for ignorance
where such allowance is fairly called for; it is not for the
law-maker to make smooth the path of the law-breaker. There are
evidently law-makers nowadays so scrupulous, or so simple-minded,
that they would be prepared to exact that no pickpocket should be
prosecuted if he was able to declare on oath that he had no
"knowledge" that the purse he had taken belonged to the person he
extracted it from.

The annual reports of the English factory inspectors serve to
bring ridicule on this law, which looks so wisely humane and yet
means nothing, but have so far been powerless to effect any
change. These reports show, moreover, that the difficulty is
increasing in magnitude. Thus Miss Martindale, a factory
inspector, states that in all the towns she visits, from a quiet
cathedral city to a large manufacturing town, the employment of
married women is rapidly increasing; they have worked in mills or
factories all their lives and are quite unaccustomed to cooking,
housework and the rearing of children, so that after marriage,
even when not compelled by poverty, they prefer to go on working
as before. Miss Vines, another factory inspector, repeats the
remark of a woman worker in a factory. "I do not need to work,
but I do not like staying at home," while another woman said, "I
would rather be at work a hundred times than at home. I get lost
at home" (_Annual Report Chief Inspector of Factories and
Workshops for 1906_, pp. 325, etc.).

It may be added that not only is the English law enjoining four
weeks' rest on the mother after childbirth practically
inoperative, but the period itself is absurdly inadequate. As a
rest for the mother it is indeed sufficient, but the State is
still more interested in the child than in its mother, and the
child needs the mother's chief care for a much longer period than
four weeks. Helme advocates the State prohibition of women's work
for at least six months after confinement. Where nurseries are
attached to factories, enabling the mother to suckle her infant
in intervals of work, the period may doubtless be shortened.

It is important to remember that it is by no means only the women
in factories who are induced to work as usual during the whole
period of pregnancy, and to return to work immediately after the
brief rest of confineme