ATELIERS NATIONAUX, or NATIONAL WORKSHOPS, a term under which such institutions became renowned in connection with the French revolution of 1848. In almost all countries and ages, there have been projects for organizing labor under public authority, designed generally for the benevolent purpose of obviating the distress caused by casual depressions in trade. However distinctly the laws of political economy were laid down on the point, it could always be said that these were merely theoretic, and therefore this one instance of practical experiment, however calamitous in its day, left behind it a valuable lesson. The principles of political economy on this matter are that competition only can fix the extent to which labor is required in any department, and the rate at which it must be remunerated; that it is this competition which gives the workman a stimulus to labor effectively and profitably; and that if this stimulus were withdrawn, and all were paid alike, whether they worked well or ill, all would work ill, the public would be losers, and the large fund out of which laborers are supported under the competitive system would cease to exist. Immediately on the formation of the provisional government in Feb., 1848, a permanent department was established, called The Committee of the Gorernment for theWorkmen. This establish ment acted on the doctrine that all workmen were entitled to have a living provided for them on a certain uniform scale. They did not forcibly abolish private employment, but they held out inducements which made workmen leave and employers break up the existing establishments. Consequently, nearly all the Parisian workmen threw them selves on the government, and others flocked in from other quarters in numbers. It was found that these crowds of men, who claimed the privilege of employment by the state, had very little idea of the duty of working, even were there distinct employment for them. But when the body had increased to considerably above a hundred thousand,
the government found that they had this ever-increasing mass to feed, and nothing to feed them with, since trade thus meddled with was in reality ruined. It was conse quently found necessary to put an end to the system, and the result was the bloody battle of Paris, which brought about the restoration of despotism. One incidental experiment will perhaps best explain the ruinous tendency of the whole system. In the Hotel Clichy, 1500 tailors were assembled to make uniforms for the new garde mobile. The men were to receive among them for the completed work as much as an army contractor would have demanded. In the meantime they were paid two francs a day of subsistence money; the rest was to be divided among them at the end. The men were buoyed up with the notion that they were to receive not only their own proper wages, but the indefinite and enormous sum which they supposed to form the profit of the contractor, forgetting that such profit seldom exceeds about three per cent. Their disappointment was great when they found nothing to divide. There was, in fact, a loss. When paid their two francs— not much more than half what they obtained when employed by a contractor—they were paid more than the value of their labor and the profit of the transaction to boot. The reason is pretty obvious. Each man working for himself, and paid for his work on the competitive system, exerted himself; but when one man's exertions went virtually for nothing, unless he got the 1499 others to exert themselves to the same amount, all were alike lazy.