Sweating not unknown in the colonies—Instances published by _Otago Daily Times_—Underpaid workers in 1895—Epidemic of strikes—State arbitration proposed in New Zealand—Conciliation Boards and Court of Arbitration—Details of New Zealand law—Objections raised by critics in England—Difference in position of British and of New Zealand trade unions—New Zealand freed from strikes—The question of the poorest workers—Wellington match makers—Tailoresses under an agreement and tailoresses under an award—The under rate worker—Victoria and Wage Boards—Campaign of the _Age_—Factory Act of 1896—Details of Wage Board scheme—The first six Boards—Boards in 1905—Several instances of the “determinations” of Wage Boards—Effect on home work—The case of New South Wales—Summing up. The evils of underpayment, being the invariable result of unlimited competition, inevitably show themselves in any country where trade has come into existence. The oversea colonies of Britain are not overcrowded, are naturally rich, and ought to be free from evils accumulated during an old civilisation. Yet, thirty years ago, instances of underpayment, exactly on all fours with those exhibited in the Queen’s Hall in the summer of 1906, were to be found in New Zealand, in South Australia and in Victoria. There, as here, newspapers called attention to the facts, and aroused the public conscience. In January 1889, the _Otago Daily Times_, “a journal distinguished amongst its fellows for caution and restraint of language,” published a series of articles about underpaid labour in Dunedin. “One woman deposed that she might make 3s. 6d. on a good day but it would be by stitching from half past eight in the morning until eleven at night.”[82] “Yet she counted her lot at that time almost happy, for she had lately escaped from a factory where, do what she would, she could not earn more than eighteenpence daily by working until all hours of the night.” Another woman reported that she “finished cotton shirts at 1s. 6d. a dozen”[83] and that she could “get through a dozen and a half in the factory between nine o’clock and six in the evening; then she carried a dozen more home and sat up sewing by lamplight until they were finished.... On one of these evenings she had a stroke of good luck; she was allowed to take away a dozen flannels as well as her dozen shirts. Both bundles were done when she went to bed—at three o’clock in the morning—and by that night’s work she earned a whole shilling.” (p. 30.)