evening; has so much to do for the children then that she cannot get to bed before three o’clock in the morning; often wet through to the skin, and obliged to work in that state.”  She said:  “My breasts have given me the most frightful pain, and I have been dripping wet with milk.”  The use of narcotics to keep the children still is fostered by this infamous system, and has reached a great extent in the factory districts.  Dr. Johns, Registrar in Chief for Manchester, is of opinion that this custom is the chief source of the many deaths from convulsions.  The employment of the wife dissolves the family utterly and of necessity, and this dissolution, in our present society, which is based upon the family, brings the most demoralising consequences for parents as well as children.  A mother who has no time to trouble herself about her child, to perform the most ordinary loving services for it during its first year, who scarcely indeed sees it, can be no real mother to the child, must inevitably grow indifferent to it, treat it unlovingly like a stranger.  The children who grow up under such conditions are utterly ruined for later family life, can never feel at home in the family which they themselves found, because they have always been accustomed to isolation, and they contribute therefore to the already general undermining of the family in the working-class.  A similar dissolution of the family is brought about by the employment of the children.  When they get on far enough to earn more than they cost their parents from week to week, they begin to pay the parents a fixed sum for board and lodging, and keep the rest for themselves.  This often happens from the fourteenth or fifteenth year. {144} In a word, the children emancipate themselves, and regard the paternal dwelling as a lodging-house, which they often exchange for another, as suits them.

In many cases the family is not wholly dissolved by the employment of the wife, but turned upside down.  The wife supports the family, the husband sits at home, tends the children, sweeps the room and cooks.  This case happens very frequently; in Manchester alone, many hundred such men could be cited, condemned to domestic occupations.  It is easy to imagine the wrath aroused among the working-men by this reversal of all relations within the family, while the other social conditions remain unchanged.  There lies before me a letter from an English working-man, Robert Pounder, Baron’s Buildings, Woodhouse, Moorside, in Leeds (the bourgeoisie may hunt him up there; I give the exact address for the purpose), written by him to Oastler:  {145}