But stay a moment: here is M. Jaurès. He has a word to say. What are you doing, M. Clemenceau? You are outraging all your own principles. You are interfering with that very right to strike which you yourself have declared to be sacred. You are using the military discipline of the comrades of the men out on strike against the electrical companies, to render their protest nugatory, by employing the sappers against them. You have, in fact, called out the powers of the State to crush the workers in a particular industry. If you were true to yourself, you would convert the electrical supply of Paris now in the hands of greedy monopolists into a public service, and give the strikers every satisfaction. That is the only real solution of social anarchy. To him Clemenceau: "But this was not merely a strike or a limited liability class war against employers. It was a bitter fight between two irreconcilable antagonists against inoffensive passers-by. The people of Paris, for whom I am concerned, had nothing to do with the matter. I myself knew nothing about the decision to strike till my own work was rendered impossible by the sudden infliction of darkness upon me by these resuscitated Joshuas. Not only was the general security threatened, as I have declared, but the lives of your own clients, Jaurès, were threatened by immersion in a flood below ground. The inundation of the Metropolitan (the Underground Railway) had already begun. The workers of Paris who used that means of communication in order to return to their work would most certainty have been drowned owing to the suspension of electrical pumps and lifts, had not the sappers and the firemen, both of them sets of public functionaries, rushed at once to the rescue. Were the workmen of Paris engaged in other departments to be allowed to perish, with the State standing by, wringing its hands in hopeless ineptitude, while the electrical engineers got the better of their masters in a dispute about wages? This was a practical question which I had to decide at once. I decided in favour of the inoffensive people of Paris and against the electrical engineers on strike." Taking a wide view of the whole question, I hold Jaurès's opinion to be the right one. But Clemenceau had to deal with an immediate practical difficulty of a very serious kind indeed. The lights went out at six o'clock. Night was coming on. No time could be lost in negotiating with the engineers. Still less was nightfall the period when a public service could be instituted in hot haste. The matter was settled in that form and for that occasion. But none the less the real point at issue was not thus easily disposed of. Clemenceau was right in preventing Paris from being left all night in darkness. Jaurès was right in claiming that the State should have a more definite and consistent policy than that of dealing with differences between wage-earners and employers by such hand-to-mouth methods.