marching or fighting for from eight to twelve hours, and they would find a good meal of meat and vegetables awaiting them. It was rare to see a man fall out.

Officers

There is a Military Academy at Belgrade which supplies the greater part of the officers of the Army. Those of the artillery and engineers being entirely recruited from this source. The age of entry is seventeen and the course lasts four years. The education is thoroughly practical, but owing to a variety of circumstances the cadets are too much given to politics, and, like their confrères at the college in Sofia, have played their part in more than one drama which has had for its object the upsetting of a dynasty. The stamp of officer turned out is undeniably good, and so far as quality is concerned the Servian officer is undoubtedly the equal of those in the other Balkan armies. There are, unfortunately, too few of them, and at present there is a wide cleavage between the two parties in the kingdom.

Servia claims to possess close on 300,000 trained soldiers available for war; whatever may be the actual numbers, and by some the figures are put as low as 220,000, there is no doubt that she has a sufficient number to bring the Army up to a war footing and to supply the wastage of a campaign. The supply of rifles is, however, dangerously short, and two years must elapse before the artillery has received its complete equipment of Schneider-Canet guns.

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

The following table gives the actual force that each nation can dispose of, as far as I have been able to ascertain :

The present situation is one that gives rise to much food for thought. The political condition of affairs in the Near East changes from day to day. Friendly Powers of to-day will be bitter enemies to-morrow. A few short years ago war between Bulgaria and Roumania seemed

inevitable, now they are fast friends. Three years have scarcely elapsed since Kings Peter and Ferdinand embraced with effusion, whilst the press of Belgrade and Sofia were loud in favour of the union of the Slavs in the Balkans. About the same time Athens received a deputation of Roumanians with delirious enthusiasm. Now all diplomatic relations between the two countries have been suspended. In 1897 Greek was flying at the throat of Turk with frenzied cries as to his indefeasible claim to Byzantium, now it would seem that Greece is ready to fight by the side of the Turk against Slav aggression. Within the past few weeks we have seen Turkey converted into a Constitutional monarchy, Bosnia and Herzegovina annexed by Austria, Bulgaria declared a kingdom, and Crete throw off the last vestige of the Turkish yoke; so that it needs a brave man to prophesy as to what the morrow may bring forth.

Whether the future brings peace or war, I am convinced that Turkey is in a position to hold her own in the Balkans. Her Armies are ready to take the field. Her Fleet commands the sea. The Bulgarian Army is spoken of with respect, and I have the highest opinion of its officers and men, but to assert that Bulgaria can place 300,000 men in the field is to talk vainly. In these days of long extended lines a plentiful supply of highly trained officers is more than ever necessary. Bulgaria does not possess these. I doubt whether she has more than enough for 188 battalions of her Active Army, leaving the remaining 100 for Home Defence. The Greek Army must for the next few years be considered une quantité négligeable. The Roumanian Army is in all respects, except with regard to its artillery, ready to take the field, but Servia must like Greece be put out of court for a war against Turkey. She has yet to receive the greater part of her new quick-firing guns, and her supply of small arms is not sufficient for the equipment of the whole of her infantry.

In 1877 Turkey was able to hold Russia at bay for nine long months, then she possessed no railways in Asia, and but the one short line in Europe connecting Constantinople with Philipopolis. Now the Asiatic railways have brought the headquarters of the Redif divisions of the first three Army corps within four days reach of the Bulgarian frontier. The European railways run parallel to and behind that frontier. Military roads have been pushed up to the north, rivers have been bridged, field-works thrown up at all strategic points, depôts of arms and provisions constructed, and a plan of campaign drawn up in collaboration with Field-Marshal Von der Goltz which provides for every eventuality. The new mobilisation scheme provides for the massing of 350,000 men on the Bulgarian frontier within one week of the Declaration of War, and a study of the distribution of troops in the Near East clearly shows the immense superiority possessed by Turkey.

There are two factors that make for peace in addition to the laudable efforts of the British Cabinet. One is the determination of His Majesty the Sultan not to be drawn into hostilities, and the second the fact that the armies of the more bellicose of the States are not prepared for war.

Volo.

C. B. NORMAN.

P.S.-I venture to add a few words on the composition of the Austro-Hungarian armies. The active army of the Dual Monarchy is under a common Minister of War (Reichs Kriegministerium); the Landwehr of each nation are under separate Ministers of Defence in Vienna and Buda Pesth. Austria is divided into eight and Hungary into seven military districts, each providing an army corps to the active army, whilst in addition Austria furnishes 115 battalions of Landwehr infantry, and six of Landwehr cavalry; Hungary furnishing ninety-four battalions of infantry and ten regiments of Landwehr hussars. The active army consists of 110 regiments of infantry, of four battalions each, with twenty-seven rifle battalions; the cavalry of forty-two regiments of six field and one depot squadron each; the artillery of 240 horse and field batteries, sixteen mountain and forty-five Howitzer batteries. The infantry arm is the 315-inch Mannlicher, the field artillery being equipped with a 3-inch quick-firing gun and the Howitzer batteries with a 4-7 or 6-inch Howitzer. There are four regiments of infantry recruited in the recently annexed provinces, with headquarters at Vienna, Gratz and Buda Pesth; only one battalion of each regiment is permitted to serve in Bosnia-Herzegovina. So far as is known at present the garrison in those provinces consists of thirty-five battalions and eleven mountain batteries, but as the army corps at Hermanstadt, Temesvar, Gratz, and Agram have been warned for mobilisation, Austria is able to move immense forces to the southward without delay.

SWEATING AND WAGES BOARDS

A SERIES of dramatic exhibitions has revealed to an easy-going public the existence of a vast amount of labour carried on in over-crowded homes, by women and children working their very lives out for wages which do not suffice to replace the daily wear and tear of life, and under conditions of ceaseless and heartless struggle with starvation, with sickness, and with filth. These workers do not share in our social progress. Their wages do not increase; their hours of drudgery do not diminish; life comes to them with no fresh brightness. They live on the margin of industry, picking up a precarious living, and their children, under-fed, ill-cared for, uneducated, over-worked, are, in due time, launched out into Society, incapable as workers and dangerous as citizens, the recruits which perpetuate the ranks of casual labour and unemployable men. Factory inspectors never visit them because no Factory or Workshop Law has yet been devised to deal with the complicated and elusive conditions of their work. They are supposed to be entered upon lists in the possession of District Councils, but every return of the lists published by the Home Office shows that these are imperfect, and that often little trouble is taken to make them accurate. Sanitary law is applied most imperfectly to their home conditions. They baffle school attendance officers. They are on the outskirts of social organisation and are not subject to its conditions nor reached by its laws.

This is not by any means the first time that a consciousness of this class has troubled the public. Every now and again some scandal of clothing made in fever dens has agitated us, and in 1890 Lord Dunraven's House of Lords Committee presented a report valuable alike for its facts and suggestions, which was much discussed at the time, which was imperfectly used by Parliament and the Home Office, and which was speedily forgotten. Since then an important report on home work was published by the Women's Industrial Council (in 1897) based upon a careful inquiry into some hundreds of individual cases, and a similar investigation was conducted in Scotland by the Glasgow Council for Women's Trades. But the public remained indifferent, until in 1906 the exhibitions to which I have referred were begun, and certain Australasian experiments had added a new

practical interest to the problem. A Select Committee was appointed in 1907 by the House of Commons to inquire and report upon the subject, whilst Mr. Aves was sent by the Home Office to Australasia to study, amongst other things, the working of anti-sweating legislation there. The reports of Mr. Aves and the Select Committee have just been published, and Parliament may now be expected to do something on the matter. But what ought it to do?

I.

As a preliminary to any action, one would have expected a careful investigation, such as was conducted by the Dunraven Committee, into two fundamental matters. First, to what extent does the evil exist, and, more particularly, is it greater or less than it was when the last inquiry was made? And, second, why does it exist, and what

industrial and economic causes contribute to it? The Select Committee, however, has given us no information on these points, and has made no attempt to put a value upon the conflicting statements of different witnesses. Sir Thomas Whittaker, in the article which appeared in the September issue of this Review, suggests that the woeful accounts are by discontented and dreamy Socialists or Tariff Reformers, whilst the optimistic statements are made by those who have rare faculties of accurate observation'!.

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The Committee specially has shirked the task of presenting to us some clear analysis of the causes of sweating. It is true, that it opens its report with a classification of sweated persons. Sir Thomas Whittaker quoted the passage in his article, so I need only summarise it. The sweated workers belong to one of three groups:

(1) Single women, widows, deserted or separated wives, wives whose husbands are ill or unable to work.

(2) Wives of men out of employment.

(3) Wives and daughters of men in regular employment who usually select pleasant work, and as a rule work for short hours.

Now this classification omits the most typical class of all-the wives and daughters of men in regular or casual employment which never yields a sufficient family income, and who, therefore, cannot select pleasant work, but belong to the lowest grade of sweated workers. Commenting upon this classification, Miss Clementina Black, who has an unusually full knowledge of the facts of the problem, says that it is curious and rather sad to observe' that the Committee is not really familiar with the problem of home work. . . . As far as my experience goes, a larger group than any of these is that of wives who work because the wages of their husbands are too small to keep the family.' 1

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Women's Industrial News, September 1908, p. 68.