ual portions, one of which went
to Capital and the other to Labour. Assuming this assertion to be, even
roughly speaking, accurate, why should there have been any serious
collision between Capital and Labour, in such an organisation, over a
question of practical economies necessarily advantageous to both?

Yet there was such a collision. In February 1884, what is known as the
great strike at Anzin broke out over a proposed improvement in the
methods of working, the demonstrable effect of which must be to improve
the position of the best workmen employed by the company, without doing
real injustice to others. A similar strike had occurred a quarter of a
century before, when the company insisted on introducing from England
and Belgium the use of ponies in the subterranean galleries. But in 1884
the conservative instinct of the workmen, which predisposes them in all
callings against innovations of any kind, was adroitly worked upon and
influenced by the direct influence of the politicians of the 'true
Republic' at Paris. A workman of the company named Basly, who had taken
an active part in organising a syndicate of mining workmen under a law
passed in 1881 to favour such syndications, put himself into
communication with the advanced Radicals at Paris, constituted himself
the champion of the syndicates of workmen, and, according to the
testimony given before a parliamentary committee, fomented a formidable
exterior pressure upon the workmen at Anzin, to bring about the strike
which eventually took place, and in connection with which M. Basly
became a conspicuous figure in French Republican politics, receiving a
much larger wage as a deputy than he had ever earned in the mines at
Anzin, where, as the books of the company show, though by no means an
exceptionally good workman, he earned, in 1881, 4 fr. 93 c., and in 1882
4 fr. 71 c. a day.

One obvious object of the syndicates of workmen being to establish a
kind of despotic control over all the workmen of any calling, the
syndicate of mining workmen at Anzin set itself, a year before the
strike, in 1883, to break down what is known at Anzin (and elsewhere in
France also, M. Guary tells me) as the system of 'marchandages.'

Under this system the company makes contracts with the workmen at a
fixed price for coal, deliverable during several months. A good
workman, holding one of these contracts and stimulated by it, frequently
gains from 20 to 25 per cent. more than the avera