INTERNATIONAL REACTIONS DUE TO COMMERCE 15
the competition of Bengal ; and he adds that both employers and
amployed were consequently anxious that the ten-hours-a-day Factory
Act should be extended to India.! On the continent of Europe an
agitation has been going on for some time in favour of international
legislation on this subject.? And in connection with this attention
should be drawn to the highly important suggestion made by Mr.
Wardle of Leek in his report on the silk industry to the Royal Com-
mission on Technical Education : the suggestion, namely, that ‘ trades
organisations should encourage the display in all museums of fabrics,
showing not only the quality, design, and colouring, but also every
branch of detail as respects prices paid, and all costs of production.’
‘This,’ he states, * while helping to steady the action of English trades’
anions, would stimulate the operations and aspirations of similar
bodies on the Continent.’3
40. It may perhaps be looked upon as one of the hopeful features
for the future that the importance of the considerations set forth in
the preceding paragraph is coming to be more and more clearly
recognised, and that the more enlightened among both masters and men
are becoming increasingly convinced that it is only by mutual and
world-wide co-operation that some of the most perplexing problems
of industry can find a solution. °After all,” said the Rt. Hon. G. N.
Barnes in a speech on the Treaty of Peace Bill in the House of Com-
mons on July 21, 1919, ‘hard conditions of life are not due to any
conscious cruelty on the part of any class or any individual. They are
rather due to fundamental causes which can be removed only by the
co-operation of classes.’* Instances of the readiness on the side of
capitalists to co-operate in this way, especially in the way of providing
good housing and garden accommodation, are already too numerous to
particularise. If one result of the great war should be that all
countries came to realise that the healthiest conditions in the widest
sense of the term for all engaged in industry were essential to the
highest prosperity of industry, and all governments accordingly made
it a prime aim to do what in them lay to secure such conditions as a
permanency, we should all then be able to acclaim at least one good
as issuing from that calamity. One is led to ask whether it is too much
to hope that the labour clause (Article 23) in the Covenant of the League
of Nations may in the end prove to be the most efficient instrument in
bringing about that international way of thinking which is universally
recognised as an indispensable condition of the success of the League.
The proceedings of the International Labour Conference held at
Washington in October-November 1919, followed by that on employ-
ment at sea held at Genoa in June-July 1920, are of good augury
Lt U.8. Cons. Reps. 61, p. 418. See below, par. 1058, n.
1 Ibid. 50, p. 393. Early in 1889 the Swiss Government addressed to the manu-
facturing states of Europe an invitation to send representatives to a conference to
consider the regulation of legislation for the well-being of the working-classes.
3 Report of Commissioners, iii., p. 1xxvi,
* Hansard, vol. 118, No. 99. col. 592.
