some
sorts of evil things to the child; they may not give it poisonous
things, or let it live in morally or physically contagious places, but
we do not insure that they shall give it wholesome things--better than
they had themselves. We must, if our work is ever to reach effectual
fruition, go on to the logical completion of that process of
supplementing the parent that the nineteenth century began.

Consider, for instance, the circumstances of parentage among the large
section of the working classes whose girls and women engage in factory
labour. In many cases the earnings of the woman are vitally necessary
to the solvency of the family budget, the father's wages do not nearly
cover the common expenditure. In some cases the women are unmarried,
or the man is an invalid or out of work. Consider such a woman on the
verge of motherhood. Either she must work in a factory right up to the
birth of her child--and so damage its health through her strain and
fatigue,[2] or she must give up her work, lose money and go short of
food and necessities and _so_ damage the coming citizen. Moreover,
after the child is born, either she must feed it artificially and
return to work (and prosperity) soon, with a very great risk indeed
that the child will die, or she must stay at home to nourish and tend
it--until her landlord sells her furniture and turns her out!

[2] The facts of the case are put very clearly, and quite
invincibly, by Miss Margaret Macmillan in _Infant
Mortality_. See also _The Babies' Tribute to the Modern
Moloch_, by F. Victor Fisher. (Twentieth Century Press,
1_d._) These are small polemical tracts. The case is treated
fully, authoritatively and without bias in _Infant
Mortality_ by Dr. G. Newman.

Now it does not need that you should be a Socialist to see how cruel
and ridiculous it is to have mothers in such a dilemma. But while
people who are not Socialists have no remedy to suggest, or only
immediate and partial remedies, such, for example, as the forbidding
of factory work to women who are about to be or have recently been
mothers--an expedient which is bound to produce a plentiful crop of
"concealment of birth" and infanticide convictions--the Socialist does
proffer a general principle to guide the community in dealing not only
with this particular hardship, but with all the kindred hardships
which form a system with it. He declares that we are here in the