kilometres of territory, stretching
from Somain to the Belgian frontier, with a breadth varying from seven
to twelve kilometres. The total area amounts to 2,805,450 hectares.

Of these concessions the four first-named were the original basis of the
organisation of the company under the controlling influence of the
Prince de Croy-Solre at the Chateau of l'Hermitage which still belongs
to his family near Conde.

The others have been acquired since 1807; Hasnon, the latest, which
covers about 1,500 hectares, in 1843.

But--and this is a notable fact--the Anzin Company from the beginning to
this day has been organised and managed under the original statutes of
1757. Under these statutes, devised and drawn up absolutely under the
_ancien regime_, and by an association of practical engineers and
enterprising adventurers with feudal seigneurs, this great company has,
for more than a century and a quarter, administered with signal success,
and still administers, what may be fairly called an industrial republic,
carrying on its affairs and developing its resources in the face of the
enormous changes of modern life, and maintaining here, under what are
thought to be the most trying conditions of labour, a most remarkable
measure of harmony between an ever-increasing nation of labourers and a
strictly limited administration, composed not only of capitalists, but
of hereditary capitalists. What becomes of the rights of man and of the
Abbe Sieyes, and of the Tiers-Etat, which 'ought to be everything,' and
of the 'immortal principles of 1789,' in the face of all this?

To the wisdom of the National Assembly the workmen and the Company of
Anzin owe considerably less than nothing. The National Assembly, of
course, meddled with the mines of France, as it meddled with everything
else. It did endless debating over the subject, in the course of which
Mirabeau declaimed eloquently against the doctrine of Turgot, that the
mines belong to the men who find them, a doctrine which, after all, is
much more rational than the more recent contention of sundry modern
Orators of the Human Race that 'the mines belong to the miners'! But
after it had talked itself hoarse, the Assembly had to descend to the
prosaic business of legislation, and in dealing with the mines, as in
dealing with other matters, it made a muddle of the laws which existed
before it met, and left this muddle to be resolved into a new order of
things legal, under the presiding g