nion has found it necessary greatly to refine
upon these broad generalisations of the truth, and the first clear
division that we make to-day in questions of wages, is that between a
healthy and unhealthy condition of bargaining.

Where, as in the great staple trades of this country, you have
powerful organisations on both sides, with responsible leaders able
to bind their constituents to their decisions, conjoined with
automatic scales, or arbitration or conciliation in case of a
deadlock, there you have a healthy condition of bargaining, which
increases the competitive power of the industry, which continually
weaves more closely together the fortunes of Capital and Labour, and
which enforces a constant progression in the standards of living and
of productive power. But where, as in what we call "Sweated trades,"
you have no organisation at all on either side, no parity of
bargaining between employers and employed, where the good employer is
continually undercut by the bad, and the bad again by the worse; where
the worker whose whole livelihood depends on the trade is undercut by
the worker to whom it is only a second string; where the feebleness
and ignorance of the workers and their isolation from each other
render them an easy prey to the tyranny of bad masters, and middlemen
one step above them upon the lowest rungs of the ladder, and
themselves held in the grip of the same relentless forces--there you
have a condition not of progress but of progressive degeneration. And
just as in the former case the upward tendency will be constant if it
is not interrupted by external power, so in the latter case the
demoralisation will continue in a squalid welter for periods which are
quite indefinite so far as our brief lives are concerned.

We have seen from the investigations of the last twenty years, when
the phenomena of sweating have been under close and scientific review,
that there is no power of self-cure within the area of the evil. We
have seen that while the general advance in the standards of work and
wages has on the whole been constant, these morbid and diseased
patches, which we call the Sweated Trades, have not shared in that
improvement, but have remained in a state of chronic depression and
degeneration. The same shocking facts, in some cases the same pitiful
witnesses, were brought before the Select Committee last year as
before Lord Dunraven's Committee in 1888. Indeed I am advised that in
some respects w