The Congress of Bourges adopted a resolution which was to concentrate the attention of the Confederation for the next two years on one question: an eight-hour working day. The Committee appointed by the Congress to consider the question reported that two ways of obtaining an eight-hour day had been indicated. One proposed to prepare a bill to be presented to the public authorities and to organize public meetings in order to show the government that public opinion demanded the passage of the law. This method was rejected by the Committee because ever since 1889, workingmen had presented such petitions to the public authorities on the first of May, but without any results whatsoever. On the contrary, the other "direct" method which recommended the workingmen to "hold aloof" from the public authorities, and to exert all possible pressure "on their adversaries" was adopted by the Committee. The Committee argued that the experience with the employment agencies had shown that this method gave better results. The report of the Committee read: If the recent campaign has resulted in the suppression of the employment bureaus, it is because the movement was becoming dangerous. Every day employment bureaus were abolished, anonymous violence was committed against the owners of the offices (_placeurs_), a considerable number of shops were damaged, numerous collisions took place between the police and the workingmen, Paris was in a state of siege, and it was in order to calm this agitation that Parliament voted a law making it permissive for the municipalities to abolish the employment bureaus.[195] [195] _XIV Congrès Corporatif_ (Bourges, 1904), pp. 205-6. The Committee, therefore, recommended that the same method be used to obtain an eight-hour day, that big manifestations be organized all over France on the 1st of May, 1905, and that afterwards an active propaganda be carried on by a special commission appointed for that purpose by the Confederal Committee "in order that beginning with the 1st of May, 1906, no workingman should consent to work more than eight hours a day nor for a wage below the minimum established by the interested organizations."[196] The recommendation of the Committee was adopted by the Congress with an amendment of Pouget which still more emphasized the "direct" method to be used. [196] _Ibid._, p. 207.