The

discussed, for which no provision in the plans had been made. customers-that is, the new National Guard and the Garde Mobile-were in a rage at the detention of their uniforms, and the whole attempt seems to have resulted in confusion and disappointment. Louis Blanc is not a match for the master tailors of Paris.-From The Economist, May 20, 1848.

The next witness is Mr. Senior-for, as I have said, he was cognizant of the facts at first hand. He entirely corroborates the testimony of the Correspondent of the Economist, and tells us, as above, that the work done in the Ateliers Nationaux was purely nominal-an exact counterpart of 'all Parish work'-i.e. the parish farms and parish houses of industry which Senior had seen at work, or rather at idleness and waste, during his inquiry into the English poor law. In addition, however, to noting Senior's evidence in regard to the complete failure of the national workshops, I should like to quote the following very able reflections:

When the relations of the labourer and the capitalist are in the state which in a highly civilized society may be called natural, since it is the form which in such a society they naturally tend to assume when undistorted by mischievous legislation, the diligence of the labourer is their necessary result. As he is paid only in proportion to his services, he strives to make those services as valuable as he can. His exertions perhaps ought more frequently to be moderated than to be stimulated. A large proportion of our best artisans wear themselves out prematurely. In another state of society, which is also natural in a lower civilization-that of slavery—a smaller but still a considerable amount of industry is enforced by punishment. But in eleemosynary employment there is absolutely no motive for the labourer to make any exertion, or for the employer, a mere public officer, to enforce it. The labourer is, at all events, to have subsistence for himself and his family. To give him more would immediately attract to the public paymaster all the labourers of the country; to give him less, and yet require his services, would be both cruelty and fraud. He cannot be dischargedhe cannot be flogged-he cannot be put to task work-since to apportion the tasks to the various powers of individuals would require a degree of zealous and minute superintendence which no public officer ever gave. When the attempt was made in Paris, men accustomed to the work earned fifteen francs a day, those unaccustomed to it not one.

Another witness is Victor Hugo, who boldly asserted in the National Assembly that the experiment was a failure. • The national workshops,' he declared, ‘have proved a fatal experiment. The wealthy idler we already know well; you have created a person a hundred times more dangerous both to himself and others, the pauper idler. . . . At this very moment

England sits smiling by the side of the abyss into which France is falling.' The pauper idler is a happy phrase and well describes the condition of the unemployable-the men who pass their lives looking for work and praying God they won't find it. Hardly less emphatic was the grave report of the Commission appointed by the French Government to inquire into the subject. While compelled to recommend the expenditure of further enormous sums of money, it felt bound to admit that the Revolution, which found the workmen of Paris contracted in their proper sphere, has been, by treating them like spoilt children, the cause of that change in their character which makes every one now dread the excesses of which they may be guilty.'

The next witness to whom I would refer is M. Émile Thomas, the Director of the Ateliers Nationaux, whose work I have named above. He shows how exceedingly difficult it is to do the thing which the Socialist assumes to be so easy, i.e. make people work, and how in spite of the most tremendous exertions to render the workshops a success, they broke down. His work, however, should be read, not merely quoted. He was a plain man of business, not a forger of epigrams, and he does not attempt to sum up the results of the experiment in any single passage. He tells the plain tale of what he saw and did quite plainly a fact which makes the general drift of his history all the more impressive. His account of the workshops is the most convincing testimony possible that in 1848 Collectivist production had a fair trial and utterly broke down.

A word in conclusion as to what was the end of the national workshops. When the National Assembly found that the Ateliers Nationaux were rapidly bringing the State to a condition of bankruptcy they determined to close them. This they did, with the result that the workmen rose in insurrection, and that for four days and nights there was such street fighting as the world had never seen before. In putting down the insurrection caused by the dissolution of the great Socialist experiment, 12,000 men were sacrificedthe number of killed at Waterloo was hardly greater.

VII.

Before leaving the subject of the Socialistic experiments tried in Paris, I will put on record for purposes of reference the following extract from Thiers's Rights of Property, which describes another experiment in Collectivism :

The owner of a great engine factory lent for a time his works to his workmen, so that there was no capital sunk in the formation of an establishment, and he agreed to buy at a stated price the machines or parts of machines they might construct. This price has been augmented 17 per cent. on the average. The associated workmen were to govern themselves, to pay themselves, and to share the profits among them. The master had nothing to do with them. He paid for the machines, or portions of machines, and naturally he was not to pay until the work was done.

The associated workmen remained divided, as they were before, in different departments (a great facility of organization, since they had only to continue the habits they had acquired); they placed at the head of each department or workshop a president, and a general president over the whole. They preserved the former classification of wages (another facility arising from acquired habits), except that they gave three francs instead of two-and-a-half francs to the lower class, that of common labourers, and they discontinued paying the skilful workmen (the marchandeurs, or middle-men) the high wages resulting from piece-work. These did not, like the rest, work all day; yet as they must be satisfied in a certain degree, they were accorded supplementary wages of ten, fifteen, and sometimes twenty sous, which, added to the four francs of average wages, gave five francs, at the most, to those workmen who had previously earned six, seven, or eight francs a day, These supplementary wages were given by the presidents of the workshops. After having thus raised the wages of the mere labourer, and lowered those of the clever workman, the following was the result of the three months' trial.

There was a daily tumult in the workshop. 'Tis true, tumult was pretty general then, and was not less at the Luxembourg, or the Hôtel de Ville, than in the manufactories. The men made holiday whenever it pleased them to take part in this or that demonstration, which, however, only injured the workmen themselves, for the proprietor paid only for the work when done. But they did not work much when they were present, and the presidents charged with the maintenance of order and the supervision of the labour were changed two or three times a fortnight. The general president, having no local supervision in the workshops, was subject to fewer variations of favour, being changed once only during the period of the association. Had they worked as before, they would have received a sum of 367,000 francs in these three months; but their returns were only 197,000 francs, although their prices were raised 17 per cent. The principal cause of this smaller production was not owing solely to the fewer number of days and hours they attended the workshops than before, but because, when present, they did not work with such activity. The piece-hands, who only received at the utmost a trifling supplement of a franc, were not very zealous in labouring for the association. The men whom they generally took

with them when they were on piece, to whom they gave a small additional sum, and whom they superintended in person, were left to the almost negative supervision of the presidents of the workshops, and a thousand workmen out of fifteen hundred manifested that ardour with which men are animated when they do not work for themselves. In a word, 100 labourers received half-a-franc a day more; 300 or 400 workmen received their ordinary 300 or 400 francs, but during fewer days, for they took more holidays; and the 1,000 clever mechanics, who formerly worked by the piece, were deprived of the advantage due to their exertions, which had raised their daily wages to seven, eight, and ten francs. Accordingly, the good hands were all determined to leave the establishment, and when the three months assigned to the association had expired, it came to an end without a single protest. It was a kind of insolvency, for it owed many hours which had not been made up, and had swallowed up the little capital of a benefit fund instituted by the owner of the establishment previously to this philanthropic administration.

Ten sous more a day, to a hundred labourers out of 1,500; the wages of 300 or 400 more kept at the same point; those of 1,000 clever hands diminished; the whole body much poorer in consequence of absences, representing 32 per cent. of time lost; 197,000 francs of work, instead of 367,000 in the same period; all the good workmen disheartened; and finally, the association itself insolvent after three months' existence, although there was an establishment already prepared by the owner-this was the result.

Compare in this context the Report of the Surveyor who in 1893 superintended Mr. Shaw Lefevre's attempt to pull down a part of Millbank Prison by means of the unemployed. When these men worked with the knowledge that their pay would vary according to the work done, they did twice as much as when they knew that whether they worked or idled their pay would be 6d. an hour. While the cost of cleaning and stacking bricks by the unemployed, acting as the pensioners of the State, averaged from 128. to 138. a thousand, the same men when employed by piece managed to earn higher wages than before, although the rate agreed on was only 78. a thousand.

VIII.

Perhaps it will be said that the national workshops failed because they were set up in France, and that Collectivism would do much better in England. That is a strange argument considering the natural aptitude for being ordered about officially possessed by our neighbours. Still I will try to meet it. We possessed till the Reform of the Poor Law a good many experiments in Socialism in the shape of Parish

H

Farms and Houses of Industry, where the poor were, in accordance with the Statute of Elizabeth, 'set on work.' These experiments have lately been examined in a very able and moderate article by Professor James Mavor (Nineteenth Century, October, 1893). The conclusions he arrives at are that all the attempts were failures :

The conclusions from this survey of attempts to set the poor on work' cannot be said to afford much substantial ground for optimism regarding the probability of success of modern attempts in the same direction. It is quite evident that the parish farm hitherto has not afforded a means of relief to the respectable artisan out of employment, but that it has been occupied solely by the vagrant and the beggar. It would seem to be a well-established fact that these two very distinct classes will not mix together in parish farms or anywhere else. The history of the parish farm shows that while it is costly and highly susceptible to the evils of bad management, it may be adapted to the needs of the beggar; but there is no evidence to show that the respectable artisan would be likely ever to enter it so long as the beggar is there.

IX.

Before I leave the subject of Collectivism tested by experiment, I desire to say a word on the general question, and for that purpose will resume some portion of what I have written elsewhere on the subject (i. e. in The Liberal Unionist in 1891). I admit as fully as any Socialist can that the ideal is to get a better, fairer and more equal distribution of the world's goods. Two solutions are offered of this problem-one by the Socialists, the other by those who follow in the footsteps of Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright. The Socialists in effect say, 'Make the State the universal proprietor and the universal employer of labour, and you will have solved the problem and produced a community where misery shall have ceased to exist.' On the other hand, the advocates of Free Exchange, not less zealous nor less religious in their own faith, say, 'Free trade and labour from all shackles, put an end to the ruin and waste of war, and of the armaments maintained for the purpose of war, stop all unnecessary absorption by the State of wealth which should belong to the individual, and you will make human labour so valuable that every man willing and able to work will be able to command material comfort.' I have no hesitation in saying