was
required in the one case than the other. The remarkable advance towards
definite action on the part of the State in relation to the
establishment of minimum rates for home workers which took place between
1906 and 1913 could not have been achieved in so short a time but for
the labours of certain voluntary associations led by men of insight,
candour, and indefatigable devotion. In this connexion the pioneer work
of the late Comte de Mun and Professor Raoul Jay has been of inestimable
value. Realizing themselves, as did few unofficial reformers, the wide
nature of the movement in which they had engaged and the impossibility
of confining it in its sweep and effects to a section of the manual
workers, they succeeded in gradually bringing home to the ablest among
their fellow-workers the necessity for closing the gulf which French
mental habit had fixed between factory and home workers and preparing
to treat both classes on a similar footing of equity. In
Germany,--where, as we might expect, there was less forwardness to
launch unofficial schemes and a disposition to work rather from the
first through authoritative channels--experiments were being made under
the Home Work Act which, if of little value in themselves, seemed the
earnest of much better things.

If this result only had been attained, the meetings of the Association
and the labours of the sections would not have been in vain. But far
more was in process of achievement when the work of the Association was
interrupted by the catastrophe of the European War. The adoption in all
industrial countries of the 'English week', with its half-holiday so
much coveted by the continental worker--the establishment of a uniform
working day--the gradual introduction of the eight-hours shift into such
'continuous industries' as steel-smelting and glass-blowing--an
international agreement to eliminate the use of lead from many branches
of the pottery industry and to limit and safeguard its use in all
others,--these were only some among the questions which study and
investigation and discussion had brought to a stage at which the
Association could look upon them as fit matter for potential
international conventions in August 1914. Now that its activities are,
for the most part, in suspense, it is well to remember that its greatest
achievement was the proof, again and again renewed, that it is possible
for persons of twenty different nationalities, holding the most diverse
opin