it is not physically possible to bring industries so different as these under the same set of regulations. There must be separate regulations for separate industries; so that here we appear to be landed back again in piecemeal legislation after all, just as we have shewn piecemeal legislation to be impracticable. There is only one way out of the dilemma; and that is to pass a general Act providing for piecemeal regulation. We must establish by law an administrative body whose business it shall be, without giving further trouble in Parliament, to draw up such regulations for each trade as shall secure to the workers in it the benefit of an eight hours working day. A practicable Eight Hour Bill must include the constitution of such a body-let us call it an Eight Hour Commission. Further, it must be capable of being put into operation promptly, and of being adapted to the requirements of all the various trades. And it must, of course, conform to the general principles of democratic legislation by making the welfare of the whole community paramount. Private interests and trade interests, whether advanced by Labor or Capital, must not be accommodated at the expense of national and international interests. The schemes about to be described must be judged with constant reference to these general principles.

Trade Inquiry.

Under this scheme the Home Secretary (pending the creation of a Minister for Labor) would be compelled to hold an enquiry into the duration of the hours of labor in a trade or industry (a) when directed to do so by either House of Parliament; (b) when requested to do so by a County Council, a Town Council, a duly registered Trade Union of the trade, or a Trades Council where there is no union; (c) on a special report from an Inspector of Factories. For the purposes of such an enquiry the Home Secretary would be bound to appoint a Commission of three persons, one of them a Factory Inspector, and one a woman in the case of trades employing women. The inquiry would embrace all trades directly dependent on the one mainly in question. The Commission would have full powers to examine witnesses on oath, to compel the production of time-books and other documents relating to the hours of labor, and to inspect factories and workshops. In order to ascertain whether the workers in a trade were in favor of a reduction of their hours of labor, the Commission would have power to take a vote by ballot of the employees in the factories and workshops concerned; or it might proceed by holding public meetings, or by calling witnesses.

At the conclusion of the inquiry, the Commission would have to report (a) what appeared to be the prevalent opinion among the members of the trade or industry as to the reduction of their hours of labor by law; (b) the probable effect of such reduction on the trade or industry and the community; (c) what reduction of the hours of labor in the trade or industry was desirable, what should be the length of the working day and week, and what allowance should be made for emergencies, seasons, etc.; (d) whether the case was a suitable one to be dealt with by the local authorities of the districts

affected by the trade or industry. The report, together with those parts of the evidence which were not confidential, would be printed and laid before Parliament.

Within three months after the presentation of the report, the Home Secretary would be bound either to report to Parliament his reasons for taking no action, or, if he determined to take action, to draw up an Order containing either (a) regulations prescribing the length of the working day and week, with such exceptions as he might deem advisable for emergencies, seasons, &c.; or (b) conferring upon County Councils and Town Councils in defined districts the power of regulating the hours of labor in the trade within limits specified in the Order. The Order, of either kind, would be laid before Parliament, and after the lapse of forty days would become law, unless the House before the expiration of that time presented an address to the Crown against the Order or any part thereof. No request to vary or revoke an Order, or for a second inquiry after an Order had been refused by the Home Secretary, would be admissible until the expiry of one year from the date of the Home Secretary's report to Parliament. The same process of inquiry by a Commission would have to precede any fresh decision by the Minister.

The local authorities specified in an Order of class (b), or any of them, would be permitted to combine together for the purposes of the Order. Before a bye-law adopted by a local authority for the regulation of the hours of labor in a trade became law, it would have to be submitted to the Home Secretary, in order that he might see that it complied with the terms of his Order. Before a local authority could vary such a bye-law, it would have to receive power to do so by a fresh Order.

Precedents.

The object of the Inquiry procedure is to get a continuous process of legislation without perpetual application to Parliament. The method suggested is a development of the practice of regulation by Provisional Orders which forms so large a part of modern lawmaking. These orders come into operation either after being legal. ised by an Act of Parliament, or, without express Parliamentary confirmation, after being before both Houses for a given time and not being objected to either by resolution or address to the Crown. The Endowed Schools Acts, the Factory Acts, and the Local Government Act, 1888, contain specimens of the procedure. Under the Factory Act, the Home Secretary has discretionary power to prescribe by Order the hours between which persons engaged in various occupations are to work; to determine whether certain classes of workers are to be allowed to work at night; and to exclude certain industries altogether from the Act.

Precedents may be found in the Education Acts and Public Health Acts for holding local inquiries into matters of detail as a preliminary to legislation. The Public Health Acts also contain abundant precedents for allowing local authorities to make bye-laws on specific subjects within fixed limits.

The political principle of the scheme is that legislation affecting the hours of labor should be completely under national control. It is the nation's duty to see that no section of it is compelled to work under inhuman conditions, or permitted to establish privileges which, though advantageous to individuals or trades, might be injurious to the country as a whole. No group of employees, no separate section of the community, can claim to set the national forces in action for its own advantage without the consent of the rest of the nation, as it could do under all the schemes which leave the question of enforcing the adoption of a shorter working day solely to the decision of the trade or of the trade unions concerned. Legisla tion to benefit any class without consulting the nation remains objectionable, whether the beneficiaries be capitalists or landlords or workmen. The community must retain the power of safeguarding itself against the possibility of dislocation of trade or violent fluctuation in prices through an inopportune or excessive reduction of the hours of labor. While the community has not the power to compel the members of a trade to work longer hours than they desire, it has the right to insist that if they wish for a reduction which does not appear expedient to the community, they must achieve it by their own efforts. Conversely, the community must have the power to enforce the reduction of the hours of labor in a trade, even against the wishes of the persons engaged in it, whenever that appears necessary for the general health or safety.

Under the Trade Inquiry Scheme provision is made to assert the control of the community and protect its interests by fixing the responsibility for issuing or not issuing an Order upon a Minister who must submit his action or refusal to act, as the case may be, to the House of Commons. This is the utmost that can be done to bring the working of the scheme under the control of Parliament. Its efficacy will of course depend on the extent to which Parliament is under the control of the community. If it does not work freely and rapidly enough to carry out the wishes of the people, the remedy must be sought in Parliamentary Reform and not in an impossible attempt to draft an Eight Hours Bill that would over-ride both Parliament and Minister. All that can be demanded of an Eight Hours Act is that the procedure it establishes shall not be needlessly slow, and shall not play into the hands of a Minister who might be unsympathetic or reactionary on the subject of Eight Hours whilst advanced enough on other points to make him, on the whole, a popular member of the Government. The provisions of the Trade Inquiry Scheme render it impossible for the Minister to refuse an enquiry into the condition of any trade; and the enquiry itself is indispensable if the Eight Hour Orders are to be made workable, since they would become a dead letter by mere force of circumstances unless they were based on accurate information as to the technical conditions of the trade and the views of the workers. And

it cannot be too emphatically urged that the greatest danger the Eight Hours Movement has to fear is an unworkable Act.

Disorganised Trades.

It has been objected against the Trade Inquiry scheme, as it was against the Trade Option Bill, that weak or disorganised trades, from their inability to pronounce in favor of a reduction of their hours, might escape the benefits of the Act, and that only strong, well-organised trades would be able to take advantage of it. Now, no kind of industrial legislation can be effective unless there are strong trade-unions willing to assist the authorities in enforcing it. As long as the textile trades continued weak, so long did the masters contrive to evade the Factory Acts or to whittle them away, and so long did disloyal workmen co-operate with their masters in enslaving their fellows. The workers must face the fact that industrial legislation is of little use without a trade organisation to call attention to every attempt of the employers to violate it—and such attempts are constantly being made. Employers, unless confronted with a strong Trade Union, will not only punish with dismissal all complaints made to the authorities by individuals, but will even discharge employees who join a Union, until the Union becomes strong enough to force the employers to recognise it. Under these circumstances, little can be done for unorganised workers by any legislative scheme whatever. But it may be pointed out that the Trade Inquiry Scheme provides a strong incentive to the poorer workers to organise. They do not form Unions now because they are too poor to maintain the sick benefits and out-of-work benefits which form the chief inducement to members to join. But a reduction of hours, probably involving also a rise in wages, would be well worth organising for without any benefits. The organisation would cost little; would not need to saddle its funds with insurance business; and could have a reasonable certainty of achieving its object under the Act, after which it would remain as a beginning of organisation for ordinary Trade Union purposes. The Commission Scheme would thus tend to call into existence the organisation without which neither it nor any other scheme can be completely effective.

Trade Inquiry, however, would not abandon the unorganised workers to their fate.

The Sweated Industries.

Take, for instance, the sweated industries. In them, owing to the way in which the workers are scattered and separated by small workshops and home-work, trade unions either do not exist at all or are very weak. Unlike the miners and factory operatives, the employees do not know where to find one another. Their work isolates them into petty groups instead of massing them together in powerful regiments and shewing them their own numbers and strength. Unfortunately, the home-work which divides them in this fashion is in some trades increasing, because it enables the wholesale dealer to throw all the expenses of manufacture on the workers. By giving out his work,

he can save the expense of providing properly ventilated and sanitary workrooms under the eye of the Factory Inspector; and naturally he does give it out, since, even apart from the desire for larger profits, the competition of rival employers compels him to get it done as cheaply as possible. Consequently, in the trades which can be carried on in tenements, the factory or large workshop has little chance of existence, especially in large towns. The enforcement of a shorter working day would only place under an additional economic disadvantage the owners of those factories and large workshops which are now conducted under fairly good conditions and are struggling with the cut-throat competition of insanitary and overcrowded dens; for in the large workshops the Act could be enforced, whilst in the small workshops and home-work places it could be easily evaded. Thus, unless special precautions are taken, any Act for the reduction of the hours of labor will infallibly cause good workshops to be shut up and manufacture to be transferred to places where all the conditions of labor are of the worst description. Therefore the Trade Inquiry Scheme provides that the report of the Commissioners shall include the effect the suggested reduction of hours would have on the conditions of the trade, and shall point out what measures should be taken to prevent the reform defeating its own ends. For instance, it would report, in the case of the sweated home industries, that nothing can be done to limit the hours of labor by law until by special industrial legislation workshops in dwelling-houses are deprived of the inequitable advantages which they at present possess over large and wellconducted factories and workshops. This can be done by making employers responsible for the conditions under which their work is done wherever it is done, and compelling them to disclose the whereabouts of the sweaters who now play hide-and-seek with the Factory Inspector. When in this way home-work has been killed and the sweated trades organised in factories, then, and not till then, will it be possible to legislate for the limitation of the hours of labor in those industries.

The Elasticity of the Scheme.

There are some eleven or twelve thousand different trades in the United Kingdom, working under different conditions, subject to different emergencies, affected differently by the seasons and the weather, and consequently involving different needs and different demands. Even in the same industry there are enormous differences: for instance, eight hours for a signalman in the cabin at Charing Cross terminus is a very different matter from eight hours for a porter at an out-of-the-way country station on a branch line where the work of the station-master and porter combined would not fill the time of a single man. A hard and fast forty-eight-hours-a-week law would either not work in these cases or else would soon be riddled by Amending Acts and exceptions. By appointing an expert commission to enquire into the conditions of labor in an industry, and to report not only on the desirability of reducing the hours of labor, but also on the form the restriction should take, we ensure the