der to earn five or seven
shillings a week, bear or rear healthy children? What "hope of our race"
can we expect from the average London factory hand? What "home" is she
capable of making for her husband and her children? The high death-rate
of the "slum" children must be largely attributed to the fact that the
women are factory workers first and mothers afterwards. Roscher, the
German economist, assigns as the reason why the Jewish population of
Prussia increases so much faster than the Christian, the fact that the
Jewish mothers seldom go out of their own homes to work.[36] One of the
chief social dangers of the age is the effect of industrial work upon
the motherhood of the race. Surely, the first duty of society should be
to secure healthy conditions for the lives of the young, so as to lay a
firm physical foundation for the progress of the race.

This we neglect to do when we look with indifference or complacency upon
the present phase of unrestricted competition in industrial work amongst
women. So long as we refuse to insist, as a nation, that along with the
growth of national wealth there shall be secured those conditions of
healthy home life requisite for the sound, physical, moral, and
intellectual growth of the young, at whatever cost of interference with
so-called private liberty of action, we are rendering ourselves as a
nation deliberately responsible for the continuance of that creature
whose appearance gives a loud lie to our claim of civilization--the
gutter child of our city streets. Thousands of these children, as we
well know, the direct product of economic maladjustment, grow up every
year--in our great cities to pass from babyhood into the street arab,
afterwards to become what they may, tramp, pauper, criminal, casual
labourer, feeble-bodied, weak-minded, desolate creatures, incapable of
strong, continuous effort at any useful work. These are the children who
have never known a healthy home. With that poverty which compels mothers
to be wage-earners, lies no small share of the responsibility of this
sin against society and moral progress. It is true that no sudden
general prohibition of married woman's work would be feasible. But it is
surely to be hoped that with every future rise in the wages and
industrial position of male wage-earners, there may be a growing
sentiment in favour of a restriction of industrial work among married
women.

Chapter IX.

Moral Aspects of Poverty.

Sec.