Clémenceau brought in a bill designed to relieve the situation by fixing the status of the state employees. The men were to be given the right of association for "professional" purposes only,--i.e., for improving their efficiency,--but were absolutely prohibited from striking and from joining other unions. A comprehensive civil-service reform was embodied in the bill, aimed to prevent the men from becoming victims of political abuse. Before the bill could be thoroughly considered the Clémenceau ministry fell and a new Prime Minister was called to the helm. This was none other than Aristide Briand, the first Socialist Prime Minister in European history. His former comrades had long before this disowned him, and he was soon to participate in events that would forever alienate them. He had been a furious Socialist, an anti-militarist, and defender of the general strike. In the Socialist congress at Paris, 1899, he said: "The general strike has the seductive advantage that it is nothing but the practice of an intangible right. It is a revolution which arises within the law. The workingman refuses to carry the yoke of misery any farther and begins the revolution in the field of his legal rights. The illegality must begin with the capitalist class, if it allows itself to be provoked into destroying a right which they themselves have professed to be holy." At the same meeting he expressed himself on the soldiery as follows: "If the command to fire is given, if the officers are stubborn enough to try to force the soldiers against their will, then the guns might be fired, but perhaps not in the direction the officers thought." Briand repeated these sentiments at the Amsterdam congress in 1903. This was the man whom destiny had chosen to lead the French government against the organized revolt of government employees. On assuming the premiership he announced his program: 1. Parliamentary and electoral reform, he said, were of the first necessity, but he deemed it best to experiment with the new methods of balloting locally before adopting a national system of reform. 2. A graduated income tax. 3. Fixing the legal status of state servants. 4. Old-age pension. October 10, 1910, the men employed on the Northern Railway went out on strike. Before they did so they had a conference with the Prime Minister and the Minister of Public Works, Millerand, requesting that they try to arrange a meeting between the men and the officials of the railway. The ministry offered its services to the railway directors, but they refused to meet the strikers, although Briand had volunteered to preside at such a meeting. The Prime Minister told the men firmly that the government could not tolerate a suspension of railway service, that it would exert its authority to prevent it, and that it relied on the common sense and patriotism of the men to prevent it.