There is a clear reason for this, which is in itself at once a justification for the special treatment which we propose for these trades, and a means of marking them off more or less definitely from the ordinary trades.  In the case of any great staple trade in this country, if the rate of wages became unnaturally low compared to other industries, and the workers could not raise it by any pressure on their part, the new generation at any rate would exercise a preference for better pay and more attractive forms of industry.  The gradual correction of depressed conditions over large periods of time is thus possible.  But in these sweated industries there is no new generation to come to the rescue.  They are recruited from a class rather than from a section of the community.  The widow, the women folk of the poorest type of labourer, the broken, the weak, the struggling, the diseased—­those are the people who largely depend upon these trades, and they have not the same mobility of choice, exerted, tardily though it be, by a new generation, but which is undoubtedly operative upon the great staple trades of the country.  That is an explanation which accounts for the same evils being reproduced under similar conditions in different countries, separated widely from one another and marked by great differences of general conditions.

I ask the House to regard these industries as sick and diseased industries.  I ask Parliament to deal with them exactly in the same mood and temper as we should deal with sick people.  It would be cruel to prescribe the same law for the sick as for the sound.  It would be absurd to apply to the healthy the restrictions required for the sick.  Further, these sweated trades are not inanimate abstractions.  They are living, almost sentient, things.  Let the House think of these sweated trades as patients in a hospital ward.  Each case must be studied and treated entirely by itself.  No general rule can be applied.  There is no regulation dose which will cure them all.  You cannot effect quicker cures by giving larger doses.  Different medicines, different diets, different operations are required for each; and consideration, encouragement, nursing, personal effort are necessary for all.  Great flexibility and variety of procedure, and a wide discretionary power, entrusted to earnest and competent people, must characterise any attempt to legislate on this subject.

The central principle of this Bill is the establishment of Trade Boards, which will be charged with the duty of fixing a minimum wage.  I am very anxious to give these Trade Boards the utmost possible substance and recognition.  They will be formed on the principle of equality of representation for employers and employed, with a skilled official chairman or nucleus.  That is the principle I have adopted in the new Arbitration Court recently established.  That is the principle which will govern the system of Labour Exchanges, shortly to be introduced, and other measures which may come to be associated with Labour Exchanges, and I think it is an excellent principle.