At the congress of the party held at St. Etienne two years after this programme was adopted, M. Brousse, a medical practitioner in Paris, and a member of the Town Council, who had already shown signs of disputing the leadership of M. Guesde, carried by a vote of thirty-six to twenty-seven a motion for introducing some modifications, and the minority seceded and set up a separate organization. In spite of repeated efforts at reconciliation, the two sections of the French socialists have never united again or been able even to work together temporarily at an election. Besides personal jealousies, there are most important differences of tendency keeping them apart. The Guesdists accept the policy of Karl Marx as well as his economic doctrine: the universal revolution, and the centralized socialist State, as well as the theory of surplus value and the right to the full product of labour. The Broussists, on the other hand, believe in decentralization, and would prefer municipalizing industries to nationalizing them. They are for giving the commune control of its own police, its own soldiers, its own civil administration, its own judiciary; and they think the _régime_ of collective property can be best brought in and best carried on by local bodies. They would have the towns take over their own gas, light, and water supply, their omnibus and tramway traffic; but they would have them take over also many of the common industries which never tend towards monopoly or even call for any special control. They would municipalize, for example, the bakehouses and the mealshops and the granaries, apparently as supplying the necessaries of life, and they would have various other branches of industry undertaken by the towns to a certain limited extent, in order to provide suitable work for the unemployed. Then in 1887 they added a fresh plank to their platform, and asked for the establishment by municipalities, on public money or credit, of productive associations to be owned--not, like the other undertakings, by the municipality, but--by the working men employed in them. This is a reappearance of the old policy of Lassalle, with the difference that the productive associations are to be founded on municipal and not on State credit; and the reappearance is not surprising in France, because co-operative production has, on the whole, been more successful in that country than in any other. Then another of their demands is, that all public contracts should be subjected to such conditions as to wages and hours of labour as the workmen's syndicates approve; and in Paris they have already succeeded in obtaining this concession from the Town Council so far as municipal contracts are concerned. These workmen's syndicates are trade unions, which aim only at bettering the position of their members without theoretical prepossessions, but are quite as bold in their demands on the public powers as the socialists, and apparently more successful. In 1885 their