mental health of the victim thus prematurely thrust into
the struggle of life, legislation can doubtless do much. By raising the
standard of education, and, if necessary, by an absolute prohibition of
child-work, the State would be keeping well within the powers which the
strictest individualist would assign to it, as it would be merely
protecting the rising generation against the cupidity of parents and the
encroachments of industrial competition.

The case of married women-workers is different. Better education of
women in domestic work and the requirements of wifehood and motherhood;
the growth of a juster and more wholesome feeling in the man, that he
may refuse to demand that his wife add wage-work to her domestic
drudgery; and above all, a clearer and more generally diffused
perception in society of the value of healthy and careful provision for
the children of our race, should build up a bulwark of public opinion,
which shall offer stronger and stronger obstruction to the employment of
married women, either outside or inside the home, in the capacity of
industrial wage-earners. The satisfaction rightly felt in the ever wider
opportunities afforded to unmarried women of earning an independent
livelihood, and of using their abilities and energies in socially useful
work, is considerably qualified by our perception of the injury which
these new opportunities inflict upon our offspring and our homes.
Surely, from the large standpoint of true national economy, no wiser use
could be made of the vast expansion of the wealth-producing power of the
nation under the reign of machinery, than to secure for every woman
destined to be a wife and a mother, that relief from the physical strain
of industrial toil which shall enable her to bring forth healthy
offspring, and to employ her time and attention in their nurture, and in
the ordering of a cleanly, wholesome, peaceful home life. So long as
public opinion permits or even encourages women, who either are or will
be mothers, to neglect the preparation for, and the performance of, the
duties of domestic life and of maternity, by engaging in laborious and
unhealthy industrial occupations, so long shall we pay the penalty in
that physical and moral deterioration of the race which we have traced
in low city life. How can the women of Cradley Heath engaged in wielding
huge sledge-hammers, or carrying on their neck a hundredweight of chain
for twelve or fourteen hours a day, in or