An increase of wages then is the primary condition of any real improvement in the lives of the sweated workers. So the point is this. Can we do anything by law to screw up the remuneration of the worst-paid workers to the minimum necessary for tolerable human existence? I know that many people think it impossible, but my answer is that the fixing of a limit below which wages shall not fall is already not the exception but the rule in this country. That may seem a rather startling statement, but I believe I can prove it. Take the case of the State, the greatest of all employers. The State does not allow the rates of pay even of its humblest employes to be decided by the scramble for employment. The State cannot afford, nor can any great municipality afford, to pay wages on which it is obviously impossible to live. There would be an immediate outcry. Here then you have a case of vast extent in which a downward limit of wages is fixed by public opinion. Take, again, any of the great staple industries of the country, the cotton industry, the iron and steel industry, and many others. In the case of these industries rates of remuneration are fixed in innumerable instances by agreement between the whole body of employers in a particular trade and district on the one hand and the whole body of employes on the other. The result is to exclude unregulated competition and to secure the same wages for the same work. No doubt there is an element--and this is a point of great importance--which enters into the determination of wages in these organised trades, but which does not enter in the same degree into the determination of the salaries paid by the State. That element is the consideration of what the employers can afford to pay. This question is constantly being threshed out between them and the workpeople, with resulting agreements. The number of such agreements is very large, and the provisions contained in them often regulate the rate of remuneration for various classes of workers with the greatest minuteness. But the great object, and the principal effect of all these agreements, is this: it is to ensure uniformity of remuneration, the same wage for the same work, and to protect the most necessitous and most helpless workers from being forced to take less than the employers can afford to pay. Broadly speaking, the rate of pay, in these highly organised industries, is determined by the value of the work and not by the need of the worker. That makes an enormous difference. But in sweated industries this is not the case. Sweated industries are the unorganised industries, those in which there is no possibility of organisation among the workers. Here the individual worker, without resources and without backing, is left, in the struggle of unregulated competition, to take whatever he can get, regardless of what others may be getting for the same work and-of the value of the work itself. Hence the extraordinary inequality of