"The top figure on the right shows that the importance of the adverse influence of female labour on the race, shown in the above figures, is growing, because there is an increase of employment amongst married women. Simon's figures show that the manufacturing industries, which in 1907 employed by themselves two million female hands, the number of married women has increased by almost 200,000 during the last twelve years. In agriculture, in which four and a half million females find their main occupation, the share of the married women is much greater still." "The increase of married female labour being intimately connected with the development of our economic life, which cannot be deliberately influenced, the demand for a Motherhood Insurance for all female labourers of any kind, and for the extension of the legal time of stoppage of work before childbirth to at least four weeks, follows as a practical result of the facts stated above." Dr. Bluhm's repeated assertion, which is regarded by many as a dogma, that economic conditions cannot be deliberately influenced (+i.e.+, that they are of the character of a law of nature) must not remain uncontradicted as a principal. It is absolutely unproved, though the difficulty of influencing our economic life cannot be denied; the economic order has been created by man and +must+ be altered if it proves harmful for the race. [Sidenote: C 101] The adverse influence of female labour on the progeny is shown from a somewhat different point of view in Table C 101--"+premature births and abortions in different callings+." The most serious fact shown here is that a low birth rate may frequently be found in conjunction with a high rate for miscarriage and premature birth; as the compiler of these statistics points out, this conjunction is most apparent in those callings which demand frequent intercourse with the public, such as domestic service, that is to say in cases where pregnancy is particularly inconvenient. Probably in these cases artificial prevention of pregnancy goes hand in hand with the procuring of abortion! Race-hygiene does not aim at an indiscriminate motherhood insurance of married and unmarried mothers, but it aims at the economic subvention and encouragement of legitimate fertility of healthy and able parents, connected with, and rendered possible by, a reduction of female labour away from the home. Marriage is one of the most important hygienic institutions for the individual as well as for the race, and it is folly to allow its decay and to replace it by substitutes. [Sidenote: C 102]