THE NATIONAL WORKSHOPS OF 1848.
[To THE EDITOR Or THE " SPECTATOR."3 SIR,—I cannot imagine that any one who has read M. Emile Thomas's " History of the National Workshops " could pay any serious attention to the story that they were purposely organised in such a manner as to discredit the movement. I have not the book by me at the moment, but my remembrance of the circumstances is somewhat as follows. When the project was first in the air, M. Thomas was so certain that he saw his way to make a success of it that he waited on some of the members of the Provisional Government with whom he was acquainted and laid his scheme before them. They went into it, and came to the conclusion that it offered as fair chances of success as anything that they could devise. They accordingly adopted it and appointed him Director. As the essential impossibility of anything but failure day by day more and more clearly manifested itself, one finds an unmistakable note of keen and genuine disappointment in M. Thomas's account of the matter. The trouble was that employment at the national workshops was preferred to work for private employers, even when the wages were no better, simply because the State employe reckoned himself his own master. The private workshops consequently were day by day more and more deserted, and the applicants at the State workshops mounted up by tens of thousands every week. The same thing, that the trouble lay in details not in essentials,
has been said of Law's Mississippi scheme. We are told by the admirers of inconvertible paper that its principle was right enough, and that it would have come out all right if it had not been for the fact that the Regent Orleans was virtually a swindler. Probably, indeed, we should find that pretty much the same thing has been said of every project that has failed notoriously owing to the fact that it contained in itself from the first the inevitable conditions of failure.—
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