“La femme devenue ouvriere, n’est plus une femme,” wrote Jules Simon in a burst of despair at the conditions of the Paris workwoman; and he repeated the word as his investigations extended to manufacturing France, and he found everywhere the home in many cases abolished, the creche taking its place till the child, vitally dependent upon a care that included love, gave up the struggle for existence, rendering its tiny quota to the long list of infant mortality.  M. Leroy-Beaulieu had described years before the practical extinction of the family and the government interference[34] brought about by the discoveries made by the government inspecting committee, upon whom consternation seized as they found decadence of morals, enfeebled physique, and that the ordinary girl-worker at sixteen or seventeen could not sew a seam, or make a broth, or care for a child’s needs or the simplest demands of a home.  Appalled at these conditions, France set about the organization of industrial schools, and these have altered the whole face of affairs.

Generations of abuses had made, up to the time of the investigation, the history of the working-class in France.  One of their best-known scientific observers, the statistician Villerme, examined in person, and as one of the government inspecting committee reported on the condition of dwellings in Lille, Amiens, and other manufacturing towns of France.  The weavers and spinners of Lille lived in caves, of which thirty-six hundred were found occupied by families,—­father, mother, and children as soon as old enough, employed in the mills, and returning at night to these dens, where filth and darkness periodically did their work of decimation, and where infant mortality had reached the maximum.  Horrified at the discoveries made, three thousand of these dwellings were at once destroyed.  But for unknown and quite inscrutable reasons six hundred were allowed to remain and receive double the original number of tenants.[35] Years passed before the last cave was filled up, the children born in them providing an enormous percentage for prison and galleys.  At Douai, Rouen, Roubaix, and many other points, such hideous filth marked the homes of the working-class that Villerme reported:  “The walls are covered with a thousand layers of ordure.”  The women, exhausted and depleted by a day’s labor of from twelve to fourteen hours, had no time to think of cleanliness.  In fact, its meaning had never been taught; and though industrial schools increase, hours are now shortened, and inspection is active, it remains true that almost the same conditions perpetuate themselves at many points,—­the descriptions given by the great realist, Zola, of women and children in the mines, and the hideousness of their home life, being very literal and unexaggerated fact.