'project' still remains a 'project.' It was adopted in what is called a
'Friday session' by the Chamber, and then sent up to die a natural death
in the Senate--the Senate, be it remembered, being the absolute
stronghold of the existing Republican Government.

So that still, after ten years of power, the Republicans of M. Doumer's
'true Republic' leave the working-men of France, so far as co-operation
can affect their interests, under the control of a law passed under the
Empire more than twenty years ago.

Clearly one of two things must be true: either this law, passed under
the Empire more than twenty years ago, is a good and sufficient law,
assuring to the working-men of France all the advantages, and protecting
them against all the disadvantages, incident to the principle of
co-operation, so far as this influence and this protection can be given
by laws; or the Republicans of M. Doumer's 'true Republic' have been
humbugging and trifling with the working-men of France on the subject
ever since they contrived, ten years ago, to get the control of power at
Paris. Upon one horn or the other of this dilemma, the 'true
Republicans' clearly must elect to take their seats.

The voters of Laon would appear to be of the mind that the 'true
Republicans' of M. Doumer have been humbugging and trifling with them.
For at the election of this year, M. Doumer lost his seat, and the
candidate favoured by my Boulangist Figaro at Laon, M. Castelin, was
elected. What followed is worth noting, to complete this picture of the
working of representative institutions in one of the great French
provinces under the Third Republic.

M. Doumer, in his address to the electors of the Aisne, issued at Laon
on August 15, 1889, was at great pains to explain what his own relations
had been with Boulangism and with General Boulanger in 1888, before he
became a deputy from Laon in the place of M. Ringuier.

'I frankly admit,' he observes in this very curious document, 'that I
felt a lively sympathy with General Boulanger _while he was Minister of
War_!... In the journal which I conducted I insisted on his being put
back into the Cabinet, on the fall of the Goblet Ministry.'

When, by the death of M. Ringuier in the early spring of 1888, a seat
from the Aisne was suddenly vacated, the freemasons of Laon, as I have
stated, selected M. Doumer as the Republican candidate to fill it. M.
Doumer's friend, M. Floquet, was not then at the head of the Gover