telegraph companies or others. Compulsory education is, of course,
universal, and the machinery to bring it about is generally based upon
a system of certificates or cards, with truant officers and factory
inspectors.

According to the encyclopaedias, some five hundred thousand women
were employed in England about twenty years ago, of whom about three
hundred thousand were in the textile mills. In Massachusetts alone
there were two hundred and eight thousand women employed, according to
the last State census. Neither of these figures include the vast class
of domestic service and farm labor. The inclusion of this would swell
the proportion of adult women employed in gainful occupations to at
least one in four, if not one in three. Congress itself has recently
been investigating the question whether "home life has been
threatened, marriage decreased, divorce increased out of all
proportion, and the birth rate now barely exceeds the death rate, so
that the economic and social welfare of the country is menaced by this
army of female wage earners" (see _Boston Herald_, April 2, 1908). It
appeared that in 1900 one million seven hundred and fifty thousand
children were at work between the ages of ten and fifteen, of whom
five hundred thousand were girls. This and other considerations have
led to the movement for national child-labor laws already discussed.

Perhaps the most dangerous tendency, at least to conservative ideas,
is the increasing one to take the children away from the custody
of the parents, or even of the mother, and place them in State
institutions. Indeed, in some Western States it would appear that the
general disapproval of the neighbors of the method employed by parents
in bringing up, nurturing, educating, or controlling their children,
is sufficient cause for the State authorities to step in and disrupt
the family by removing the children, even when themselves unwilling,
from the home to some State or county institution. Any one who has
worked much in public charities and had experience with that woeful
creature, the institutionalized child, will realize the menace
contained in such legislation.

Finally, it should be remembered that throughout the United States
men are universally liable for their wives' debts, short of some
quasi-legal separation; on the other hand, wives are never liable for
the debts of their husbands.

XVIII

CRIMINAL LAW AND POLICE

There is no very general tendenc