s given much time to a study of the question, contains the
latest results of English and French legislation, and of special action
in this direction. Any history of the movement as a whole, hardly has
place in these pages. It is sufficient to say that the system had
practically no consideration till 1850, when the first Board of
Arbitration was formed in England, owing its existence to the
determined efforts of two men. Mr. Rupert Kettle, lawyer and judge,
approached it from the legal side; Mr. Murdella, a manufacturer, and
himself sprung from the working-classes, went straight "to the practical
and moral end implied by the word 'conciliation,' ... both routes of
this noble emulation converging, each affording strength to the common
conclusions."

The Nottingham lace manufacture, in which numbers of women and children
as well as men are employed, has, for thirty years and more, been
governed by a Board of Arbitration, the result being an end of strikes
and all difficulties of like nature. If no more were accomplished than
the bringing about a better understanding between employer and employed,
it would mean much, since mutual suspicion and distrust rule for both.
Organization among women, and the sense of mutual dependence given by
it, lead naturally to the formation of a board able to judge
dispassionately and disinterestedly of the questions naturally arising,
many of which, however, are at once dissipated on the adoption of the
system of profit-sharing.

The practical steps already taken sum up in the forms just given; and
there remains only the question constantly asked as to the final effect
upon wages of woman's entrance into public life, this question usually
shaping itself under three heads:--

1. Why are they in the field?

2. How does their work compare in efficiency with that of men?

3. What is likely to be the final effect on wage of their entrance into
active life?

The first phase has already had full answer in the general survey of
trades and their rise and growth. As to the second, personal
observation, long continued and minute, added to the very full knowledge
to be obtained from the reports of the various State bureaus of labor,
goes to prove beyond question that, given the same grade of
intelligence, the work of women is fully equal to that of men.
Descending in the scale to untrained labor in all its forms, the woman
is at times of less value than the man. The Knights of Labor, however,
set