France was passing through a very difficult period. Whatever view a thoroughgoing Socialist may take as to the need for a wider general policy than that adopted by Clemenceau, it is not easy to see how, the French people being unprepared to accept a purely Labour or Socialist Government, the Republic could have been peacefully maintained, but for the cool determination of the Radical Republican at the head of affairs. Scarcely a day passed without some fresh economic and social conflicts that called for prompt action. These, however, arose in provinces and cities and under conditions where the antagonism between wage-earners and employers, between capital and labour, in the ordinary way offered no exceptional features for the statesman. But in the spring and summer of 1907 a more complicated and dangerous uprising, which developed into little short of an attempt at an Anarchist-communist, anti-Republican revolution, broke out in the South of France among the wine-growers. The peasants of the districts round Narbonne and Montpellier, together with many of the inhabitants of those towns, who were themselves dependent upon the wine industry, made, in fact, a desperate local attack upon the existing Government of France. Disaffection had been growing for a long time and was due to a series of economic and agricultural troubles among the wine-growers, which successive Ministries had not understood, far less attempted to cope with. It had its direct origin in a natural cause. This cause was the appearance in the Bordeaux country of the deadly enemy of all _vignerons_, large and small--the much-dreaded phylloxera. The vineyards of the Gironde were devastated and the famous clarets shipped from Bordeaux ceased to be the product of Bordeaux grapes. Thereupon the inferior vintages of the Midi came into abnormal demand. But the wine-producers of the West were not wholly defeated, even while the phylloxera continued his ravages and no method of checking the mischief had been discovered. There are ways and means of meeting even such a calamity. "Would your lordship like madeira served with that course?" said a butler to a well-known bishop who was giving a dinner, in days long before the war, to a number of his clergy. "Madeira!" was the reply, in great surprise. "Why, I have not a single bottle in my cellar." "Oh, yes, my lord, you have. _Monseigneur oublie peut-être que je suis de Cette._" Madeira, so the story goes, was duly served. But Cette is not the only town in France where the art of blending and refining wine for foreign and even home palates has been brought to a high pitch. At any rate, during the phylloxera period, Australian, Algerian, Spanish and other wines, which previously had been regarded contemptuously by foreign and French consumers of claret, were, it was alleged, imported at Bordeaux in great quantity and came out again with the old familiar Bordeaux labels and duly impressed corks.