its various glassworks in the glass manufacture. At Chauny alone the
chemical works employ 1,350 of these workmen. For these, as for its
glassworkers, the company has established a system of savings
institutions and of pensions. Medical advice and medicines are given
gratuitously to the workmen and their families. The co-operative
association founded by M. Cochin at St.-Gobain has not, I believe, been
extended to the chemical works; but the company maintains
establishments which supply the chief wants of the workpeople at cost
price, and the dwellings provided for them, either gratuitously or at
very low rents, now number more than seven hundred, independently of the
dormitories for unmarried workmen. Retiring pensions, varying from
one-fifth to one-fourth of the wages of the workmen, are granted to all
after a certain number of years of service, and to workmen disabled by
disease or by accidents.

At the pyrites-mine of Sain-Bel, in the South, near Tarare, where more
than 400 workmen are employed--300 as miners and the rest in the works
above named, the former earning on an average 1,309 fr. 25 c., and the
latter on an average 1,114 fr. 90 c. a year--a system exists under which
any workman who chooses to put aside his savings in a _caisse de la
vieillesse_ receives from the company, when he has completed twenty-five
years of service, or has attained the age of fifty-five years, an annual
pension more than equal to the amount at that time of his savings in the
_caisse_.

As I have said, the manufacture of chemical products is not so pleasant
or so picturesque in itself as the manufacture of plate-glass and
mirrors. Within the last decade the output of sulphuric acid alone from
the company's works has more than doubled, and now amounts to more than
200,000 tons a year. The gases disengaged in the manufacture of chemical
fertilisers, such as carbonic acid, sulphuretted hydrogen, fluorine of
silicium, and so on, it was found at Chauny, destroyed entirely in a
very short time the polish of the glass in the window-panes of the
houses opposite to the works, and certainly did not improve either the
respiratory organs or the general health of the workmen. The company
therefore spent a good deal of time and of money in working out a system
for the complete condensation of these gases. I am told that it has
proved completely successful, and is now established in all the
chemical works of the company, to the great advantage not