tter than Venice. 'The
industries of Venice,' said these irreverent conquerors, 'as precocious
as the industries of China, have stood still like them.'

In this age of jointstock companies and limited liabilities, it may be
interesting to see on what terms the original founders of the Company of
St.-Gobain put their heads and their purses together, to establish a
great industrial enterprise. Their articles of association were signed
by twelve associates on February 1, 1703, some ten years after William
Paterson and Lord Halifax laid the foundations of the Bank of England
and of the British public debt. The capital of the company, estimated at
2,040,000 livres, was divided into twenty-four shares of 85,000 livres
each, called 'sols,' and these again into twelve parts each, called
'deniers,' making a total of 288 'deniers.' These curious designations,
taken from the currency of the time, were used down to the overthrow of
the restored Bourbon monarchy in 1830. The owners of these shares, or
'deniers,' bound themselves solemnly never to make a loan, but to meet
all the expenses of the enterprise by assessments in proportion to their
holdings, and always to keep in hand a fund for current expenses of at
least one million of livres. They were to receive ten per cent. on their
capital, a special honorarium of 1,000 livres a year apiece, and a fee
of two crowns for attendance at meetings. All misunderstandings were to
be settled by arbitration, and all the proceedings were to be secret.
Under these articles St.-Gobain grew up, prospered, withstood the shock
of successive political revolutions in France, and kept its place in the
front of the great industrial movement of the nineteenth century down to
the year 1830.

During this long life of over a century and a quarter, the payment of
dividends seems to have been suspended for three years only, and that
after the Terror, from 1794 to 1797. In 1792, when the Girondins and the
Jacobins were tearing France to pieces between them, and courting
foreign invasion as a stimulus to domestic anarchy, the works were
stopped for a time in Paris, at Tour-la-ville and at St.-Gobain, but
only for a time. The very able director of the company, M. Deslandes,
originally selected, as I have said, by Madame Geoffrin, and who had
vindicated her good judgment by managing the affairs of the company with
success for thirty years, resigned his post in 1789. He was a model
disciplinarian of the old sc