The principle underlying this mass of com plicated and detailed legislation — a principle which was not consciously present to the mind of its early advocates, and one which is still only grudgingly admitted — is the establishment and enforcement of a "national minimum" in the circumstances of employment, below which it is judged to be inexpedient, in the permanent interests of the community as a whole, that any person should be employed. "The ultimate end of factory legislation," approvingly wrote the Times of 12 tune 1874, "is to prescribe con ditions of existence below which population shall not decline." This compulsory national minimum is naturally a rising one. "Every society is judged, and survives," aptly said Mr. Asquith in 1901, "according to the material and moral minimum which it prescribes to its members." It would be an interesting and supremely useful subject for graduate study to discover what is the national minimum which the vari ous civilized states of the world now actually prescribe, by compulsory law, to the various grades and classes of citizens, in the different circumstances of their respective employments. To do this even for the United Kingdom would require much more than the space here avail able. The student would find that the sys tem of regulation which began, in 1802, with the protection of the tiny class of pauper ap prentices in textile mills, now includes within its scope every manual worker in every manu facturing industry. From sanitation and the duration of labor, the law has extended to the age of commencing work, protection against accidents, the fixing of meal times and holi days, the methods of remuneration, and now also, in coal mining as well as in various low paid industries, the amount of the wages. The prescription of national minima is, however, still very far from being either uniform or sys tematic. The various requirements in the way of sanitation, duration of labor, hours of be ginning and ending, age of commencement, meal times and holidays, remuneration and protec tion against accidents, often apply, each of them, to particular industries, particular proc esses, particular ages, particular localities and pa,rticular sexes; partly, of course, because the vinous detailed prescriptions are, in their very nature, applicable only to this limited extent; but, more commonly merely on account of the empirical, and so to speak, accidental character of all cur legislation. Speaking generally, we may say that the policy of the national mini mum has been most completely and efficiently worked out in the industry to which it was first applied, mainly cotton spinning and cot ton weaving; and in which—whether post hoc or tropics. still leads the world; taking industries generally, it has been far more thoroughly applied to the employment of ym women and children than to that of men, in respect to whom it has only lately begun; with regard to subjects of prescription, it is most universal in respect of the cleanliness, ventila tion, temperature and sanitary accommodations of the work place and the means of escape from fire ; next most in respect of the age of commencement, the maximum working day and protection against accidents; whilst with re gard to the enforcement of a national minimum of subsistence we are, in the United Kingdom, still in the stage of gradual application to trade after trade. The policy of a national mini mum secures universal lip homage, so far as it applies to children. Yet our young children may lawfully be industrially employed, or even hired out for wages, in all Ireland outside the large cities, if in any industry not coming under the Factory Acts, at any age, at all hours, without stint ; in Great Britain and the Irish cities (unless new by-laws have recently been made) in any such industry at any age, for any number of hours; under such by-laws, gen erally only after 11 years of age, and for hin ted hours, differing from place to place; in agriculture not under 12 and in factories or workshops not under 13, and then only half time unless a minimum educational standard, prescribed by the local education authority, has been attained; generally speaking, full time after 14; but in some specified industries or processes not until 16, or even 18. The pre scription of a minimum wage is still illogically confined to the relatively well-paid coalminers, on the one hand, because they were strong enough to compel Parliament in 1912 to pass the Coal Mines (Minimum Wage) Act; and on the other, to certain arbitrarily selected "sweated trades" brought under the Trade Boards Act because their operatives were too weak to stand alone. Still more wanting in universality and uniformity is the enforcement of such national minima as the law does pre scribe. The distribution of the task of en forcing the law among over 2,000 independent local governing bodies, in England, Scotland and Ireland; the supervision and imperfect con trol exercised over these by four different gov ernment departments in England, besides sev eral others for Scotland and Ireland; and the very different views which these government departments take of their duties — to say nothing of the very different degrees to which they have consciously adapted the root-idea of factory legislation as above set forth— necessarily makes the enforcement of the law extremely uneven. Only in two branches, indeed,
that which deals with ((factories" properly so called, in which women and children are em ployed in connection with mechanical power, and in coal mining can the law be said to be at all successfully and systematically enforced from one end of the kingdom to the other. These happen to be the branches of the law which are enforced by an official staff, appointed by and solely responsible to, the Home Office • in London.
For the enforcement of the policy of the national minimum, so far as this is committed to him, the Home Secretary has at his dis posal, in the Factory Department of the Home Office, a 'Chief Inspector," a score of specialist and superintending inspectors, and over 160 inspectors and assistant inspectors. This staff of about 170 men, who are paid from 1150 to /1,000 a year, is supplemented by 21 lady inspectors, who receive from 1200 to 1550 a year. All the staff are appointed after examination, without regard to politics, and are permanently employed. These inspectors are perpetually traveling over the United King dom, covering among them nearly a million miles annually, and keeping under inspection more than a quarter of a million distinct fac tories, workshops, warehouses, laundries, docks and wharves (excluding those employing adult men only, which are ignored in practice), in which nearly five millions of persons are em ployed. Their efforts are aided by about 2,000 *certifying surgeons," who are paid by fees only. These are doctors in local practice who give the certificates of health without which, in certain cases, children cannot be employed. A similar, but more limited, staff is employed in the inspection of the mines and quarrie . The tradition of the Home Office in this de-' partment is that it is the business of the inspector, not merely to act on complaints, or to make so many visits, but to get the law enforced. Hence, the inspectors go hither and thither as they think fit, visiting one factory frequently, another not at all; acting on any hint or suggestion that they can get of any illegality being committed and not only not refusing to act on anonymous communications, but eagerly welcoming them when nothing bet ter is to be had. Unfortunately, however, the paucity of the staff allowed to it by the Treas ury, and the curious reluctance of English gov ernment departments to see their functions expand, has led the Home Office to forego whole fields of industrial employment in which the enforcement of a national minimum is no less necessary than those which it inspects. It de liberately omits from its regular inspection not only the work places where men only are em ployed (though these are also subject to the law in various particulars)— as to this, see 'Life in a Railway Factory,' by Alfred Wil, Hams (1915)— but also the myriads of "domes tic workshops," in which only members of the same family are employed, and in which the worst cases of *sweating" are found. The sanitation, too, of the workshops (not using mechanical power), even where women and children are employed, is, like the whole regu lation of the homeworkers, abandoned, in the main, to the more perfunctory hands of the local authorities. On the other hand, it must be said that the Home Office far surpasses the Board of Trade in the execution of its duty of enforcing the policy of the national minimum. The scanty inspectorial staff of the Board of Trade, on whom we have to rely for the en forcement of the •law relating to the conditions of employment in connection with railways and ships, confines itself practically to the investi gation of cases actually brought to its notice by responsible specific complaints, or by accidents; and takes up the attitude that it is not the busi ness of the office, or of its parliamentary chief, to initiate anything. To the student of the fac tory system of the 19th century, the reflection will inevitably occur that, if the Home Office had acted on this principle, we should still have with us the °white slavery" of the Lancashire cotton mills, denounced by Oastler and Lord Ashley. The Board of Trade is more efficient in the administration of the Trade Boards Act, where the wage awards made by the joint boards of employers and employed in each trade are enforced by a small staff of inspectors who prosecute employers guilty of the offense of paying less than the prescribed minimum. But there is even a lower depth that. the Board of Trade. The Local Government Board, the de partment to which Parliament has entrusted the enforcement of the national minimum of sanita tion takes no action whatever to see that the local governing bodies put into operation the sanitary provisions of the Factory Acts with regard to workshops and the residences of home-workers; and fails even to compel negli gent or recalcitrant local government bodies to put in force the Public Health Acts. It does not even make itself aware of the extent to which the national minimum of sanitation is being secured in the different localities.