dren had _declined_. The cause was simple. The
children now enjoyed the mother's nourishment and better care than they
had ever had during the best seasons of work. The same fact was attested
by physicians during the crisis of the seventies in the United States,
especially in New York and Massachusetts. The general lack of employment
compelled the women to rest from labor, and left them time for the care
of their children. Similar observations were also made by Dr. v.
Recherberg during the inquiry into the condition of the weavers of the
region of Zittau in Saxony, as shown by him in a work that he wrote
during the summer of 1890.

In the home-industries, which romantic economists love to represent as
idyllic, conditions are no better. Here the wife is chained to her
husband, at work early and late into the night, and the children are
from an early age hitched on. Crowded into the narrowest space
imaginable, husband, wife and family, boys and girls, live together,
along with the waste of materials, amidst the most disagreeable dusts
and odors, and without the necessary cleanliness. The bedrooms are of a
piece with the sitting and working rooms: generally dark holes and
without ventilation, they would be sufficiently unsanitary if they
housed but a part of the people huddled into them. In short, the
conditions of these places are such as to cause the skin to creep of
anyone accustomed to a life worthy of a human being.

The ever harder struggle for existence often also compels women and men
to commit actions and tolerate indignities that, under other
circumstances, would fill them with disgust. In 1877 it was
authentically established in Munich that, among the prostitutes,
registered by and under the surveillance of the police, there were not
less than 203 wives of workingmen and artisans. And how many are not the
married women, who, out of distress, prostitute themselves without
submitting to a police control that deeply lacerates the sense of shame
and dignity!

But we have wandered somewhat from our subject. It was shown that the
number of actions for divorce is on the increase in all countries of
civilization, and that the majority of these actions proceed from wives.
This steadily rising figure of actions for divorce is a sign of _the
decay of bourgeois marriage, which is answering its purpose ever less_.
But a still much worse sign of its decay is the circumstance that,
simultaneously, the number of marriages is