Advances repayable without interest, for example, are made to workmen who wish to buy or to build houses for themselves. These advances in 1888 stood in the books of the company at a total of 1,446,604 francs, of which 1,345,463 fr. 91 c. had been repaid, leaving a balance due to the company then of 101,140 fr. 9 c. With these funds workmen of the company had bought or built for themselves 741 houses, being thus visibly, and unanswerably to the extent of the value of these houses, participants in the profits of Anzin. Not less real is the participation of the workmen in the profits through the various beneficial and educational institutions which I visited with M. Guary, or with his son, and of which I shall presently speak. The concessions now possessed by the Anzin Company are eight in number: those of Vieux-Conde, Fresnes, Raismes, Anzin, Saint-Saulve, Denain, Odomez, and Hasnon. These concessions cover, in the form of an irregular polygon, about thirty continuous kilometres of territory, stretching from Somain to the Belgian frontier, with a breadth varying from seven to twelve kilometres. The total area amounts to 2,805,450 hectares. Of these concessions the four first-named were the original basis of the organisation of the company under the controlling influence of the Prince de Croy-Solre at the Chateau of l'Hermitage which still belongs to his family near Conde. The others have been acquired since 1807; Hasnon, the latest, which covers about 1,500 hectares, in 1843. But--and this is a notable fact--the Anzin Company from the beginning to this day has been organised and managed under the original statutes of 1757. Under these statutes, devised and drawn up absolutely under the _ancien regime_, and by an association of practical engineers and enterprising adventurers with feudal seigneurs, this great company has, for more than a century and a quarter, administered with signal success, and still administers, what may be fairly called an industrial republic, carrying on its affairs and developing its resources in the face of the enormous changes of modern life, and maintaining here, under what are thought to be the most trying conditions of labour, a most remarkable measure of harmony between an ever-increasing nation of labourers and a strictly limited administration, composed not only of capitalists, but of hereditary capitalists. What becomes of the rights of man and of the Abbe Sieyes, and of the Tiers-Etat, which 'ought to be everything,' and of the 'immortal principles of 1789,' in the face of all this?