country which created the driving power which renders this Bill possible.  I am advised that German legislation on some of these questions has even anticipated us.  In other countries legislation is pending on principles not dissimilar from those which we advocate.  In Bavaria and Baden the latest reports are to the effect that the official Government Reports of Inquiries recommend almost the same and in some cases stronger provisions than those to which we now ask the assent of the House of Commons.  This may be said in a different form of Austria.  All this movement which is going on throughout Europe, and which is so pregnant with good, will be powerfully stimulated by our action in this country, and that stimulus will not only facilitate our work by removing the argument which causes hon. gentlemen opposite anxiety, but it will also, I think, redound to the credit of this country that it took a leading and prominent position in what is a noble and benignant work.

I was delighted to hear the Leader of the Opposition say, in a concise and cogent sentence, that he could easily conceive many sweated trades in which the wages of the workers could be substantially raised without any other change except a diminution of price.  Sir, the wages of a sweated worker bear no accurate relation to the ultimate price.  Sometimes they vary in the same places for the same work done at the same time.  And sometimes the worst sweating forms a part of the production of articles of luxury sold at the very highest price.  We believe further, however, that decent conditions make for industrial efficiency and increase rather than diminish competitive power.  “General low wages,” said Mill, “never caused any country to undersell its rivals; nor did general high wages ever hinder it.”  The employers who now pay the best wages in these sweated trades maintain themselves not only against the comparatively small element of foreign competition in these trades, but against what is a far more formidable competition for this purpose—­the competition of those employers who habitually undercut them by the worst processes of sweating.  I cannot believe that the process of raising the degenerate and parasitical portion of these trades up to the level of the most efficient branches of the trade, if it is conducted by those conversant with the conditions of the trade and interested in it, will necessarily result in an increase of the price of the ultimate product.  It may, even as the right hon. gentleman has said, sensibly diminish it through better methods.

Sir, it is on these grounds, and within these limits, that I ask for a Second Reading for this Bill.

The principles and objects are scarcely disputed here.  Let us go into Committee and set to work upon the details, actuated by a single-minded desire to produce a practical result.  It is by the evidences of successful experiment that, more than any other way, we shall forward and extend the area of our operations; and in passing this Bill the House will not only deal manfully with a grave and piteous social evil, but it will also take another step along that path of social organisation into which we have boldly entered, and upon which the Parliaments of this generation, whatever their complexion, will have to march.