eive great
extension. It provides in substance for the fixing of a minimum wage
in the clothing trade or _any other_ trade specified by the Home
Secretary. The obvious probability is that it will, as in New Zealand,
soon be extended to all trades. This wage is to be fixed by a board of
arbitrators with the usual representation given to each side, and it
will doubtless work, as it does in New Zealand, for the elevation of
wages, as such commissions rarely reduce them.

[Footnote 1: This, the Trade Boards Act, the 22d chapter of the ninth
of Edward VII., enacted October 20, 1909, took effect January 1, 1910.
The act applies without specification to ready-made and wholesale
tailoring, the making of boxes, machine-made lace and chain-making,
and may be applied to other trades by provisional order of the Board
of Trade, when confirmed by Parliament. The Board of Trade may make
such provisional order applying the act to any specified trade if
they are satisfied that the rate of wages prevailing in that trade is
exceptionally low as compared with that in other employments, and
that the other circumstances of the trade are such as to render the
application of the act expedient; and in like manner they may make a
provisional order providing that the act shall cease to apply to any
trade to which it already was applied. Section 2 provides that the
Board of Trade shall establish one or more trade boards for any trade
to which the act is to be applied, with separate trade boards
for Ireland. These trade boards (section 11) consist of members
representing employers and members representing workers in equal
proportions, and of certain appointed members. Women are eligible,
and the representative members may be elected or nominated as the
regulations determine. The chairman and secretary are appointed by the
Board of Trade. Such boards are given power to fix minimum rates of
wages both for time and piece work, which thereafter must be observed
under penalty. There is further a machinery for the establishment of
district trade committees. All regulations made by such Boards
of Trade shall be laid as soon as possible before both houses of
Parliament; but there does not appear to be any other appeal.]

Co-operation and profit-sharing, the great hope of the middle years
of the nineteenth century, has made little progress in England or the
United States since. Such successful experiments as now exist consist
principally in offering to th