confident of producing a working substitute, they did
not pretend to offer in every case the precise quality which seemed to
be the special gift of the German, or Belgian, or Austrian trader.
Perhaps it was not after all only sheer laziness on the part of the
British manufacturer, and sheer lack of patriotism on the part of
British governments which induced our commercial leaders to concentrate
on one field of production and abandon another. To each nation, as to
each man, his gift. Some realization of this law may have come
instinctively to practical workers engaged in practical tasks.

If the organizers of production among us have not been forward in the
past to promote international action in the matter of labour
legislation, this is not from any failure to realize the effect of
inequality of industrial conditions upon nations competing in the
markets of the world. This effect was naturally greatest in cases where
the countries concerned were geographically contiguous and engaged in
direct rivalry with one another in respect of manufactures falling under
the same trade category. Here is the perfect case of competition, in
which any circumstance tending to lessen production on the one side is
immediately counted as an advantage to the other. But the pressure is
felt even where the territory of the rival is situated at the other side
of the world, even where the article produced belongs to a different
class of manufacture. In normal times long distance transport is easy
and long distance freight rates cheap, so that the question of distance,
although still to be reckoned with, is no longer a determining factor in
the sum of consideration. Again, the network of prices which controls
the ultimate cost of production of any finished article is so complex
that it is difficult in many cases to rule out this or that set of
industrial conditions in one country as being without importance for a
given factory in another. The price of a pair of corsets sold retail in
Paris may have been subtly influenced by a strike of smelters of iron
ore in Silesia; and your china tea-set may be dearer to-morrow by reason
of a sudden outbreak of foot and mouth disease among the herds of the
Argentine. Quite naturally, therefore, it has come about that
manufacturers, in opposing proposals to make existing labour legislation
either more stringent in detail or wider-reaching in scope, have put
forward, as their principal objection, the plea that su