setting their own house in order—to modernise their organisation, 
improve their technique, eliminate waste, and apply more intelligently 
the resources which science Las revealed. There is no reason why cotton 
operatives should suffer because mill-owners have watered their capital, 
or miners because mine-owners are too incompetent to understand their 
business and too obstinate to take the advice of those who do, or 
workers everywhere because the organisation of British industry, as 
one critic after another has remarked, is antiquated aad out 
of date, and employers, instead of improving it, use the old faliacious 
argument of inferior labour conditions abroad as a weapon to degrade 
labour conditions at home. The Labour Party does not intend that 
they shouid. - In full accordance with the best economic opinion, it 
stands both for the systematic, universal and thoroughgoing application 
of the policy of fixing minimum standards of life and employment, in 
such a way as at once to safeguard the workers against the downward 
pressure of unscrupulous or incompetent employers and to increase the 
efficiency of industrial organisation, and for the general adoption of the 
principle of equal pay for equal work. Needless to say, it will give 
its whole-hearted support to the establishment of international standards 
through the International Labour Organisation and to their rigorous 
enforcement, with the object of securing and maintaining the best 
possible conditions of working-class life both at home and abroad. 
INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION 
A Charter for Trade Unionism 
The wage-earner’s first safeguard is his Trade Union. The 
Government has done its utmost to deprive him of it. Among 
the first tasks of the Labour Party, therefore, will be to repeal the 
cynical measure of class-legislation, by which the Conservatives have 
sought to cripple the strength of Trade Unionism both on the industrial 
and on the political fields. At the same time, while restoring to the 
organised workers the rights of which they have been unjustly deprived, 
it will devote its energies to maintaining and advancing the standard of 
life of the whole population, both by the passage of urgently needed 
legislation and by ensuring that such legislation as exists is more 
effectively administered. The code of Factory and Workshops Acts. 
Mines Regulation Acts, Shop Hours Acts, Miners’ Minimum Wage, 
Trade Boards, and Agricultural Wages Board Acts, Workmen's 
Compensation Acts, Pensions, Public Health, Insurance and Education 
Acts is riddled with gaps. Not only so, but owing to the reluctance 
of capitalist politicians to find the money for their effective 
administration, the practical enforcement of these measures is gravely 
defective. The Labour Party will make it its business to extend their 
scone and improve their administration. 
New Standards in Industry 
The Labour Party will take up again the Factory and Workshops 
legislation. prepared when a Labour Government was in office. 
Convinced that the low economic standards of one nation react 
injuriously upon all the rest, and that it is at once the duty and the