When, however, we turn to Australasia, we find laws in operation there demanding a system of administrative organization more complex than would be required in connection with a minimum wage law founded on the cost of living. The New Zealand Arbitration Acts, the effect of which has been the institution of legal minimum rates of wages on the basis of what each trade arbitrated upon will bear, entails upon the members and officials of the Conciliation Boards and the Court of Arbitration a vast amount of labor in settling multitudinous points of great difficulty which would not arise here under a minimum wage law. Some idea of what those labors have been may be formed from the following quotation from State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand, by the Hon. William Pember Reeves:

"The trades that have come under the awards of the tribunals have been those of the bootmakers, seamen, goldminers, coalminers, printers, tailors, millers, carpenters, plumbers, painters, moulders, drivers, saddlers, tailoresses, dressmakers, sawmillers, engineers, ironworkers, furniture-makers, bakers, confectioners, butchers, grocers' assistants, and others of less importance. The questions arbitrated upon have already included most of the hard nuts which students of labor conflicts know so well. Among them are hours of labor, holidays, the amount of day wages, the price to be paid for piecework, the proportion of apprentices, the facilities to be allowed to trade union officials for interviews with their men, the right of employers to engage non-unionists, or to discharge or refuse to engage unionists, the conduct of unionists in refusing to work side by side with free laborers,' and pressure exerted by employers to induce them to join a private benefit society."

Yet, in spite of the hardness of the nuts mentioned by Mr. Reeves, they have been successfully cracked without any serious strain upon the machinery provided for the purpose, or any strong or widelyspread dissatisfaction arising with the methods adopted.

State Action in Victoria.

Again, the Shops and Factories Act of the State of Victoria, Australia, which so far is the boldest experiment entered upon for the stamping out of sweating and industrial parasitism, necessitates an elaborate system of enquiry and inspection in each trade brought under the Act. The measure, besides being one for the regulation of factories and shops on the ordinary lines, also contains clauses which make it an actual minimum wage law, and accordingly deserves special attention.

The Act as passed in 1896 provided for the appointment of special boards to fix wages and piecework rates for persons employed either inside or outside factories in making clothing or wearing apparel or furniture, or in breadmaking or baking, or in the business of a butcher or seller of meat. Special boards might be appointed for any process, trade or business usually or frequently carried on in a factory or workroom, provided a resolution had been passed by either House of Parliament declaring it to be expedient to appoint

such a board. The special boards were to consist of not less than four or more than ten members and a chairman, and to hold office for two years. Half the members (elected as prescribed) were to be representatives of employers and half of employees. If the employers' or employees' representatives were not elected the Governor in Council was given the power to appoint representatives. He was also empowered to fill all vacancies. The members of a board might elect a chairman (not being one of such members); if they did not elect a chairman the Governor in Council might appoint one. The members of these boards were to be paid Ios. per full day, 5s. per half day, the chairman £1 per day with travelling allowances. A board might fix either time rates or piecework rates, or both; must also fix the hours for which the rate of wages was determined, and the payment for overtime, and in fixing wages might take into consideration the nature, kind, and class of work, and the mode and manner in which the work was to be done, the age and sex of the workers, and any matter which might be prescribed by regulation. A board could settle the proportion of apprentices or improvers to be employed in any process, trade, or business, and the wage to be paid to them; and in fixing such wage might consider age, sex and experience. The determination of a special board was to apply to every city and town and might be extended by the Governor in Council to any borough or shire or part of a shire. A board could determine that manufacturers might be allowed to fix piecework rates based on the minimum wage. That is to say, the board, after fixing time wages itself, might leave it to employers to pay a fair equivalent to their pieceworkers. The Chief Inspector might, however, challenge any rate so paid, and the employer might have to justify it before the board.

The Success of the Victorian Act.

The boards set up for the baking, clothing, bootmaking, shirtmaking, and underclothing trades, in spite of intricate complications, found it possible to arrive at determinations which have given general satisfaction. The furniture trade board had the most onerous task, as certain sections of the trade are in the hands of the Chinese, whose idea of honoring Factory Acts of this kind is to contravene them. Though collusion between Chinese masters and their Chinese workpeople to outwit the inspector in matters of wages and hours was glaringly obvious, the cunning of the yellow man was too often superior to that of the representative of the law when it became a question of securing legal proof that the regulations had been broken. Yet even here sweating has been checked to a very great extent, and the conditions of the trade in 1901 were reported as far superior to those prevailing before the establishment of the wages board.

It is important to note that the alleged tendency of a minimum wage to become the maximum has not shown itself. In May, 1902, the Chief Inspector asserted that whereas in the clothing trade, in 1901, the minimum wage for adult males was 45s. per week, the average paid was 53s. 6d. For adult females the minimum was 20s.,

the average, 22s. 3d. He instanced similar differences in the boot, furniture, and shirtmaking trades.

Owing to the favorable results of the working of these six boards, twenty-six other trades have been brought under the operation of the Act-amongst others, the aerated water trade, artificial manure making, bedstead making, brassworking, brewing, brickmaking, coopering, dressmaking, jam-making, ironmoulders, pastrycooks, plate-glass making, stonecutting, tinsmithing, woodworking, etc., etc.

By the end of 1904 determinations had been made by the above 32 boards, except in the case of the tinsmiths, where the fixing of piecework rates caused delay. In all cases rises in wages had been made, and in nearly every instance the staff of inspectors reported that the decisions of the boards had been acted upon without any serious friction taking place. In two industries only does it appear that trouble arises. One is the furniture trade, which suffers from the blight of yellow labor. According to the Chief Inspector's report of December, 1904, a case of evasion by a white firm engaged in the furniture trade was discovered, and the employer was compelled to hand over to his underpaid workmen the sum of £40 each. It should be mentioned in passing that a weakness of the Act is that no provision appears to be made for punishing the men as well as the employers in a case of collusion. The other of the two troubled trades is that of dressmaking. Here dissatisfaction has been caused by the low minimum wage fixed by the board, which, following the example of all the other boards, based its award upon the principle of giving what the trade would bear.

In 1903 a court was created in order that appeals against the determinations of the wages boards might be heard. By December, 1904, only one case had come before the court-an appeal by the employers in the artificial manure industry against a decision fixing a minimum wage of 40s. 6d. The employers were successful, the award being reduced to 36s. This dearth of employment for the Appeal Court may fairly be taken as further evidence that the Act is working smoothly.

The Victorian Act, 1896, was intended as an experiment to be tried for three years only. In 1899 it was amended slightly and extended for two years plus a session of parliament. In 1902, when a sudden dissolution of the Victorian parliament endangered it, an Act was got through again extending its life, this time until 1905. The Chief Inspector of Factories, in Dec. 1904, reported strongly in favor of the Act being made a permanent one. Last year (1905) the Act was again renewed.*

It has been urged that the successful working of Australasian laws affecting wages and dealing with complicated and minute details, throws no light upon the question as to whether similar laws would be practicable in England, because the population of Australasia is less than one-tenth that of the United Kingdom. This objection is easily disposed of. Melbourne, Manchester and Birmingham

* For further details of Australasian Labor laws see Fabian Tract No. 83.]

have practically the same population: five hundred thousand each. The notion that the experience of Melbourne is useless as a guide to Manchester is flatly contrary to common sense. The two cities resemble each other far more closely than Shrewsbury resembles Sheffield.

The Proper Basis of a Minimum Wage Law.

So far we have been discussing the objections to State interference with wages, and to the fixing of any kind of minimum wage by Act of Parliament. We now have to consider the form such an Act would take in this country.

The Act should aim at the fixing and enforcement of a wage sufficient to enable our workers to be maintained in healthy existence. Therefore, the wage should be calculated on what the worker requires for physical health and efficiency, and not on what the trade will bear. The latter method, obviously resulting in the fixing of different minimum rates for each trade, would come under the head of wage regulation, which, in the interests of industrial peace, may be extremely desirable, but is something quite apart from the establishment and enforcement of a national minimum wage in the interests of physical and industrial efficiency. The minimum wage would not replace "standard" or "trade union" rates where these were the higher amount.

In the second place the law must be national: that is, must apply to the whole country in order that no district shall undersell another in the labor market at the cost of national vitality. Thirdly, since the last condition cannot be fulfilled by equal money wages all over the country, the Act must be drafted on the assumption that it is possible to determine a national minimum of real wages: that is to say such a wage as, worked out in its cash equivalent will equalize all local variations in cost of living.

Relative Wages of Men and Women.

The necessity for fixing a lower wage for women than for men raises one of the greatest difficulties in the way of an equitable solution of the problem; and it must be said at once that it is a difficulty which cannot be fairly adjusted without bringing the Poor Law to the aid of the Minimum Wage.

The reason for paying men more highly than women is that under our marriage institutions the man is the woman's paymaster for her domestic work. This domestic work, including childbearing and the rearing of children, is onerous, dangerous, and absolutely indispensable to society. But the woman is not directly paid for it: she is given, instead, a legal claim on her husband's means, name, and status. Therefore it is admitted that the man, having to support another adult and their children, must receive a wage sufficient to maintain these several persons, whilst the woman is regarded industrially as a single woman, needing only enough to support herself.

The objections to such an arrangement are obvious. Some men are not married, and are therefore receiving family wages for single

life. What is far worse, some women are widows with children; and these women are receiving the wages of a single adult, and starving a family on it.

To novices in political science it may seem simple to establish two wages, one to be paid to married and the other to single workers. But in competitive commerce such solutions are utopian. If married men cost more in the labor-market than single ones, employers would never employ a married man where a single one was available; and the married men would thus tend to be driven out of the market by the single ones. The same would be true of women. Further, if women and men were paid at the same rates, men would always be employed in preference to women wherever possible, because, fairly or unfairly, male labor is considered industrially superior to female. The demand for "equal wages for men and women" is perfectly well known to trade-unionists as a device for keeping women out of men's trades. Any attempt to maintain two prices in the labormarket for the same article, or to maintain the same price for two different qualities of the same article, must fail, because nobody will buy at the higher price when he can get what he wants at the lower, and nobody will take second quality when he can get first quality for the same money. Therefore, whilst the present competitive system of employment by competing private enterprises prevails, the_industrial minimum wage must conform to three conditions: (a) It must be lower for women than for men; (b) all men must have the same minimum wage, and all women the same minimum wage; (c) the man's wage must be enough to support a family, and the woman's to support a single independent adult.

This leaves the problem of the bachelor and the widow with children unsolved, just as they are left unsolved by our present system.

The case of the bachelor may be disregarded for two reasons; (a) if the minimum wage secures enough to the married man, it is no evil, but only a negligible inequity, to let the bachelor have a little more than enough; (b) the practice of working men at present shows that, as a matter of fact, they do not find that they can provide themselves with domestic service and companionship more cheaply as bachelors than by marriage.

The case of the widow cannot be set aside in this way. Nothing can be more deplorable than the position of a woman who, in addition to industrial work, has to be both father and mother to a family, and yet can get only the wages of an underpaid single person. It is im possible for her to maintain her health and self-respect under such circumstances. When her children grow up they are more likely to join "the residuum," and become a heavy charge on the community, than to add to its resources. She must be rescued from this miserable and mischievous condition. But a minimum wage law alone cannot rescue her, though it alone can make her rescue possible. The only way of meeting her case is to give her, as a matter of right, sufficient assistance from public funds to enable her, with the aid of free public schools, and free meals in them, to make up her income to the standard for heads of families. There is no element of charity