es equally
to all other ranks. No Unionist member or Unionist candidate is really
well served unless he has a number of men of the working class on what
I may call his political staff. And I say this not merely for
electioneering reasons. This is just one of the cases in which
considerations of party interest coincide--I wish they always or often
did--with considerations of a higher character. There is nothing more
calculated to remove class prejudice and antagonism than the
co-operation of men of different classes on the same body for the same
public end. And there is this about the aims of Unionism, that they
are best calculated to teach the value of such co-operation; to bring
home to men of all classes their essential inter-dependence on one
another, as well as to bring home to each individual the pettiness and
meanness of personal vanity and ambition in the presence of anything
so great, so stately, as the common heritage and traditions of the
British race.

SWEATED INDUSTRIES

Oxford, December 5, 1907

This exhibition is one of a series which are being held in different
parts of the country with the object of directing attention, or rather
of keeping it directed, to the conditions under which a number of
articles, many of them articles of primary necessity, are at present
being produced, and with the object also of improving the lot of the
people engaged in the production of those articles. Now this matter is
one of great national importance, because the sweated workers are
numbered by hundreds of thousands, and because their poverty and the
resulting evils affect many beside themselves, and exercise a
depressing influence on large classes of the community. What do we
mean by sweating? I will give you a definition laid down by a
Parliamentary Committee, which made a most exhaustive inquiry into
the subject: "Unduly low rates of wages, excessive hours of work, and
insanitary condition of the workplaces." You may say that this is a
state of things against which our instincts of humanity and charity
revolt. And that is perfectly true, but I do not propose to approach
the question from that point of view to-day. I want to approach it
from the economic and political standpoint. But when I say political I
do not mean it in any party sense. This is not a party question; may
it never become one. The organisers of this exhibition have done what
lay in their power to prevent the blighting and corrosive influence