aw up a
Report of the Chamber of Deputies on this question, with a Project of a
Law to supersede, modify, extend the Law of 1867, under which
co-operative societies have so far grown up in France.

'The Report and the Project, as finally edited by the aspiring deputy
for Laon, a freemason as I have told you, are to be printed by another
freemason, the worthy hatter, M. Bugnicourt, at Chauny, who is the chief
personage of the _Defense Nationale_, and all the voters are to see how
Brother Doumer devotes himself to the interests of the working classes,
at Paris, while other deputies go about amusing themselves with the
_danseuses du ventre_, and the other marvels of the Exposition.

'This is all very well.

'But Brother Doumer, in his desire to pose before the voters of the
Aisne as the heaven-born deputy in whom the working-man may put his
trust, takes the trouble to make it quite clear that the Republic has
done absolutely nothing but appoint committees to sit upon "the great
question" of co-operation among the working classes!

'Brother Doumer, as I have told you, was made a deputy in 1888. After
taking his seat he was made a member of the Committee which has been
conducting an "extra-parliamentary enquiry" on the subject of
co-operative societies among working-men for work and for production,
and with the question of contracts between employers and working-men
for participation in the profits of industrial enterprises.

'This committee, he says in his Report, took the matter in hand in 1883,
and spent _five years_ over it, getting its project of a law on these
subjects into shape only in 1888, on the eve of the election of a new
Chamber of Deputies!

'During these five long years, according to Brother Doumer, the Republic
was content to let co-operation among working-men take its chances under
a law passed in 1867, under the Second Empire. And yet, according still
to Brother Doumer, the idea of co-operation among the working classes
was an exclusively French idea, and not only an exclusively French idea,
but an idea which came to birth only under the Republic of 1848 (he
glides silently over the famous experiment of the National workshops of
1848). Is it not really remarkable that the Republicans of 1879 should
have been willing to leave this "beautiful and generous" idea at the
mercy of a law passed by the Empire, and which--still according to
Brother Doumer--left the co-operative societies of working-men withou