ht
become part of the great profit-grinding system. Her breasts might be
full to overflowing with the food wonderfully provided for the child
by Nature; the baby in the cradle might cry for the very food that was
bursting from its mother's breasts, but Capital did not care. The
mother was taken away from the child and the child was left to get on
as best it might upon a miserable substitute for its mother's milk.
Hundreds of thousands of babies die each year for no other reason than
this.

There will never be safety for the home and the family so long as
babies are robbed of their mothers' care; so long as little children
are made to do the work of men; so long as the girls who are to be the
wives and mothers are sent into wifehood and motherhood unprepared,
simply because the years of maidenhood are spent in factories that
ought to be spent in preparation for wifehood and motherhood. Here is
capitalism cutting at the very heart of the home, with Socialism as
the only defender of the home it is charged with attacking. For
Socialism would give the child its right to childhood; it would give
the mother her freedom to nourish her babe; it would give to the
fathers and mothers of the future the opportunities for preparation
they cannot now enjoy.

I ask you, friend Jonathan, to think of the tens and thousands of
women who marry to-day, not because they love and are loved in return,
but for the sake of getting a home. Socialism would put an end to that
condition by making woman economically and politically free. Think of
the tens of thousands of young men in our land who do not, dare not,
marry because they have no certainty of earning a living adequate to
the maintenance of wives and families; of the hundreds of thousands of
prostitutes in our country, the vast majority of whom have been driven
to that terrible fate by economic causes outside of their control.
Socialism would at least remove the economic pressure which forces so
many of these women down into the terrible hell of prostitution. I ask
you, Jonathan, to think also of the thousands of wives who are
deserted every year. So far as the investigations of the charity
organizations into this serious matter have gone, it has been shown
that poverty is responsible for by far the greatest number of these
desertions. Socialism would not only destroy the poverty, but it would
set woman economically free, thus removing the main causes of the
evil.

Oh, Jonathan Edwards