industry produces upon all other sections, and appreciates the danger of settling strikes in the way the South Wales Coal Strike of 1915 was settled. It has been amply proved by bitter experience that no branch of human activity stands in more urgent need of even administration on uniform and consistent lines than does labour. Granted that employers and employed should settle between themselves so far as possible their own disputes, there comes inevitably a stage when a settlement or failure to settle intimately affects the community. It is then that the offices of a properly constituted Ministry of Labour come into play. If it is desired to leave the public merely as a football between employers and employed then abolish the Ministry. Far from abolishing it, in my view it ought to be consolidated and vested with extended powers. It ought to be made in fact, not merely in name, a real Ministry of Labour. All the powers of the other Government Departments which relate to labour should be transferred to it, so that there would be one central department charged with and responsible for the administration of all labour in this country. A great part of the labour disorganization during the war which has been used as an argument for abolition of the Ministry of Labour, and in derogation of the great national services performed by it, was entirely due to this clash between different departments in regard to labour administration: the Admiralty bidding against the Ministry of Munitions by paying higher wages to the same class of men and settling strikes on more advantageous terms to the workers; the Agricultural Wages Board of the Ministry of Agriculture putting up wages of agricultural labourers to a height that upset the country railway porters who were drawn from them. Innumerable other instances could be given, all directly due to the sub-division of labour administration among a number of different and hostile Government departments. It is not unimportant in this connection to remember that when, in the beginning of 1917, the Ministry of Labour, which was originally a conception of the Trades Union Congress, was formed by Mr. Lloyd George’s first Coalition Government, it was intended to transfer to it all the labour powers of the other Government departments. This was fiercely resisted by every department which it was proposed to denude of any powers, and in great measure successfully. As a result of that internecine warfare, the present Ministry of Labour is unhappily but an emasculated edition of the fully endowed central department that Mr. Lloyd George wisely had in mind. The wonder is that it has done as well as it has with such a disappointing limitation of powers. But apart from home labour administration, we shall get into most serious international complications, and very great domestic difficulty, if proper touch is not maintained with, and the interests of the country properly voiced in, the International Labour