year a larger percentage of half-timers, crammed to qualify for wage-earners at the earliest possible period.  Already in Lancashire and elsewhere, the labour of these thirteen-year-olders is competing with the labour of their fathers.  The substitution of the “ring” for the “mule” in Lancashire mills, is responsible for the sight which may now be seen, of strong men lounging about the streets, supported by the earnings of their own children, who have undersold them in the labour market.  The “ring” machine can be worked by a child, and can be learned in half an hour; that is the sole explanation of this deplorable phenomenon.

In the case of child-work, with its degrading consequences on the physical and 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.