The decree relative to the deserted workshops made restitution to the mass, dispossessed since centuries, of the property of their own labour. A commission of inquiry named by the Syndical Chambers was to draw up the statistics and the inventory of the deserted workshops to be given back into the hands of the workmen. Thus "the expropriators were in their turn expropriated." The nineteenth century will not pass away without having begun this revolution; every progress in machinery brings it nearer. The more the exploitation of labour concentrates itself in a few hands, the more the working multitude are massed together and disciplined. Soon, conscious and united, the producing class will, like the young France of 1789, have to confront but a handful of privileged appropriators. The most inveterate revolutionary Socialist is the monopolist. No doubt this decree contained voids and stood in need of an elaborate explanation, especially on the subject of the co-operative societies to which the workshops were to be handed over. It was no more than the other applicable in this hour of strife, and required a number of supplementary decrees; but it at least gave some idea of the claims of the working-class, and had it nothing else on its credit side, by the mere creation of the Commission of Labour and Exchange, the revolution of the 18th March would have done more for the workmen than all the bourgeois Assemblies of France since the 5th May, 1789. The delegation of Labour wanted to look carefully into the contracts of the commissariat. It demonstrated that in the case of contracts adjudicated to the lowest bidder, the running down of prices falls upon wages and not on the profit of the contractor. "And the Commune is blind enough to lend itself to such manoeuvres," said the report, "and at this very moment, when the workingman dares death rather than submit any longer to this exploitation." The delegate demanded that the estimate of charges should specify the cost of labour, that the orders should by preference be given to the workmen's corporations, and the contracting prices fixed by arbitration between the commissariat, the Syndical Chamber of the corporation, and the delegate of Labour. To overlook the financial administration of all the delegations, the Council in the month of May instituted a superior commission charged to audit their accounts. It decreed that functionaries or contractors guilty of peculation or theft should be punished with death.