is made by the law for the compensation of the woman who is thus required to sacrifice herself to the interests of the State.  The woman evades the law in tacit collusion with her employers, who can always avoid “knowing” that a birth has taken place, and so escape all responsibility for the mother’s employment.  Thus the factory inspectors are unable to take action, and the law becomes a dead letter; in 1906 only one prosecution for this offense could be brought into court.  By the insertion of this “knowingly” a premium is placed on ignorance.  The unwisdom of thus beforehand placing a premium on ignorance has always been more or less clearly recognized by the framers of legal codes even as far back as the days of the Ten Commandments and the laws of Hamurabi.  It is the business of the Court, of those who administer the law, to make allowance for ignorance where such allowance is fairly called for; it is not for the law-maker to make smooth the path of the law-breaker.  There are evidently law-makers nowadays so scrupulous, or so simple-minded, that they would be prepared to exact that no pickpocket should be prosecuted if he was able to declare on oath that he had no “knowledge” that the purse he had taken belonged to the person he extracted it from.

The annual reports of the English factory inspectors serve to bring ridicule on this law, which looks so wisely humane and yet means nothing, but have so far been powerless to effect any change.  These reports show, moreover, that the difficulty is increasing in magnitude.  Thus Miss Martindale, a factory inspector, states that in all the towns she visits, from a quiet cathedral city to a large manufacturing town, the employment of married women is rapidly increasing; they have worked in mills or factories all their lives and are quite unaccustomed to cooking, housework and the rearing of children, so that after marriage, even when not compelled by poverty, they prefer to go on working as before.  Miss Vines, another factory inspector, repeats the remark of a woman worker in a factory.  “I do not need to work, but I do not like staying at home,” while another woman said, “I would rather be at work a hundred times than at home.  I get lost at home” (Annual Report Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for 1906, pp. 325, etc.).

It may be added that not only is the English law enjoining four weeks’ rest on the mother after childbirth practically inoperative, but the period itself is absurdly inadequate.  As a rest for the mother it is indeed sufficient, but the State is still more interested in the child than in its mother, and the child needs the mother’s chief care for a much longer period than four weeks.  Helme advocates the State prohibition of women’s work for at least six months after confinement.  Where nurseries are attached to factories, enabling the mother to suckle her infant in intervals of work, the period may doubtless be shortened.