to become of us, for it's a good
bit that she has been the man in the house and I the woman; it is bad
work, Joe;" and he cried bitterly, and said, "It has not been always so."
"No," said Joe; "but when thou hadn't no work, how hast thou not
shifted?" "I'll tell thee, Joe, as well as I can, but it was bad enough;
thou knowest when I got married I had work plenty, and thou knows I was
not lazy." "No, that thou wert not." "And we had a good furnished
house, and Mary need not go to work. I could work for the two of us; but
now the world is upside down. Mary has to work and I have to stop at
home, mind the childer sweep and wash, bake and mend; and, when the poor
woman comes home at night, she is knocked up. Thou knows, Joe, it's hard
for one that was used different." "Yes, boy, it is hard." And then Jack
began to cry again, and he wished he had never married, and that he had
never been born; but he had never thought, when he wed Mary, that it
would come to this. "I have often cried over it," said Jack. Now when
Joe heard this, he told me that he had cursed and damned the factories,
and the masters, and the Government, with all the curses that he had
learned while he was in the factory from a child.

Can any one imagine a more insane state of things than that described in
this letter? And yet this condition, which unsexes the man and takes
from the woman all womanliness without being able to bestow upon the man
true womanliness, or the woman true manliness--this condition which
degrades, in the most shameful way, both sexes, and, through them,
Humanity, is the last result of our much-praised civilisation, the final
achievement of all the efforts and struggles of hundreds of generations
to improve their own situation and that of their posterity. We must
either despair of mankind, and its aims and efforts, when we see all our
labour and toil result in such a mockery, or we must admit that human
society has hitherto sought salvation in a false direction; we must admit
that so total a reversal of the position of the sexes can have come to
pass only because the sexes have been placed in a false position from the
beginning. If the reign of the wife over the husband, as inevitably
brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, the pristine rule of the
husband over the wife must have been inhuman too. If the wife can now
base her supremacy upon the fact that she supplies the greater part, nay,
the whole of the commo