But there is another force required to give any full effect to such extensions of the Factory Act as will crush private workshops, and either directly or indirectly prohibit out-work.  The real reason, as we saw, why woman’s wages were proportionately lower than man’s, was the competition of a mass of women, able and willing to work at indefinitely low rates, because they were wholly or partly supported from other sources.  Now legislation can hardly interfere to prevent this competition, but public opinion can.  If the greater part of the industrial work now done by women at home were done in factories, this fact in itself would offer some restrictions to the competition of married women, which is so fatal to those who depend entirely upon their wages for a livelihood.  But the gradual growth of a strong public opinion, fed by a clear perception of the harm married women do to their unsupported sisters by their competition, and directed towards the establishment of a healthy social feeling against the wage-earning proclivities of married women, would be a far more wholesome as well as a more potent method of interference than the passing of any law.

To interfere with the work of young women living at home, and supported in large part by their parents, would be impracticable even if it were desirable, although the competition of these conduces to the same lowering of women’s wages.  But the education of a strong popular sentiment against the propriety of the industrial labour of married women, would be not only practicable, but highly desirable.  Such a public sentiment would not at first operate so stringently as to interfere in those exceptional cases where it seems an absolute necessity that the wife should aid by her home or factory work the family income.  But a steady pressure of public opinion, making for the closer restriction of the wage-work of married women, would be of incomparable value to the movement to secure better industrial conditions for those women who are obliged to work for a living.  A fuller, clearer realization of the importance of this subject is much needed at the present time.  The industrial emancipation of women, favoured by the liberal sentiments of the age, has been eagerly utilized by enterprising managers of businesses in search of the cheapest labour.  Not only women, but also children are enabled, owing to the nature of recent mechanical inventions which relieve the physical strain, but increase the monotony of labour, to make themselves useful in factories or home-work.  Each year sees a large growth in the ranks of women-workers.  Eager to earn each what she can, girls and wives alike rush into factory work, reckless of the fact that their very readiness to work tells against them in the amount of their weekly wages, and only goes to swell the dividends of the capitalist, or perhaps eventually to lower prices.  The improving mechanism of our State School System assists this movement, by turning out every