,
factory inspection would provide shorter hours and fair sanitary
conditions, and last, not least, women whose home duties precluded them
from full factory work would be taken out of the field of competition.
Whether it would be possible to successfully crush the whole system of
industrial "out-work" may be open to question; but it is certain that so
long as, and in proportion as "out-work" is permitted, attempts on the
part of women to raise their industrial condition by combination will be
weak and unsuccessful. So long as "out-work" continues to be largely
practised and unrestrained, competition sharpened by the action of
married women and other irregular and "bounty-fed" labour, must keep
down the price of women's work, not only for the out-workers themselves,
but also for the factory workers. Nor is it possible to see how the
system of "out-work" can be repressed or even restricted by any other
force than legislation. So long as home-workers are "free" to offer, and
employers to accept, this labour, it will continue to exist so long as
it pays; it will pay so long as it is offered cheap enough; and it will
be offered cheaply so long as the supply continues to bear the present
relation to the demand.

But there is another force required to give any full effect to such
extensions of the Factory Act as will crush private workshops, and
either directly or indirectly prohibit out-work. The real reason, as we
saw, why woman's wages were proportionately lower than man's, was the
competition of a mass of women, able and willing to work at indefinitely
low rates, because they were wholly or partly supported from other
sources. Now legislation can hardly interfere to prevent this
competition, but public opinion can. If the greater part of the
industrial work now done by women at home were done in factories, this
fact in itself would offer some restrictions to the competition of
married women, which is so fatal to those who depend entirely upon their
wages for a livelihood. But the gradual growth of a strong public
opinion, fed by a clear perception of the harm married women do to their
unsupported sisters by their competition, and directed towards the
establishment of a healthy social feeling against the wage-earning
proclivities of married women, would be a far more wholesome as well as
a more potent method of interference than the passing of any law.

To interfere with the work of young women living at home, and supporte