Sweated Industry and the Minimum Wage. By Clementine Black. With
an Introduction by A. G. Gardiner. (Duckworth and Co. 38. 6d. net.)—There is, of course, a quantity of detail in this volume which it is not within our competence to examine. The principle which Miss Black seeks to establish, and not, we believe, without success, is that a living wage is economically profit- able. But there are two matters to which we would especially draw attention. One is from Mr. Gardiner's introduction :—" Many of the complaints of high rates in the East End come from the very firms whose high dividends were actually being paid out of the rates in the form of poor relief to the underpaid worker." This is the old Poor Law over again, starvation wages supplemented out of intolerably high rates. The other ie the chapter on "Foreign Competition" :—" In cases where the continuance of a trade actually depends upon aggravated 'underpayment, the trade is shown, by that very fact, to be already in a declining state and unable to support its own cost; and no trade that is in a declining state and unable to support its own cost and that offers no possibility of bettered conditions can be regarded as a national asset"
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