ch reforms in
favour of the worker would place British industry at a disadvantage with
that of countries where the action of the manufacturer remained
comparatively unfettered. The distrust, as well as the dislike of long
hours as a means of increasing production, together with the belief that
healthy and pleasant surroundings conduce to the development of the
worker's powers as well as to the satisfactory maintenance of his
physical condition, has made remarkable progress among the more
intelligent of the employing class since the twentieth century began.
But there is still, in nearly every trade, a considerable mass of
masters who rarely think and never experiment, who turn a deaf ear to
the representations of their managers and foremen when these, coming
into direct personal contact with the employed, take note of results due
to over-strain which are invisible to the head of the business in his
office, and who continue to suppose, with their fathers, that limitation
of the working period necessarily restricts output and spells
commercial loss. Such men, hearing that their own manufacture is
produced, let us say in Russia, by men working twelve hours a day to
their men's nine, and paid at a considerably lower rate than that which
obtains in their own works, would certainly not dream of drawing any
other conclusion than the, to them, obvious one that the result of this
difference must be a lowered cost of production. Inquiries which should
prove, as did those of Sir Alfred Mond's firm when confronted with such
a case, that the cost of production per ton was actually higher under
the long hour and low wage system would never be instituted by them, and
their results, when made by others, leave them sceptical if not
suspicious.

Recognizing this mental attitude in a large section of the business men
of every country, and bearing in mind that, in order to secure the
efficient administration of labour laws, the legislator must be able to
carry with him at least the general consent of the majority of those
employers to whose trades they apply, it becomes clear that if we would
remove all objection to complete and adequate protective law for the
workers we must first dispel the fear of the manufacturer that such law
would handicap him unfairly in the international market. And what way so
apt to this end as the bringing of his competitors under a law similar
in character and as far as possible uniform in its provisions?

It