One particular class of wages questions does demand intervention by the Government. In well-ordered industries, where organizations exist effectively representing the employers and employed engaged in the industry, wages and conditions ought to be left as matters for collective bargaining. There are, however, many industries which are so scattered through the country or so subject to conditions incompatible with good organization as to make collective bargaining impossible. In them reasonable minimum wages and conditions must be secured, and it is the duty of the Government to see that such provision is made, unless it is prepared to acquiesce in “sweated labour trades.” Hitherto, the provision has taken the form of a Trade Board for the industry under the Trade Boards Act, and there is no doubt that type of organization must continue in appropriate cases. Much criticism has been levelled against the Trade Boards, on which Lord Cave’s Committee[20] has now reported fully. From their inception up to the war, Trade Boards on the whole were successful. The defects that subsequently developed in the system were due to the fact that the far-flung series of Trade Boards, constituted immediately after the war, had none of the experience nor traditions of the old Boards; their chairmen and independent members were very largely persons without practical experience of industrial problems, and necessarily of that category, because of the large number of such appointments to be filled. They did not confine themselves to prescribing minimum wages and conditions—their proper function—so as to avoid sweated conditions, but they attempted to regulate actual wages and conditions, a very different matter. They also applied war-time standards to peace-time circumstances, and that naturally plunged a nascent and struggling industry into great difficulty. Industrial Research Industrial research becomes daily more essential for industrial progress. It has been developed to a greater extent in Germany and the United States of America than with us. Much of the industrial prosperity in those two countries is due to the establishment of associations, and, indeed, of highly developed departments by individual firms for industrial research. Much is being done, and still more remains to be done, by individual firms and by trade associations in this country in that direction. There is no doubt that this kind of work can more effectively be conducted in that way than by any Government Department, but, at the same time, a Government Department is required to co-ordinate and stimulate rather than to control such private efforts. In this way, most valuable work is being done by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. This will always remain an important sphere for Government industrial activity. Need of a Real Ministry of Labour