In the creation of cordial relationships between capital and labour in the leather trades, there has been unfortunately little progress. The leather trade is not a sweated industry. Its workers have always enjoyed reasonable hours of work. In most factories an approximate 48-hour working week (involving no night work) has long been in operation. The industry, however, is not one in which high wages obtain. The average tannery worker receives a wage which is never much above the level of subsistence. This is mostly due to the fact that he is usually a quite unskilled labourer, and is therefore on the bottom rung of the labour ladder. In addition to this the work itself is often distressingly monotonous, and makes little demand upon the intelligence of the worker. The trade consequently offers little attraction to the intelligent labourer. The old system of apprenticeship is now quite obsolete, partly owing to the rapidity of the changes in the methods of manufacture, partly to the specialization of labour which results from the development of large factories, and partly also, because to understand modern tanning involves a better general education than most workmen receive. It is indeed frequently difficult to find competent under-foremen for the different departments of the modern leather factory. Until recently leather workers have been either unorganized or badly organized, and their views and complaints have been confused and sporadic, but during the war period there has been a very rapid extension of trade union movements, and consequently a more articulate expression of the demands for "democratization" as well as "a greater share in the fruits" of the industry. In the leather trades, however, the gulf between the unskilled labourers and the wealthy employers is perhaps unusually wide, and there is little disposition on the part of capital to recognize the equity of either of the above demands of labour. Generally speaking, the leather trade firms are not public but private companies. There is absolutely no trace of "co-partnership" or "profit-sharing" schemes, or of co-operative production. There is little recognition that the trades' prosperity should be shared in any way by the workpeople, and still less recognition of any right to a voice in industrial conditions. This condition of affairs has an ominous reaction upon the attitude of labour, which believes that it is producing great wealth but not obtaining much more than subsistence. It is not the function of this volume to pronounce a verdict upon the wages question or upon the democratization of the leather trades, but one may be permitted earnestly to hope that if such be the future lines of development, there will be also, as an absolutely essential part of any such schemes, a much higher standard of education amongst the workers, for this is the only satisfactory guarantee that the voice of labour in council will have any practical value, or that higher wages will be at