st in freeing
the home from the workshop element, the loom having usurped the largest
and best place in every household. But, as machinery developed, the time
of mother and children was again absorbed, and so absolutely that any
household knowledge ended then and there, with no further possibility of
its acquisition. It was this state of things, with its accumulated
results, which, a generation or so later, faced the few investigators
who puzzled over the decadence of morals, the enfeebled physiques, the
general helplessness of the young women who married, and the whole
series of natural consequences. So startling were the facts developed,
that it became at once evident that a change must be brought about, if
only as a measure of wise political economy; and thus it has happened
for Lyons that the factory system has perfected itself, and matches or
even goes beyond that of any other country, with the exception of
isolated points like Saltaire in England, or the Chenney village in
Connecticut. When it became evident that the ordinary factory
girl-worker at sixteen or seventeen could not sew a seam, or make a
broth, or care for a child's needs so well as the brute, the time for
action had come; and schools of various orders, industrial and
otherwise, have gradually risen and sought to undo the work of the years
that made them necessary. Perfect in many points as the system has
become, however, competition has so followed and pressed upon the
manufacturer that the wage standard has lowered to little more than
subsistence point, this fact including all forms of woman's work,
without the factory as well as within.

Leaving France and Germany and looking at Swiss and Italian workers,
much the same statements may be made, the lace-workers in Switzerland,
for instance, being an illustration of the very minimum of result for
human labor. Like the lace-workers of Germany, the fabric must often
grow in the dark almost, basements being chosen that dampness may make
the thread follow more perfectly the will of the worker, whose day is
never less than fifteen hours long, whose food seldom goes beyond black
bread with occasional milk or cabbage soup, and whose average of life
seldom exceeds forty years. There is not a thread in the exquisite
designs that has not been spun from a human nerve stretched to its
utmost tension, and the face of these workers once seen are a shadow
forever on the lovely webs that every woman covets instinctiv