If the employers were in the wrong, as it appears they were, then to call out the military to protect those miners who showed themselves ready to make immediate terms with injustice was, however good the intention, to take sides against the main body of the men. So it seemed to these latter. When, therefore, the soldiers defended the non-strikers, the strikers assailed the military, who had not attacked them. Clemenceau accordingly decided that the strikers had broken the law, as undoubtedly they had, by stoning and injuring the servants of the State, who were upholding the law as it stood. The truth is that, so long as these antagonistic sections exist among the working class, and persist in fighting one another, it is practically impossible for the State not to intervene in order to keep the peace. There may be no sympathy with blacklegs, but the Minister of the Interior could scarcely be blamed for protecting them against an infuriated mob, which would probably have killed them, or for insisting upon the release of those whom the strikers had seized. That the temper of the crowd had become highly dangerous was apparent a little later, when the Socialist Mayor was knocked down as he was trying to calm them. All this rendered M. Clemenceau's second and third visits to the scene of class warfare far more stormy than the first. Owing to the horror and hatred created by the avoidable holocaust in the Courrières mines, and the further discovery that engineers appointed by the State had played into the hands of the employers, the situation got worse from day to day. The strike itself was not only an effort to get more wages, but a declaration of hostility to the mine-owners, and those of the miners' own class who showed any tenderness towards them, or were ready to take work under them. Their own leaders and representatives had no longer any influence with the men or control over them. M. Basly, the deputy who acted throughout for the miners, had as little power over the strikers as anybody else. The whole movement was taking an anarchist turn. Also, agents were at work among them both from the reactionary and the revolutionary side whose main object, for very different reasons, was to foster disturbance and influence passion. Foreign emissaries likewise were said to be at work.