who turn a deaf ear to the representations of their managers and foremen when these, coming into direct personal contact with the employed, take note of results due to over-strain which are invisible to the head of the business in his office, and who continue to suppose, with their fathers, that limitation of the working period necessarily restricts output and spells commercial loss.  Such men, hearing that their own manufacture is produced, let us say in Russia, by men working twelve hours a day to their men’s nine, and paid at a considerably lower rate than that which obtains in their own works, would certainly not dream of drawing any other conclusion than the, to them, obvious one that the result of this difference must be a lowered cost of production.  Inquiries which should prove, as did those of Sir Alfred Mond’s firm when confronted with such a case, that the cost of production per ton was actually higher under the long hour and low wage system would never be instituted by them, and their results, when made by others, leave them sceptical if not suspicious.

Recognizing this mental attitude in a large section of the business men of every country, and bearing in mind that, in order to secure the efficient administration of labour laws, the legislator must be able to carry with him at least the general consent of the majority of those employers to whose trades they apply, it becomes clear that if we would remove all objection to complete and adequate protective law for the workers we must first dispel the fear of the manufacturer that such law would handicap him unfairly in the international market.  And what way so apt to this end as the bringing of his competitors under a law similar in character and as far as possible uniform in its provisions?

It is a proof of the prescience of Robert Owen that, even before he had succeeded in planting the first small seed which was to grow into the flourishing tree of British industrial legislation, he had grasped the necessity and formulated the demand for international action in the matter of Factory Laws.  Owen’s labours at home have, naturally enough, bulked so large in the estimation of historians and publicists in their writings on this subject, that the continental side of his activities has received comparatively little attention at their hands.  Nevertheless his correspondence with European governments on the abuses and needs of industrialism as it existed in the early years of the nineteenth century are among the most remarkable he ever wrote; and his appeal to the Congress of the Holy Alliance in 1818 shows how thoroughly prepared he was to treat national reform as the first step to a system which should be international.  Had the statesmen of his time, too busy in their making and unmaking of kingdoms to heed his arguments and appeals, turned their attention from those high matters (in which, after all, their achievement was for the most part neither brilliant nor beneficial) to the