The composition of these commissions—­in which all the real work of the conferences is done—­is truly heterogeneous.  A commission may represent a dozen nationalities; it will certainly contain specimens of every social class, members of the most varied shades of thought in politics, religion, and sociology.  I can still remember the constituents of my first commission at Geneva in 1906.  Our subject was the night-work of young persons.  At the head of the table was a professor of Civil Law in the University of Louvain.  On either side of him sat a Catholic clerical member of the German Reichstag; a German Protestant pastor from Bavaria; a distinguished Parisian engineer; an Austrian nobleman interested in social reform; a Hungarian man of science; a Dutch factory inspector; a Swiss Trade Union secretary; and myself.  We were a motley crew, but the strange ‘pattern’ which we must have presented to the observation of any higher intelligences interested in our deliberations had no effect on the goodwill and good humour with which they were conducted.

The range of subjects considered at international meetings is very wide.  It includes all questions relating to the labour of women, young persons and children; matters of health and hygiene, with special reference to the use of poisonous material in industry, and the regulation of dangerous trades; workmen’s insurance; the establishment of wages boards and minimum rates as preventives against sweating; the extension of the ten-hours’ day and the Saturday half-holiday to be the legal rule in all industrial countries; and the introduction of the three-shift system and the eight-hour working day in continuous industries.  As it is obvious that questions so large, touching so deeply the domestic life and habits of every people, cannot possibly be settled either out of hand or all at once, the Association’s study of each separate problem is always prolonged and, according to the circumstances and the difficulty of the case, more prolonged in one instance than in another.  Like the old pioneers of National Factory legislation, the Association has proceeded along the line of least resistance:  not because it lacks courage, but for reasons of sheer prudence.  If it was to become, in the words of M. Millerand, the present French Minister of War, one of its oldest and staunchest members, ’the laboratory in which international treaties are made’, it was clear that it must not propose for international acceptance reforms which even among the most progressive peoples were looked upon as doubtful or dangerous.  Accordingly it chose for the subject of its first great efforts two reforms in relation to which it could count with certainty upon a considerable amount of sympathy, and proposed international legislation prohibiting the night-work of women in factories, and the manufacture, importation, and sale of matches made with white phosphorus.  Information on both these subjects was collected by means of the national sections; the Association in conference drew up proposals and recommendations to the governments concerned; the governments consented to a diplomatic conference at Berne, and the conventions concluded in 1906 were the happy result of their meeting.