'Brother Doumer, as I have told you, was made a deputy in 1888. After taking his seat he was made a member of the Committee which has been conducting an "extra-parliamentary enquiry" on the subject of co-operative societies among working-men for work and for production, and with the question of contracts between employers and working-men for participation in the profits of industrial enterprises. 'This committee, he says in his Report, took the matter in hand in 1883, and spent _five years_ over it, getting its project of a law on these subjects into shape only in 1888, on the eve of the election of a new Chamber of Deputies! 'During these five long years, according to Brother Doumer, the Republic was content to let co-operation among working-men take its chances under a law passed in 1867, under the Second Empire. And yet, according still to Brother Doumer, the idea of co-operation among the working classes was an exclusively French idea, and not only an exclusively French idea, but an idea which came to birth only under the Republic of 1848 (he glides silently over the famous experiment of the National workshops of 1848). Is it not really remarkable that the Republicans of 1879 should have been willing to leave this "beautiful and generous" idea at the mercy of a law passed by the Empire, and which--still according to Brother Doumer--left the co-operative societies of working-men without privileges, without favour, and with no particular facilities for constituting themselves and for keeping themselves alive? 'I say the "Republicans of 1879" advisedly, for you will see, if you look at page 5 of this delightful Report, that--still according to Brother Doumer--we really had no republic, in fact, in France till 1879. These are his own words; "the Republic, having been reconstituted, (after the fall of the Empire) _first in name_, and afterwards in fact, a new impulse was given to co-operation. The ill-will towards all societies of working-men of the Governments of May 21 and of May 16, retarded the movement. It was only in 1879 that, the wounds of the country having been healed and liberty reconquered, we had leisure to occupy ourselves with the question of the organisation of labour." 'Is not this charming? Really, when one remembers what the "wounds of the country" were in 1871, and how those "wounds" were got first through the collapse of the wretched Government of the National Defence, and then through the Commune of Paris, the Governments of May 21 and May 16 may be credited with having done a good piece of work by "healing those wounds" and by "reconquering liberty." Is not this plain? 'But the "wounds having been healed," and "liberty having been reconquered," the true Republic, still according to Brother Doumer, was set free in 1879, to occupy itself with the question of the organisation of labour. Very good.