assionate observer, Mr. W. Stanley Jevons, whose conclusions are
founded on long investigation and deduction, years ago wrote words which
he has at various times emphasized and repeated, and which sum up the
evils to which the infancy of the children of overworked mothers is
subject, as well as the consequences to the State in which they are
born, and which faces the results of the system which produces them. He
writes as follows:--

"We can help evolution by the aid of its own highest and latest
product,--science. When all the teaching of medical and social
science lead us to look upon the absence of the mother from the
home as the cause of the gravest possible evils, can we be
warranted in standing passively by, allowing this evil to work
itself out to the bitter end, by the process of natural selection?
Something might perhaps be said in favor of the present apathetic
mode of viewing this question, if natural selection were really
securing the survival of the fittest, so that only the weakly babes
were killed off, and the strong ones well brought up. But it is
much to be feared that no infants ever really recover from the test
of virtual starvation to which they are so ruthlessly exposed. The
vital powers are irreparably crippled, and the infant grows up a
stunted, miserable specimen of humanity, the prey to every physical
and moral evil."[46]

It is hardly necessary to go on specifying special violations of
sanitary law or special illustrative cases. The Report of the New York
Bureau of Labor for 1885 is a magazine of such cases,--a summary of all
the horrors that the worst conditions can include. Aside from the
revolting pictures of the life lived from day to day by the workers
themselves, it gives in detail case after case of rapacity and
over-reaching on the part of the employers; and parallel ones may be
found in every labor report which has touched upon the subject.

In New York a "Working Woman's Protective Union," formed more than
twenty-five years ago, has done unceasing work in settling disputed
claims and collecting wages unjustly withheld. No case is entered on
their books which has not been examined by their lawyer, and thus only
well grounded complaints find record; but with even these precautions
the records show nearly fifty thousand adjudicated since they began
work. Many cities have special committees, in the organized char