of oppression on the part of the capitalist class caused Clemenceau to support Socialists more and more in their demands for limitation of the then unrestricted powers of individual employers and "anonymous" companies. So, too, individualist as he was, he wrote article after article in defence of the right of the men to strike against grievous oppression, holding that the combination of the workers was more than sufficiently handicapped by the fact that they were bound to imperil their own subsistence as well as the maintenance of their wives and children by going on strike at all. This argument he applied to all strikes in organised industries. But Clemenceau naturally found himself drawn into bitter antagonism to the doctrine of _laissez-faire_ and the law of supply and demand. "You say all must bow down to them. I contend all must revolt against them." "The individual struggle for existence is only a great _laissez-faire_! Far from being liberty, it is the triumph of violence, it is barbarism itself. The man who mastered the first slave founded a new system . . . so completely that after some ages of this rule a physiocrat overlooking it all would have sagely pronounced: Slavery is the law of human societies. This with the same amount of truth as he says to-day: The law of supply and demand is an immutable ordinance. And, for all that, the supreme irony of fate has decreed that the first slave-driver was at the same time the first sower of the seed of liberty, of justice. For by enslaving men he created a social relation, a relation different from that enjoined by the primitive form of the struggle for existence: kill, eat, destroy. Henceforth man was bound to man. The social body was formed." Man had to discover the law governing the new relation, and he found it at last in the first flashes of justice and liberty. "What, then, is this your _laissez-faire_, your law of supply and demand, but the pure and simple expression of force? Right overcomes force: that is the principle of civilisation. Your law once formulated, let us set to work against barbarism!" All that is telling criticism; though to-day it reads a bit antiquated in view of the revolt everywhere against both these catch-phrases and the anarchist chaos which they connote. But here again Clemenceau, with all his acuteness and brilliancy, displays the need for a guiding historic and economic theory--the sociologic theory which scientific Socialism supplies. It was not justice or liberty which created slavery, or destroyed slavery, but economic development and social necessity. The cult of abstraction leads to social revolt but not to material revolution.