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honor which the Chamber and the Senate confer only on rare occasions. One of his most admired addresses was that in which he defended before the Senate the terms of the law of amnesty, and in which he branded with ignominy the crimes and the wrongs committed in the course of the Dreyfus affair and its sequels. He said:

To those who consider this measure too indulgent, and who believe that we are incurring the danger of enfeebling the sense of responsibility in the national consciousness, I confine myself to replying that there are punishments more severe than those which the law inflicts; that the justice whose seat is in our court rooms is not the sole justice which pronounces sentence upon the guilty. There is another justice, constituted by the public conscience. The decision of this justice will be handed down through the ages, will furnish an example to nations, and has already become a part of history.

When the appropriations for the expedition to China were under discussion in the Chamber, and when certain Deputies, from a sentiment of hostility to the Church, opposed the granting of indemnities to the missionaries, Waldeck-Rousseau came to the rescue with a speech, on the mission and the duties of France in the Orient, of such lofty eloquence that his habitual adversaries applauded with enthusiasm. He has always been

happy, especially in the days when he was the spokesman of the moderate party, when he used to brand the flatterers of the mob the demagogues who "intoxicate the masses with the alcohol of false promises." He framed a definition of socialism which has remained famous, when he termed it, "that enormous and childish illusion, which arouses the evil passions of the credulous, and which traverses paths of hatred and rage to reach its goal in misery and servitude." His social and economic doctrine is summed up in this famous phrase of his, "Labor must own and capital must work." Gambetta was once declared, by one of his opponents, to speak with such eloquence that his adversaries, the Radicals, had to hold on to their benches to keep themselves from applauding him. The correct, lucid, and somewhat frigid eloquence of M. Waldeck-Rousseau has not quite this marvelous effect. But it is almost as marvelous that during so long a time, despite all the snares of an unremitting opposition, he should have been able, by almost daily triumphs of persuasion, to hold together and keep in order the majority, by whose aid he has succeeded in giving France three years of a government at once peaceful, energetic, and fruitful.

II.-M. COMBES, PHYSICIAN, SCHOLAR, AND RADICAL LEADER.

"There are men who can be succeeded but not replaced." The new premier of France would doubtless be the first to apply this timehonored maxim, frequently illustrated in politics, to the statesman whom he so unexpectedly succeeds.

M. Combes is far from being unknown in France, where, for the last fifteen years, he has taken an active part in politics, now in the Senate and now in the cabinet. For all that, his selection as president of the council of ministers has caused considerable surprise. Many have thought that he was not quite equal to the duties of this position, and that his personality was a little deficient in the prestige which M. WaldeckRousseau possesses to so high a degree, not to speak of the eloquence which is still more important in a prime minister.

It is true that M. Combes, who, although by no means young, is still comparatively a newcomer in French politics, has not yet had an opportunity of playing a very distinguished rôle. But those who are familiar with the present parliamentary situation in France, and who, moreover, have followed the course of M. Combes since the beginning of his political career, have no difficulty in understanding the reasons which have caused M. Loubet to intrust the leader of

the Radical party in the Senate with the formation of the new cabinet. These reasons are valid and of various nature.

The principal reason is that the Radical party has been the one most successful in the last elections. The great majority of the three hundred and thirty-nine newly elected deputies favorable to the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry is made up of Radicals. It was to the support of the Radicals that M. Waldeck-Rousseau owed his long continuance in power, and it is therefore only just that his policies should be continued by those who had approved and supported them.

Now in the Radical party there are not many men whose past services or personal prestige marks them out as available for the prime min. istry. The Radical party has plenty of men of talent, but it has not many men of the very first order. In fact, it has only two. One of these is M. Bourgeois, who is by far the most brilliant and most distinguished leader of the party. But M. Bourgeois, who has been for a certain time forced by family reasons to with. draw from active politics, was unwilling and unable to accept the position for which his name naturally suggested itself. The other is M. Brisson, an upright and austere Jacobin, somewhat lacking in adaptability, whose influence

has of late been on the wane. M. Brisson was approached, but wisely declined.

M. Loubet, well acquainted with the Senate, in which he had sat for twenty years, then sought among its members for a man sufficiently in harmony with the advanced Republican majority to enjoy its confidence, and with sufficient authority in the Parliament to be able to guide it. He selected M. Combes. In the present condition of affairs he could hardly have made a better choice.

M. Combes will be sixty-seven years old in September. He is a small man, which is not counted as a disqualification in France, where a popular proverb and the experience of history agree in inspiring confidence in men of moderate stature. Bonaparte was short; so was M. Thiers. As to his age, M. Combes does not show it. He is full of life and youth, and in that Senate made up of veterans he seems, in spite of his gray mustache and imperial, a new recruit, such vivacity resides in his features and such indefatigable energy in all his figure. Although not a powerful orator, he is a precise and clear speaker, trained in parliamentary debate.

M. Combes comes from the south of France. He is a son of that turbulent and fluent Midi, where men are born eloquent, and where the heat of the sun seems to impart to their natures a double share of liveliness, aggressiveness, and color. Like many representatives of free thought and antagonists of the Church, he began his career under those influences of which he was later to become the irreconcilable adversary. He was educated in a religious seminary, where he was trained in the principles which he has since detested. It has often happened that the enemies of the Church have been of her own household. Voltaire, who uttered the famous phrase, Écrasez l'infâme," was a pupil of the Jesuits. Renan, whose name in clerical circles is as much loathed as that of Voltaire, received all his instruction from priests. The leader of anti-clericalism under the third Republic, Gambetta, who said, "Clericalism, there is the enemy," was, like M. Combes, the pupil of a little seminary. But M. Combes received religious instruction longer than any of them. Voltaire and Gambetta were under clerical guardianship only in their early youth. Renan himself parted with the Church at the age of twenty-two. M. Combes remained within the Church even in his maturity; he took priestly orders, and became what Renan had once dreamed of becoming,-an ecclesiastical professor in a Catholic seminary.

In 1895, when M. Combes was first made minister of public instruction in the Radical cabinet of M. Bourgeois, it occurred to me to hunt

up in the Library of the Sorbonne, in Paris, the theses which M. Combes had written in his old days to obtain his degree of docteur-ès-lettres. found a great volume of several hundred pages,like all French theses,-upon "The Psychology of St. Thomas Aquinas," and another thesis in Latin, likewise upon a question of scholastic metaphysics. I took the occasion to make these two metaphysical works known, by analyzing them in a Paris newspaper. Then began a campaign of ridicule and epigram in the Conservative press against the Radical who had begun life as a theologian. M. Waldeck-Rousseau himself, who was at that time the champion of the moderate party against the Radical ministry of M. Bourgeois, said, at Bordeaux, in 1897, in replying to those who accused the Republican party of reactionary tendencies: "It is certainly not in our ranks that you must look to find a magistrate* who has learned how to distinguish real republicans by prosecuting them under the empire, or a learned theologian who has trained himself by the study of the fathers of the Church to spy out better the clericals in disguise." Again, the other day, when M. Combes first appeared before the Chamber, the old clerical and royalist Baudry d'Asson bitterly reproached him for his "apostasy." How did M. Combes come to forsake what he had previously followed, and to break with the political and religious system to which he had previously adhered? This he has never explained to the public. We only know that one fine day he abandoned scholastic theology for the study of medicine; left the department of the Tarn, where he had been known as l'abbé Combes, to establish himself in the Department of the Charente Inférieure, where he was thereafter to pass as Dr. Combes. Modest in his ambitions, he selected a little town of five thousand inhabitants, the town of Pons, where he practiced his new profession. With the zeal of a neophyte, he began to promulgate the new ideas to which he had just given his adhesion, and which, in these southwestern regions, find a soil at once favorable and hostile, inasmuch as one part of the population is of Huguenot stock, and the other, more numerous still, retains a strong Bonapartist feeling.

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The physician has a great influence upon the rural population in France. By his daily contact with the people he is enabled to gain the confidence of the simple-minded, and to spread his ideas. M. Combes, nevertheless, made but slow progress. In 1875, he was elected mayor of Pons; in 1879, he was made member of the "Conseil Général," and it was not until January,

*M. Guyot-Dessaigne, now a Radical deputy, former judge of the empire.

1886, that he succeeded in being elected to the Senate.

It

The Senate, which has only three hundred members, all at least forty years of age, is less turbulent, less sensational, and less frequented by the public than the Chamber of Deputies. is for this reason that men of great ability and genuine talent may here long remain unknown to all except those who actually watch them at their work. It was thus that M. Combes was little known when, in 1895, M. Bourgeois placed him in his Radical ministry, by the side of M. Berthelot and M. Cavaignac. He had not attracted the attention of his colleagues, except by his work upon committees, especially those relating to educational matters.

In the Ministry of Public Instruction he was the author of certain bills which testified to the energy of his passion for reform, and to his vigorous hostility to clerical influence. Upon his return to the ranks he continued to make a spe cialty of those educational questions which, in France, have always engaged the attention of men zealous for the emancipation of the nation. In the discussions which ended, on May 29 of this year, in a complete reform of French secondary instruction, adapted from henceforth on to the needs of a modern democracy, M. Combes played a leading part as spokesman of the Committee of the Senate.

To the measures which, during the WaldeckRousseau ministry, had had for their object the disarmament of the clerical party, M. Combes has given ardent support. He was chairman of the Committee on the Law of Associations, whose report was presented by M. Vallé, the new Minister of Justice. When M. WaldeckRousseau, in advocacy of the bill, delivered before the Senate one of those great addresses for which he is noted, it was M. Combes who proposed to the Senate that it be posted on the walls of all the villages of France.

Within the last few years the importance and the influence of M. Combes have increased through the progress of the Radical party in the Senate. The group of which he was the chief, before his election as Vice-President of the Senate, has become one of the most important in that assembly, in which, a few years ago, it numbered scarcely ten members.

It is a strange circumstance that the Senate, which, only a few years ago, was regarded by the Radical party as an obstacle to all reform, as an injurious institution which ought to be destroyed, the Senate, whose abolition was demanded in all Radical platforms,-now supplies the leader of the Radical party. At the present moment the Senate is par excellence the conserv.

ative factor in the Republic, less subject than the Chamber, which is directly created by popu lar vote, to the sudden gusts and the superficial agitations which disturb the masses; it is not affected by those outbursts of clerical or reactionary sentiment which, under the name of Boulangism, anti-Semitism, or nationalism, have too often shown their effects in the Chamber of Deputies. It is precisely upon the field of conflict against clericalism and nationalism,-in other words, as M. Combes expressed it last January in the Senate, the conflict for the triumph of the spirit of the Revolution over that of the CounterRevolution," that M. Combes has given energetic support to the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet. He has accepted power with a view to continuing this policy. Like his predecessor, he does not seek to carry out the entire programme of radiicalism. He will limit himself to applying vig. orously the law of associations already in force and to striking a new blow at clerical education by securing the repeal of the law of Falloux, of 1850, which confers upon ecclesiastical institutions privileges which are not enjoyed by the national schools. Like most men who have freed themselves from clerical influence, M. Combes, as a matter of fact, does not pride himself on being liberal. To an editor of Le Figaro, M. Jules Huret, he said recently that he did not believe that the freedom of teaching is a natural right.

Among reforms of a social and political nature, he will revive the project of pensions for working men prepared by M. Millerand, he will reform the system of courts-martial, will reduce military service to two years, and will frame a system of taxation involving the income tax, so long advocated by the Radicals.

To realize this programme, to which, on June 12, the Chamber gave in advance its approval by a vote of 329 to 124,-M. Combes has assembled in his cabinet a group of colleagues each of whom has been tried and tested, and of whom two at least are of extremely interesting personality. One of these is the new Minister of the Navy, Camille Pelletans, well known in journalism, a somewhat erratic writer and a brilliant orator, who, for twenty years, has displayed as a member of the Opposition qualities which for the first time will be exercised constructively. other is Maurice Rouvier, who has already been many times minister, and once even prime minister. M. Rouvier has taken part in parliamen tary life since the foundation of the Republic, and has been prominent in the most difficult and most troubled periods. A financier of great ability, an orator of remarkable power, he stands out conspicuously above the rest of the cabinet.

The

STRIKES IN THE UNITED STATES.

PRIOR

ORIOR to 1881, no attempt was made by the national government to collect data relative to labor controversies. It was only in the period of twenty years closing with December, 1900, that the strike assumed great importance, although this method of seeking redress of real or supposed grievances had been resorted to since 1740, or 1741, when the journeymen bakers of New York City demanded an increase of wages, and made an agreement not to bake bread until their demand was acceded to. The main facts relating to the strikes and lockouts for the period from 1881 to 1900, inclusive, are shown in the accompanying tables, constructed from the sixteenth annual report of the United States Commissioner of Labor. In the North American Review for June, Commissioner Wright makes the following comments on the statistics therein presented:

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both strikes and lockouts, occurring in the period amounted to the enormous sum of $468,968,581, more than 6,000,000 persons having been thrown out of employment for an average of 23.8 days. It is often supposed that most strikes fail; but the foregoing record shows that 50.77 per cent. of the strikes succeeded, that 13.04 per cent. succeeded partly, and that 36.19 per cent. failed.

The figures in the tables do not represent the actual, number of different individual employees who were involved in strikes or lockouts in a given year, because, in many cases, there have been two or more strikes or lockouts in one concern in the same year.

"Of the whole number of strikes, 14,457 were ordered by labor organizations; these represented 103,455 establishments out of a total of 117,509. Of the strikes ordered by organizations, 52.86 per cent. were successful, 13.60 per cent. partly successful, and 33.54 per cent. unsuccessful. These percentages coincide very closely with those relating to the total number of successful, partly successful, and unsuccessful strikes.

GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION.

"The distribution of strikes offers occasion for some very serious reflections. During the twenty years included in the report, New York shows the largest number of strikes, as well as the larg

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* Not including the number in 33 establishments for which these data were not obtainable.

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est number of establishments affected, that State having 28.34 per cent. of the total number of strikes in the country during the whole period, and 32.20 per cent. of the total number of establishments involved. Pennsylvania follows, with 12.48 per cent. of the total number of strikes, and 15.69 per cent. of the total number of establishments involved. Illinois had 11.58 per cent. of the strikes, and 17.68 per cent. of the establishments affected.

"In a group of States consisting of Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania there were 87,878 establishments under strike during the period out of a total of 117,509 in the whole country; that is, in this group of States the establishments involved were 74.78 per cent. of all involved. These States contained 45.02 per cent. of all the manufacturing establishments, and employed 55.15 per cent. of the capital invested in the mechanical industries of the United States.

INDUSTRIES CHIEFLY INVOLVED.

"As regards the employees involved in strikes, almost the same percentages are shown; but the industries most affected by strikes during the twenty years were the building trades, with 4,440 strikes, involving 41,910 establishments and 665,946 employees; coal and coke, with 2,515 strikes, involving 14,575 establishments and 1,892,435 employees; metals and metallic goods, with 2,080 strikes, involving 4,652 establishments and 511,. 336 employees; clothing, with 1,638 strikes, involving 19,695 establishments and 563,772 employees; tobacco, with 1,509 strikes, involving

6,153 establishments and 251,096 employees; and transportation, with 1,265 strikes, involving 3,436 establishments and 484, 454 employees. It is thus seen that of the 22,795 strikes which occurred during the period, 59 per cent. were in the six industries just mentioned, while of the 117,509 establishments involved, 76.95 per cent. were so engaged. As regards the employees thrown out of employment by strikes, 71.60 per cent. of the total number were connected with establishments engaged in these six industries."

As to the success attending strikes, Colonel Wright shows that strikes to secure an increase of wages included 28.70 per cent. of all establishments involved, and of this number success resulted in 52.77 per cent. In strikes undertaken for both increase of wages and reduction of hours, 62.49 per cent. succeeded.

"PROSPERITY" AND THE WAGE-EARNER. HE publication of some of the data comprised in the census of 1900,-especially the information contained in Bulletin No. 150, devoted to manufacturing,-affords an opportunity to review the progress made during the decade from 1890 to 1900. If the returns do not fully bear out the expectations, based on the last few years of prosperity, we should remember that in the middle of the decade under consideration there was a four years' period of depression (1893-96), and this went far to neutralize the progress shown in the remaining years. This point is emphasized in an article, entitled "Warning from the Census," in Gunton's Magazine for June. In this

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