SWEATED INDUSTRIES

Oxford, December 5, 1907

This exhibition is one of a series which are being held in different parts of the country with the object of directing attention, or rather of keeping it directed, to the conditions under which a number of articles, many of them articles of primary necessity, are at present being produced, and with the object also of improving the lot of the people engaged in the production of those articles.  Now this matter is one of great national importance, because the sweated workers are numbered by hundreds of thousands, and because their poverty and the resulting evils affect many beside themselves, and exercise a depressing influence on large classes of the community.  What do we mean by sweating?  I will give you a definition laid down by a Parliamentary Committee, which made a most exhaustive inquiry into the subject:  “Unduly low rates of wages, excessive hours of work, and insanitary condition of the workplaces.”  You may say that this is a state of things against which our instincts of humanity and charity revolt.  And that is perfectly true, but I do not propose to approach the question from that point of view to-day.  I want to approach it from the economic and political standpoint.  But when I say political I do not mean it in any party sense.  This is not a party question; may it never become one.  The organisers of this exhibition have done what lay in their power to prevent the blighting and corrosive influence of party from being extended to it.  The fact that the position which I occupy at this moment will be occupied to-morrow by the wife of a distinguished member of the present Government (Mrs. Herbert Gladstone), and on Saturday by a leading member of the Labour Party (Mr. G.N.  Barnes, M.P.), shows that this is a cause in which people of all parties can co-operate.  The more we deal with sweating on these lines, the more we deal with it on its merits or demerits without ulterior motive, the more likely we shall be to make a beginning in the removal of those evils against which our crusade is directed.

My view is, that the sweating system impoverishes and weakens the whole community, because it saps the stamina and diminishes the productive power of thousands of workers, and these in their turn drag others down with them.  “Unduly low rates of wages, excessive hours of labour, insanitary condition of workplaces”—­what does all that mean?  It means an industry essentially rotten and unsound.  To say that the labourer is worthy of his hire is not only the expression of a natural instinct of justice, but it embodies an economic truth.  One does not need to be a Socialist, not, at least, a Socialist in the sense in which the word is ordinarily used, as designating a man who desires that all instruments of production should become common property—­one does not need to be a Socialist in that sense in order to realise that an industry,