Another measure already enacted towards establishing "a national minimum" applies to the wages in ready-made tailoring and some less important industries, to which shirt-waist making is soon to be added. These are known as the "sweated" trades, "where the feebleness and ignorance of the workers and their isolation from each other render them an easy prey to the tyranny of bad masters and middlemen one step above them upon the lowest rungs of the ladder, and themselves held in the grip of the same relentless forces,"--where "you have a condition not of progress but of progressive degeneration." Mr. Churchill asked Parliament to regard these industries as "sick and diseased," and "to deal with them in exactly the same mood and temper as we should deal with sick people," and accordingly boards were established for the purpose of setting up a minimum wage.[61] But if employers are forced to pay higher wages, it may be thought that they will lose from the law. This Mr. Churchill effectively denies. "In most instances," he says, "the best employers in the trade are already paying wages equal or superior to the probable minimum which the Trade Board will establish. The inquiries I have set on foot in the various trades scheduled have brought to me most satisfactory assurances from nearly all the employers to whom my investigations have addressed themselves.... But most of all I have put my faith in the practical effect of a powerful band of employers, perhaps a majority, who, whether from high motives or self-interest, or from a combination of the two--they are not necessarily incompatible ideas--will form a vigilant and instructed police, knowing every turn and twist of the trade, and who will labor constantly to protect themselves from being undercut by the illegal competition of unscrupulous rivals." Mr. Churchill claims that employers who are trying to pursue such trades with modern machinery and modern methods are more seriously hampered by the competition of the "sweaters" than they are by that of foreign employers. "I cannot believe," he concludes, "that the process of raising the degenerate and parasitical portion of these trades up to the level of the most efficient branches of the trade, if it is conducted by those conversant with the conditions of the trade and interested in it, will necessarily result in an increase in the price of the ultimate product. It may even sensibly diminish it through better methods."[62] Mr. Churchill is able to point out, as with most of the other reforms, that in one country or another they are already being put into effect, the legislation against "sweating" being already in force in Bavaria and Baden, as well as in Australia, under a somewhat different form.