at home; he drinks; however little that be that he spends,
for his means it is too much. At times he falls a prey to gambling,
which, in the upper circles of society also, claims many victims, and he
loses more than he spends in drink. The wife, in the meantime, sits at
home and grumbles; she must work like a dray-horse; for her there is no
rest or recreation; the husband avails himself of the freedom that
accident gives him, of having been born a man. Thus disharmony arises.
If, however, the wife is less true to duty, she seeks in the evening,
after she has returned home tired, the rest she is entitled to; but then
the household goes back, and misery is twice as great. Indeed, we live
"in the best world possible."

Through these and similar circumstances, marriage is shattered ever
more among the working class also. Even favorable seasons of work exert
their destructive influence: they compel him to work Sundays and
overtime: they take from him the hours he still had left for his family.
In many instances he has to travel hours to reach the shop; to utilize
the noon recess for going home is an impossibility; he is up in the
morning at the very earliest, when the children are still sound asleep,
and returns home late, when they are again in the same condition.
Thousands, especially those engaged in the building trades in the
cities, remain away from home all week, owing to the vastness of the
distance, and return only on Saturdays to their family. And yet it is
expected of family life that it thrive under such circumstances.
Moreover, female labor is ever on the increase, especially in the
textile industry, whose thousands of steam weaving and spinning looms
are served by cheap woman and children's hands. Here the relations of
sex and age have been reversed. Wife and child go into the mill, the now
breadless husband sits at home and attends to household duties. In the
United States, that, due to its rapid large-capitalist development,
produces all the evils of European industrial States in much larger
dimensions, a characteristic name has been invented for the state of
things brought on by such conditions. Industrial places that employ
women mainly, while the husbands sit at home, are called "she-towns."

The admission of women to all the manual trades is to-day conceded on
all hands. Capitalist society, ever on the hunt for profit and gain, has
long since recognized what an excellent subject for exploitation is
woman