A glance at social legislation during the last century reveals some interesting uniformities. Every step in the development of the English Factory Acts as they stood at the beginning of the present war, starting with the first Child Labor Bill in 1802 and ending with the Shop Regulation Act of 1912, had been taken against the protest of the most vocal elements in the trades concerned. In nearly every case investigation will show, either that the requirements of the measure enacted fell considerably below the practice of the best concerns, or that the whole industry was in need of some outside impulse to start it in the way of more efficient organization. As long as it is permissible to employ five women and five children to tend five machines, there is not the right incentive to make adjustments by which all five of them can be tended by one man. In this country in our forty-nine jurisdictions we have been going forty-nine times over the experience of England and other countries, in connection with each effort to force up the competitive level. We have seemed to be quite unable to apply the most obvious lessons of experience either at home or abroad to new cases, and yet essentially the same uniformity of adaptation has occurred here as abroad. Like our employer, whom a strike impelled to adopt an advanced policy toward labor, we find after the event that we should not know how to do business under the standards in force before the law compelled a change. Enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law has been frequently cited as an example of unwise government interference. With respect to many of the incidents of enforcements, criticism has been well founded. But the net result of that enforcement has been a much sounder body of law on the important subject of fair and unfair competition. Besides, we now have in the Federal Trade Commission the beginnings of an administrative organization for dealing with the whole subject of monopoly and restraint of trade. And more than all this, we have a better prospect than ever before, of some sort of mutual respect between government and business, and of honest cooperation in working out their mutual problems. It is not likely that the Anti-Trust Law has prevented honest men from earning legitimate profits from legitimate business service to anything like the extent which would be indicated by the vigor with which it has been opposed. But even if it has, we have received something for the price paid.