(2) Taking the trades where any appreciable percentage of women are employed, those not subject to Wages Boards show an increase of wages on the average of 12s. 5d. per week, whilst the Wages Boards' trades show an increase of 8s. 101d. From these figures no conclusion except a negative one as regards Wages Boards can be drawn.

(3) If we take the recorded wages, we have to accept the same conclusions. On the average, wages have increased in the clothing trade by 8d. per week since 1896, in dressmaking by 9d. since 1903, by 10d. in jam-making since 1900, by 11d. in shirt-making since 1896, by 1s. 8d. in underclothing since 1898; and these are the chief women's trades regulated by Boards. When the average for adults alone is slightly better than these figures it is always dragged down by an increase in juvenile labour. The minimum for adults fixed by Boards in these trades respectively is 20s., 16s., 14s., 16s., 16s. per week. Here, again, there can be no doubt as to the failure of Wages Boards; more particularly when it is remembered that the purchasing power of money is appreciably less in Victoria than in this country. In this connection it is also to be noted that rarely in the case of unorganised women are wages paid over the fixed minimum.

(4) How far Wages Boards have steadied wages and kept them up to the minimum, mean though it may be, is another question of some importance. The average wages paid through a series of years in regulated and unregulated trades help us to a conclusion on this matter. We can, for instance, compare clothing and boots, which are regulated, with hosiery and tobacco, which are unregulated.

For these figures Mr. Aves is responsible. Once more it is the negative result of Wages Boards which is most striking. The effect upon wages appears to be inconsiderable,' are Mr. Aves' words.

(5) Owing to the Factory Acts and the power of the Labour Party in industry, home work occupies a place of very secondary importance,' although it is now growing, and the inspectors admit that a good deal of it is unlicensed. The statistics of wages given are those of factories alone. No wages returns of home work are published.' The effect of Wages Boards upon the home-worker's income is therefore not known, although I was informed by those who had done some investigation into the subject that the statutory minimum of 4d. per hour is not exceeded, and is not always reached.

(6) This experience has been acquired at a time when every economic tendency for an increase in wages has been in operation, more particularly a great shortage of women's labour. Mr. Aves says 'It is the same everywhere," I was told by a group of women whose experience gave them abundant opportunities of knowing: employers cannot get experienced workers." A dressmaker could expand her business" at once" if she could only obtain experienced workers.' Factory development has swallowed up all available labour, and no opportunities have been given for the perpetuation of sweating conditions.

(7) Finally, a general conclusion must be expressed. The operations of these Boards (but far more in the organised men's than in the unorganised women's trades) have an influence in concentrating attention upon wages. They have in some measure taught by compulsion the economy of high wages, which has been a gain; but they have also misled the workpeople into forgetting that wages are but relations -are but measures of exchange. I have not known labour leaders to be less aware of the difference between nominal and real wages than those of Australasia.

Such are the meagre results of Wages Boards where they have been tried under conditions of extraordinary advantage.

III.

The misfortunes of the sweated worker appeal with irresistible force to people's hearts. Some consequently seek peace of mind by doing something-anything. They speak of sweating as though it were some simple phenomenon which is capable of a simple remedy. They decline to consider details; they trust to Providence, luck, and their own good intentions. Their arguments are pious opinions. They are what Sir Thomas Whittaker describes as 'pillsfor-earthquakes reformers.' They have proposed Wages Boards and produced the most imperfectly considered Report which this Parliament has published.

The problem of sweating requires a different treatment. It must be analysed into its causes. How are the wages of the bread-winner to be raised? How is casual labour to be decasualised? How is unemployment to be prevented, or treated when it occurs? What can be done for the widow with little children and no other possessions? What succour can we give to the industrial sick? For it is these difficulties that together form the problem of sweating. Obviously, increasing the wages of women workers at home barely touches any of these questions. An increase in the value of the wife as a breadwinner is one of the most pernicious things that could happen in view of the present disintegration of family life caused by the inability of large classes of men to secure sufficient wages to be a family income.

The widow having to take care of young children cannot properly take part in the exacting labours of home work, driven hard by factory competition. She has to be helped through her children. Let them be boarded out with her, and let it be seen that she takes proper care of them. Next year, the Government has promised to deal with the problems of unemployment and of casual labour; and whether it redeems its promise or not, if the moral aversion to sweating were used as a political leverage to compel the Local Government Board to take some positive and constructive action on this subject, permanent good would be done. The influence of Old Age Pensions is apparent, and if these can be supplemented by a system of sickness and other accident insurance, further poisoned sources of sweating will be dried up. Above all, we must diminish the causes which tend to casualise home work. This can be done only by making the homeworker feel that she is part of the ordinary and regular army of workers, and not a kind of industrial creature of the gutter, snatching a crust here and a scrap there. This can best be secured by a system of Licensing-not the meaningless proposal of the Parliamentary Committee to register, but the giving of a licence to a person enabling her to work on certain premises which, in the opinion of the inspector, are fit for being used for the purpose. This would at once discourage every home-worker who is only a casual, working one week and not another, and would tend to do for the whole class which remains the same thing which the proposed Labour Registries are going to do for the casual male workers. Test the need of the home-worker by putting her to a little trouble to obtain a licence, and the apparent inconvenience in reality places her in a much better position by ridding her of that casual fringe from which springs so much of her distress. The sweated home-worker must go, but the humane and true way to abolish her is to put an end to the conditions which create her. Her misfortunes are independent of her being sweated. Sweating is an effect, not a cause. The impatient pessimist who must do something hastily and dramatically to try and persuade himself that he is an optimist with a conscience, is not satisfied with this attack on the causes of sweating, but the fact remains that sweating can be cured not by a concentrated pill, but by a general policy expressing itself in many directions. Wages Boards misdirect our energies and create a cumbersome industrial machinery, which may look well, but which will not work; only an attack in detail upon the several causes of sweating can have a permanent and beneficial effect upon our industrial condition and upon the victims of its shortcomings.

J. RAMSAY MACDONALD.

HOW SWITZERLAND DEALS WITH HER

UNEMPLOYED

THE Swiss are an eminently frugal people: everything that smacks of waste is in their eyes the veriest anathema; and it is to them a source of real satisfaction that no other people on the face of the earth can make a penny go quite so far as they can. And they are as practical as they are frugal: when they have a difficult problem to solve, instead of wasting time lamenting that it should be there to be solved, they straightway set to work, in a common-sense fashion, to consider how the solving can best be done. They have other good qualities, too, of course; still, it was because they are frugal and practical, rather than because they are humane or anything else, that they first began grappling with unemployment as a subject of vital importance, not only to the unemployed themselves, but to the whole community.

It was realised clearly in Switzerland, already many long years ago, that a working man who is unemployed is, if left to himself, prone to become unemployable. He takes to the road in search of work, and on the road drink is cheaper than food, besides being more easily procured. A glass of schnapps is more comforting, too, than a hunch of bread, when one is down on one's luck and may have to sleep in a ditch. Nor is drink the only danger. It is the easiest thing in life to drift into loafing ways: they are few and far between, indeed, who can, for very long at a time, tramp up and down, day in, day out, looking vainly for work, without losing the desire to find it.

It was realised also and equally clearly, many long years ago, that for the community to allow any one of its members, who could be kept employable, to become unemployable, is sheer wasteful folly, if for no other reason than because, when once he is unemployable, the community must support him-must support his children, too, if he has any. Although Switzerland differs from England in that no one there may claim relief as a right, a self-respecting community cannot anywhere, in this our day, leave even the most worthless of its members to die of starvation. Besides, even if it could, such a proceeding would be fraught with difficulties, especially

in a country where, as in Switzerland, the government is democratic. For although there are undoubtedly both men and women capable of starving some of them actually do starve-without disturbing their neighbours by unseemly wails, they form but a small minority of any population; and with the vast majority it is quite otherwise. The vast majority it is practically impossible to leave to starve, because of the uproar they would make while starving. For them the community must provide board together with lodging, if they cannot provide it for themselves; and they cannot, if they are unemployable. It behoves the community, therefore, as a mere matter of self-interest— so, at least, it is argued in Switzerland-to do everything that can be done to prevent their being unemployed, lest they become unemployable.

This is a point on which all cantons alike hold decided views. Throughout the country, indeed, there is a strong feeling that any man who is out of work must be helped to find work; and this not so much for his own sake, as for the sake of the whole communityto guard against his being a cause of expense to it, instead of being, as he ought to be, a source of income. There is, however, an equally strong feeling that, when the work is found, the man must, if necessary, for his own sake as well as the sake of the community, be made to do it; to do it well, too. Practically everywhere in Switzerland, while it is held to be the duty of the authorities to stand by the genuine work-seeker and help him, it is held to be their duty also to mete out punishment to the work-shirker, and force him to earn his daily bread before he eats it. No toleration is shown to the loafer, for he is regarded as one who wishes to prey on his fellows, and take money out of the common purse while putting none into it. On the other hand, what can be done is done, and gladly, to guard decent men from all danger of becoming loafers through mischance, or misfortune.

In England a man may deliberately throw up one job, and, without ever making an effort to find another, remain for months in the ranks of the unemployed, steadily deteriorating all the time into an unemployable. Meanwhile, no one has the right to say him yea, or nay, unless he applies for poor relief. In Switzerland, however, it is otherwise. There is no resorting to workhouses as to hotels there; no wandering round the countryside extorting alms while pretending to look for work. For begging is a crime and so is vagrancy; and in some cantons the police receive a special fee for every beggar or vagrant they arrest. If a man is out of work there, he must try to find work; for if he does not, the authorities of the district where he has a settlement will find it for him, and of a kind, perhaps, not at all to his taste-tiring and badly paid. And he cannot refuse to do it, for if he does he may be packed off straight to a penal workhouse, an institution where military discipline prevails, and where every inmate is made to work to the full extent of his strength,