If we are to have anything like effective and efficient labour administration, a Ministry of Labour is essential. Those who call for abolition of the Ministry are truly neophytes in the art of industrial government. Convinced believers, let us assume them to be, in the principle of _laissez-aller_, they actually think that if the Ministry disappeared there would be an end of all intervention by Government between employers and employed. What uninformed criticism! They forget that the Home Office has control of the administration of the Factory Acts—a matter embracing working conditions and welfare of workers which goes right to the root of the Labour problem. They omit to notice that the Mines Department of the Board of Trade exercises supervision over the conditions of employment and wages of miners; that the Ministry of Agriculture is responsible for the Joint Conciliation Committees which deal with exactly similar questions in agriculture; that the Ministry of Transport does the same in the railway service, and that the Ministry of Health has jurisdiction over health insurance so largely handled by the Approved-Societies-sections of the Trade Unions, and over the administration of the Poor Law relief which so nearly touches the unemployment problem. These various jurisdictions are admittedly to stand—it could not be, and indeed is not contended otherwise. The Ministry of Labour is, however, to disappear, and its responsibilities—unemployment insurance, trade boards, labour exchanges, conciliation of trade disputes, co-ordination of Labour administration in this country in conformity with the International Labour Organization created by the Peace Treaty—are to be extinguished or tacked on as appendages to other departments. The resulting position is too ridiculous to contemplate. Under such circumstances the Government could never be advised on any basis of consistent administration and policy in regard to any labour question; continuous touch would be lost with the representative Trade Union federations; there would be as many opinions as there were departments implicated. Whenever a national strike was imminent in any great industry, the Government would have to organize an improvised committee of the Departments concerned in labour—probably few of them even remotely connected with the particular industry affected—and try to evolve an _ad hoc_ policy. We are suffering still from the effects of opportunist action of that kind and want no repetition. And when Government intervention in a national strike becomes inevitable for the protection of the community, he would be a bold man who would prefer negotiations by the Cabinet conducted on no set principle and founded on no experience of industrial conditions, to negotiations by the Ministry of Labour, which does conduct such business on a settled basis of principle, knowing the interconnection of trade with trade and the effect which a concession like the 12½ per cent. bonus to one section of