I have given a fairly detailed account of these affrays--they were no less--between Clemenceau and the Socialists because they are of great importance, not only as explaining the vehement hostility which has since existed between them, but because the points at issue affect every civilised country to a greater or less degree. Capital and labour, capitalists and wage-earners, are at variance everywhere. Their antagonism can no more be averted or bridged over than could the class struggle between land and slave-owners and their chattel slaves, or the nobles and their serfs. Only the slow process of social evolution leading up to revolution can solve the problem. Meanwhile, combination on the one side is met by combination on the other. Outside political action, which is ineffective until the workers themselves understand how to use it, there is no weapon for the wage-earners or wage-slaves but the strike. They suffer, even when they win, far more than the capitalists or employers, who are only deprived of the right to make profits out of their hands, while those same hands are undergoing the pangs of hunger and every sort of privation, not only for themselves but for their wives and children. Arbitration, when the social conditions have reached the stage where this is feasible, may postpone the crucial battle and smooth over the matter temporarily; but it can do no more than that. A step towards this arbitration was made under M. Millerand's measure declaring strikes illegal unless decreed by a majority of the employees upon a referendum, and the enactment of an arbitration clause. But when strikes actually take place and the men's blood is up, then comes the real tug-of-war. Should the State--obviously the capitalist State to-day--interfere to keep order and maintain the right to work for non-strikers, or should it refrain from interference altogether? When Jaurès and the Socialists were challenged to say what they would do under the circumstances, they failed to answer, as already recorded. This put them in a weak position. An opposition must have a policy which it would be prepared to act upon if it took office. Socialism, however desirable, could not be realised all at once. But it was open to Clemenceau, as to any other Minister entrusted with full powers by the State, _to bring at least as much pressure to bear upon the capitalists and employers as upon the strikers_, and to insist that they should yield to the demands of the men and continue to work the mines, out of which, by the purchase of the labour-power of the pitmen, they had derived such huge profits. This course was not adopted by the Minister of the Interior, nor does it seem to have been demanded by Jaurès. The troubles in the wine districts arose from different economic causes, and had to be dealt with in a different way. But the truth is that, in periods of transition, no Government can go right. It was Clemenceau's lot to have to govern at such a period of transition.