This contrast serves to suggest how valuable has been the influence of the Boards in checking the fall of wages. An average weekly difference of half a crown between the wages of dressmakers and of milliners would scarcely have arisen of itself, especially in a comparatively small industrial community. Some Boards have evidently been timid; and some have shown—to put the matter mildly—no strong desire to approximate the wages of women to those of men engaged in very similar work. The difference between 17s. and 30s. in the case of chocolate coverers may serve as an instance. On the other hand, the Bootmaking Board and the Brushmaking Board have courageously enacted that women employed in certain branches shall have “the same rate as males.” Thus a woman in the bootmaking trade who is engaged in “making, finishing or clicking (but not skiving or trimming) insides or outsides or stuff cutting by hand” must receive a minimum of 40s. a week; while for women in some other branches of the same industry the minimum is fixed at 20s.[94] The Brushmaking determination, even bolder, runs thus: “Any females employed in any of the above classes of work to be paid at the same rates as males.” These rates vary from a minimum of 21s. a week to one of 64s.[95] Even the lowest of these minima would be an advance of at least 25% on the wages of most home working brushmakers in London. In Victoria the average throughout the whole trade was, in 1905, £1, 9s. 2d.[96] Some Boards have been less successful than others. The mingled ignorance, astuteness and bland mendacity of the Chinese furniture makers appear to have baffled the Furniture Board, as far as the Chinese department of the trade is concerned; and as the figures quoted show, the minimum fixed in some women’s trades is far too low. But, looking at the Report of the Chief Inspector—a most interesting document—it seems impossible to doubt that the Boards have, in trade after trade, both arrested the fall of wages and (not always but often) effected a rise. No doubt the determinations are sometimes evaded; so, in our own country, are the Factory Acts sometimes evaded, yet the general influence for good of the Factory Acts is no longer a matter of doubt. That neither the Industrial Arbitration Act nor the Wage Boards have by their action checked the trade of the colonies in which they exist seems to be established beyond question. The Wage Boards, without any other prohibitory effort, seem by the mere process of forbidding underpayment to have imposed a check upon the most unsatisfactory sorts of home work. As M. Aftalion has pointed out, home work, in large part, subsists solely on account of its evils. Work given out only because it might be sweated naturally ceases to be given out when sweating is stopped. On the other hand, home work of a better kind, the home work that is harmful neither to the worker nor to the community, is not checked merely by a provision that it shall be properly paid.