engaged in doing the things, some of which I have undertaken to record, were too busy to engage in controversy, and thus the nonsense passed in general without rebuke. Besides, even nonsense has its uses, and if exaggeration served the purpose of stimulating the mind of the public and of the authorities to further effort, it was not altogether without advantage.

The war made manifest the latent powers of British industry and of British science; but the powers were there all the while. The occasion to exercise them came, and they were not found wanting.

I should not have had the temerity to speak so positively on a matter not strictly within my field, had I not had unusual opportunities during the period from 1886 up till 1892 of making myself acquainted with the development of technical industry in Great Britain. These opportunities arose through my connection with Industries, an engineering paper established in 1886. Shortly afterwards I became Assistant Editor, and in this capacity visited frequently all the chief engineering centres in Great Britain and Ireland. I was therefore in a position to know what was going on and to appreciate the enormous mental activity which was being applied during a period of comparatively dull trade to improvements in industrial technique. It is quite obvious that there must be a close connection between the utilisation of technical ability and the general course of trade. I have suggested that development of technical skill was one of the causes of the trade movement which put an end to the depression. In the large sense, therefore, not deficiency in technical ability or even in technical education, but rather deficiency in those general trade conditions by means of which these can be availed of and supported lay at the root of the matter.

In short, not absence of supply of technically trained persons, but variability of demand involving at times serious deficiency of such demand for such persons is the real difficulty. What is necessary, therefore, is education of the organising capitalist or of his professional director where private enterprise is concerned, as well as of the public and their representatives where public enterprises are in question. If there should happen at any time to be a deficiency in supply of skilled technicians, this is soon corrected. The continuous stream of chemists and engineers from Great Britain to the United States during past years has shown that organisation of capital or reluctance of capital to pay a sufficiently attractive price to keep technical skill at home is an important factor.

When I come to describe the industrial conditions which I found to

exist in the United States at a somewhat later period, this aspect of the relation between technical skill and capital will become more vivid.

Two industrial movements, one indigenous as regards the working class and the other derived by it, but owing its growth exclusively to that class, made great progress in Scotland in the eighties. These were the trade union and the co-operative movements. Both of these affected, although not uniformly, the general mass of working people. During this period I endeavoured to make a critical study of both of these efforts towards industrial combination. I attended the Trades Union Congresses and visited with some frequency Trades Councils and some local branches of trade unions. Debates in the Congresses were sometimes at a high level; but speakers were embarrassed by the circumstance that votes of members of the Congress were determined before the debate and that no matter how convincing might be their arguments, they could not hope to influence the result of the vote. The method of delegation with instructions formerly in vogue in parliamentary representation had been adopted by the Trade Union Congress at an early stage in its history. The adoption of this method did not, however, prevent a great deal of "lobbying" directed towards future contingencies and policy rather than towards the immediate vote.

A very noticeable feature of Trade Union Congresses of this period was that while resolutions of a thoroughgoing collectivist order were passed sometimes almost without debate, members of pronounced socialist views were never elected to offices-they were, for example, carefully excluded from the Parliamentary Committee which was practically the executive body of the trade union movement. The general body of trade unionists seemed to be quite willing to adopt very drastic resolutions, but very unwilling to entrust guidance of their movement, especially in Parliament, to men who were extreme. The consequence of this policy was that resolutions were deprived of any importance, because no one expected the Parliamentary Committee to do anything whatever to give them effect. The members of this committee at that time were worthy men; but they could not properly be regarded as representatives of wage-earning people. They had been themselves wage earners, otherwise they could not have become trade unionists; but they had long ceased to earn wages by labour. They had been elected to trade union secretaryships and afterwards to Parliament, and their mode of life as well as their points of view were hardly distinguishable in essence from those of the middle class. When they travelled they lived at the best hotels, and in general, in spite of absence of early education, and in spite of a certain awkwardness,

they effected an entry into a class to which as workmen they had been unaccustomed. This condition, although not originating in this epoch (1881-90), developed rapidly in it; and it is not therefore surprising that a subsequent period should be characterised by reaction in the ranks of labour against trade union officials and by the growth of a labour party outside the official trade union movement.

While on some questions the trade union movement presented an united front, as, for example, on the question of recognition of unions, on others there was much difference of opinion. Some trades were in favour of an eight-hour day and some were not. So also occasionally there were more or less serious disputes between closely allied trades. Ship carpenters and ship joiners had, for example, a prolonged quarrel arising from the action of carpenters during a strike of ship joiners. The trade union movement during the decade pursued a policy rather of consolidation than of aggressive action. It was in the next decade that it came to be influenced by collectivist ideas.

The real labour difficulties of the eighties arose in the unorganised trades-in dock labour, e.g.-and quite as importantly in low-paid domestic industries, chiefly carried on by women-paper-bag making, umbrella stitching and the like. I made at that time some inquiries into the first-mentioned of these, and I found women working in their own wretched houses sometimes till long after midnight making paper bags at incredibly low rates. A strike of umbrella stitchers, an industry at that time carried on by women at home, revealed also very undesirable conditions. Exposure of these conditions led to the organisation of a woman's trade union and to improvement in the position of certain groups of female workers. I became convinced at this time that the chief reason for the relatively low rate of women's wages under laisser faire conditions was that earnings of women were to a large extent supplementary rather than substantive, while the standard of comfort to which they were accustomed and beyond which large numbers of them did not aspire, led them to accept a very low scale of remuneration. This low scale of remuneration reacted upon their work which was not very efficient. Women's work was thus involved in a vicious circle.

Alongside of the trade union movement there had grown in Scotland and in the north of England the co-operative movement. earlier history of co-operation had made plain the fact that organisation of purchases and sales in retail distribution was much more easily accomplished than organisation of manufacture. After some unsuccessful experiments in co-operative production the strength of