to meet the objections of the backward States that the provisions laid down, had they been accepted without modification, would have tended to depress rather than to raise the standard of international opinion on the questions to be affected by them.  We need not, therefore, feel much regret that the war has swept them, with so many other pre-war schemes, into the wastepaper-basket.  The vast question of minimum rates of wages and their regulation by the State is obviously still too much in the experimental stage of its solution (even in this country where experiments have been boldest) for it to be possible to make it the subject of international agreement.  As a subject of international discussion it has had its place, and an increasingly important place, for at least eight years past in the studies of the sections and the discussions of the Association meeting.  Upon no question has public international opinion ripened more rapidly.  In 1906, at Geneva, where the conditions of home workers were first under discussion, a few daring delegates met in corners and whispered under their breath the words ‘Wages board’.  By 1910, at Lugano, an English woman delegate was elected joint president of the Association’s Home Work Committee, ’as a recognition of Great Britain’s achievement in passing the first Trade Boards Act’; at Zurich, in 1912, a two-day conference on the legal minimum wage preceded the meeting of the Association, and a whole sheaf of minimum wage bills introduced by private members into the Chambers of different countries was before the delegates, together with an official measure of the French Government.  To watch this change of attitude was to see international thought in the making.  To appreciate its full significance, it is necessary to bear in mind the different aspects presented by the ‘sweating’ difficulty in this country and in the great industrial States of the Continent.  The French or German social reformer sees it mainly, if no longer exclusively, as a problem of home work.  Now home work in Great Britain is a by-product of a strictly limited class of industries, affecting a comparatively small class of the population; in France and Germany it forms a highly important section of the general industrial structure, it is interwoven, to an extent rarely grasped by British students, with the life, and habits, and productive power of the nation.  Much more courage—­and greater freedom from prejudice—­was required in the one case than the other.  The remarkable advance towards definite action on the part of the State in relation to the establishment of minimum rates for home workers which took place between 1906 and 1913 could not have been achieved in so short a time but for the labours of certain voluntary associations led by men of insight, candour, and indefatigable devotion.  In this connexion the pioneer work of the late Comte de Mun and Professor Raoul Jay has been of inestimable value.  Realizing themselves, as did few unofficial reformers, the wide nature of