A.—7.

depression are to become really effective, they must be internationally co-ordinated. The great industrial countries can do nothing more valuable towards promoting social progress throughout the world than by sustaining a high level of business activity. Without this, as the present decade has conclusively shown, prices of raw_ materials and of agricultural products are ruthlessly forced down; international trade is reduced enormously both in volume and, still more, in value; international, indebtednesst becomes a perpetual source of friction; and international investment dries up. It is particularly in this field that international consciousness is necessary and world co-operation waits to be devised. As Mr. D. 11. Robertson says: ' Unless we can work towards international control of the cyclical movement of trade, sooner or Inter we shall all he back in the gutter playing beoaar-mij-neighbour . . .' " The other enlargement of the scope of the Organization is a direct outcome of the new attitude towards social progress. No country now considers that its duty has been discharged if it merely takes measures to prevent the more extreme forms of exploitation. The aim has been enlarged to include the maintenance of an adequate standard of living for the whole of the people. Here, also, there are new international aspects which cannot be ignored. Fair dealing between employers and workers does not make up the totality of social justice. There are other fields no less important. In particular, there is the wide gap between the remuneration of those engaged in manufacturing and the remuneration of those who work on the land. In the interests both of industrial and of agricultural workers this gap needs to be closed; and it can only be closed by raising the conditions of the workers on the land, not by reducing the conditions of those engaged in manufacturing. If this is to be successfully accomplished, international as well as national action is required. Yet, again, if social justice is to form a basis for universal peace, there must be some approach to greater economic equality between nations. So long as there is such extreme poverty as still predominates in a large number of countries, there can be no question of justice, and in the end no possibility of peace. Here, also, international action is required. It is not suggested that the Organization can by its own efforts bring about such enormous changes as these. What it can do, and by terms of its Charter is bound, to do, is to insist upon their necessity and their inevitability. Its duty is to hold, up the social mirror to every type of economic action and experiment—to discern the types of State intervention which are socially valuable from those which are socially pernicious. In short, it has to ensure so far as it may that international co-ordination shall be planned and executed in the interests of social progress and in the light of the changed circumstances of the present age. "The increased importance attached to the problems of agriculture, migration, housing, nutrition, indigenous labour, is one sign among many of the widened outlook of the Organization. Its function is no longer conceived as mainly consisting in drafting Conventions to regulate the competition between the industrial countries. Working-conditions in industry constitute only one part of the social problem. Shorter hours, protection against industrial accident and disease, unemployment andl old age, the care of women and children, are important elements in the maintenance and improvement of the general standard of living of every community, but they are not sufficient in themselves. Without regular work, ivithout wages adequate to ensure a civilized level of feeding, clothing, and housing—in a word, without a solid economic foundation —labour legislation is only a very partial remedy for the social evils which the International Labour Organization was created to combat. It is therefore an inevitable and healthy development that its outlook should have continued to broaden and that it should have been gradually led to consider the general questions upon which the welfare of the workers, both in industry and agriculture, ultimately depend. A new period of intense and varied activity is opening out before the OrganizationIts purview is no longer confined to the technical problems of industrial legislation which it inherited from the International Association for Labour Legislation. Its horizon embraces all those wider questions which are inherent in the vast problems of stabilizing employment and lifting the standard of life to more civilized levels everywhere. These problems are squarely attributed to the jurisdiction of the Organization by its Constitution, They are the essence of its existence. In the future its work may not be cast in the same conventional moulds. Its Constitution may have to be adapted to meet new circumstances as they arise. Its centre of gravity will no longer be located in the middle of Europe. Its outlook will become more world-wide as time goes on. It may some day acquire the universality which it has never yet entirely achieved. But, whatever its vicissitudes, its future is assured as long as civilization based on the economic dependence between nations and a common aspiration to improve the lot of the great masses of mankind endures. As the American philosopher, John Dewey, lias said: ' Internationalism is not an aspiration but a fact, not a sentimental ideal but a force,' Only the

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