The immediate outcome was the formation of the Anti-Sweating League to secure a minimum wage, and later in the year a three days’ conference, opened by the Lord Mayor and representing two millions organised workers, was held at the Guildhall. This conference, which was addressed on various aspects of the evil and its remedy by authorities like Sir Chas. Dilke, Lord Dunraven, Mr Pember Reeves, Mr Sidney Webb, Mr J. A. Hobson, Mr Bernard Wise, Miss Clementina Black and others, unanimously endorsed the programme of the League which was embodied in the Bill now before Parliament. That Bill is purely experimental. It is based upon the lines of the Victorian Wages Board system and is applied only to a certain group of trades which furnish the best field for an experiment which has become firmly established and generally operative in the Australian colony. Many authorities prefer the Arbitration system of New South Wales and New Zealand; but the difficulty in the way of the adoption of that system in this country is the opposition of the trade unions. All are agreed on the principle of the minimum wage, and the Wages Board has been accepted as the only possible legislative expression of that principle in this country. So far as can be seen, then, the Bill offers the one available remedy for an evil which all are agreed must be dealt with. It is not necessary here to argue at length the case for the principle of the minimum wage. Those interested in the subject will find it stated in the addresses given at the Guildhall Conference and published in pamphlet form by the National Anti-Sweating League, Salisbury Square, E.C. It is forty-seven years since Ruskin shocked the economists of his time by declaring for the regulation of wages irrespective of the demand for labour. “Perhaps one of the most curious facts in the history of human error,” he said, “is the denial by the common political economist of the possibility of thus regulating wages; while for all the important and much of the unimportant labour on the earth, wages are already so regulated. “We do not sell our Prime-Ministership by Dutch auction; nor on the decease of a bishop, whatever may be the general advantages of simony, do we (yet) offer his diocese to the clergyman who will take the episcopacy at the lowest contract. We (we exquisite sagacity of political economy) do indeed sell commissions; but not openly, generalships; sick, we do not inquire for a physician who takes less than a guinea; litigious, we never think of reducing six-and-eightpence to four-and-sixpence; caught in a shower, we do not canvass the cabmen, to find one who values his driving at less than sixpence a mile.” Ruskin was duly punished. The publishers closed their magazines against such revolutionary teaching, and Carlyle’s “ten thousand sparrows” chirped in one furious chorus the current equivalent for “Socialism” and “Wastrel.”