of compromise to meet
the objections of the backward States that the provisions laid down, had
they been accepted without modification, would have tended to depress
rather than to raise the standard of international opinion on the
questions to be affected by them. We need not, therefore, feel much
regret that the war has swept them, with so many other pre-war schemes,
into the wastepaper-basket. The vast question of minimum rates of wages
and their regulation by the State is obviously still too much in the
experimental stage of its solution (even in this country where
experiments have been boldest) for it to be possible to make it the
subject of international agreement. As a subject of international
discussion it has had its place, and an increasingly important place,
for at least eight years past in the studies of the sections and the
discussions of the Association meeting. Upon no question has public
international opinion ripened more rapidly. In 1906, at Geneva, where
the conditions of home workers were first under discussion, a few daring
delegates met in corners and whispered under their breath the words
'Wages board'. By 1910, at Lugano, an English woman delegate was elected
joint president of the Association's Home Work Committee, 'as a
recognition of Great Britain's achievement in passing the first Trade
Boards Act'; at Zurich, in 1912, a two-day conference on the legal
minimum wage preceded the meeting of the Association, and a whole sheaf
of minimum wage bills introduced by private members into the Chambers of
different countries was before the delegates, together with an official
measure of the French Government. To watch this change of attitude was
to see international thought in the making. To appreciate its full
significance, it is necessary to bear in mind the different aspects
presented by the 'sweating' difficulty in this country and in the great
industrial States of the Continent. The French or German social reformer
sees it mainly, if no longer exclusively, as a problem of home work. Now
home work in Great Britain is a by-product of a strictly limited class
of industries, affecting a comparatively small class of the population;
in France and Germany it forms a highly important section of the general
industrial structure, it is interwoven, to an extent rarely grasped by
British students, with the life, and habits, and productive power of the
nation. Much more courage--and greater freedom from prejudice--