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of British labour should bestir themselves to try what international co-operation can do to mitigate the disturbance, and, if possible, to stop the sweated labour in foreign countries from underselling us in the world-market. The International Labour Bureau, attached to the League of Nations, is at any rate the possible instrument of such a co-operative policy, though its present feebleness is attested by the contemptuous treatment accorded by most governments to its early conventions.

So far I have treated this international co-operation from the exclusively British standpoint as a means of preventing the degradation of our wages in periods of trade depression. But there is a wider and more fundamental significance attaching to international co-operation for the maintenance and improvement of the standards of labour in all countries by consent. For this is the only safe way in which the world-product can be distributed more equally and equitably between labour and the other claimants. The better distribution within a single national area, such as Britain, would not secure its object. It might drive a good deal of the trade, capital and labour, to other national areas where profits were higher and wages lower. It is literally true that for a country in close dependence upon other countries, as is ours, no single problem of trade or labour can be solved upon a purely national basis. A common international policy is the only way of remedying that fundamental maladjustment between rate of production and rate of consumption, of which trade depressions and the ills they bring are at once the evidence and the conse-