rom 2,210,702 in the preceding year, 1883. Two of the great French
industries, the iron industry and the sugar industry, both of them most
important consumers of coal, were then passing through a period of
depression, the over-production of sugar in Germany having seriously
damaged the French sugar-producers in particular. To meet the pressure
put upon them by the decline in the demand for coal, the directors of
the Anzin Company found it necessary to carry out certain economies,
either through a reduction of wages or through some modification in
their methods of production.

If they had been allowed to do this through an undisturbed arrangement
with their workmen, there is no reason to doubt that it would have been
done with little friction, and with no injustice to anyone. Wages at
Anzin had steadily risen from a daily average, for the surface workmen,
of 3 fr. 67 c. to 4 fr. 52 c. in 1883, concurrently with the development
at Anzin of that system of practical participation in the profits to
which I have already alluded. For the subterranean workmen, the advance
had been from 3 fr. 38 c. in 1879 to 3 fr. 72 c. in 1883.

The spirit in which the Anzin Company has been administered from the
beginning is strikingly illustrated by the steady advance in the wage of
the workmen. In Belgium, one of the chief seats of the competition with
Anzin for the coal-market of France, on the contrary, the wages of the
workmen are subject to the fluctuations of the general market. In 1873,
for example, the average wage of the workmen in the mines of Hainault,
as given to me by M. Guary, was 4 fr. 69 c., or about 25 per cent. above
the average wage of 1883 at Anzin. But 1873 was the year of the great
advance in coal. In 1876 the average Hainault wage fell to 3 fr. 45 c.;
in 1879 it fell to 2 fr. 68 c., and in 1880 it stood at 3 fr. 6 c. By
1880 the average wage at Anzin had risen (and steadily risen) to 4 fr.
23 c.

During the year 1883 the expenditure of the Company upon the assistance
fund, the pension fund, the medical services, the gratuitous supply of
fuel, the cottages, in addition to, and not at the expense of, the wages
paid, reached a total of 1,224,730 francs. During this same year the
profits of the company, as stated after an inquiry by the French
Minister of Public Works, amounted to 1,200,000 francs. This really
seems to warrant the assertion that at Anzin in 1883 the profits of the
mines were virtually divided into two eq