t of its grace and
value. This narrowing of the home into a place of hurried meals and
sleep is on the whole the worst injury modern industry has inflicted
on our lives, and it is difficult to see how it can be compensated by
any increase of material products. Factory life for women, save in
extremely rare cases, saps the physical and moral health of the
family. The exigencies of factory life are inconsistent with the
position of a good mother, a good wife, or the maker of a home. Save
in extreme circumstances, no increase of the family wage can balance
these losses, whose values stand upon a higher qualitative level.

The direct economic tendency of machine-industry to take women and
children away from the home to work must be looked upon as a tendency
antagonistic to civilisation.[265] In the case of children, factory
legislation of increasing severity has been necessary to prevent the
spread or continuance of the evil.[266] The factory regulations
restricting and protecting women are directly continuous with this
policy, and may be regarded in the light of a protection of the home
against the undue encroachments of the machine. How far further
restrictions may be left to voluntary action and the growth of a saner
estimate of values, or how far further legal protection of the home
may be required, it remains for history to determine.

APPENDIX.

The following Table of Factory Legislation is constructed to
illustrate the lines along which State protection of labour has
advanced in this century in England. Four laws of development are
clearly discernible:--

1. Movement along the line of strongest human feeling. Weakest
workers are protected first, pauper children who are the
least "free" parties in a contract, then protection
advances to other children, young persons, women, men.

2. Protective legislation moves from the more highly organised
to the less highly organised structures of industry.
Cotton-mills are sole subjects of earliest Factory Acts,
then woollen, then other textile trades, trades subsidiary
to textile industries, non-textile factories, larger
workshops, domestic workshops, retail trade, domestic
service.

3. Growing complexity of aims and of legislative machinery.
Primarily Factory Acts aim at regulation of quantity of
labour. Reductions of the working-day forms a backbone of
this leg