of
the thirteenth century, with a tower of the sixteenth, and the noble
trees which cover the slopes and shade the roadway of St.-Gobain, are no
more in keeping with the standard English and American type of a
manufacturing town than is the parklike domain in the midst of which
rise the main buildings of the great manufactory itself.

There M. Henrivaux gave me a cordial welcome. The chateau of St.-Gobain,
in which the offices of the company have long been established, is a
vast square edifice of the time and the style of Louis XIV. It occupies
the site, and, I believe, comprises one remaining wing of an earlier
chateau, which was stormed and partially destroyed by the English in the
fourteenth century. Henry IV. was seigneur of St.-Gobain, and when the
glassworks company, at the end of the seventeenth century, bought the
domain and the buildings from the Count de Longueval, then governor of
La Fere, the title of the crown to the property had to be extinguished
as well as his.

Nothing can be finer in its way than the wide panorama of forest-clad
hills and rolling vales, dotted here and there with towns, vi