The former had always been accustomed to work for their living, indirectly if not directly. On the little farms they looked after the cow, the hens, and the garden. They did the carding and the spinning of flax and of wool. True, these industries were carried on at home, and probably the decent "manufacturer," then literally a hand-worker, would have regarded himself as disgraced had his wife or daughters needed to go outside his home to find work.[68] But when the factory system came, with the horrible sufferings caused by the transition from one system of industry to another, the women and children always accustomed to toil at home followed their work to the factory, and there, owing to the new methods of competition and to the absence of any regulation of industry, they suffered hardships of overwork and underpayment which seem to the present generation nearly incredible. Home life for a time almost disappeared, and the suffering and degeneration was only checked by the series of Factory Acts, imposing ever fresh and fresh restrictions on the treatment of women and children.[69] The policy underlying these acts was much criticised at the time, and was indeed not fully comprehended until recently. But it is now all but universally admitted that the Factory Acts have in the main achieved their object, and have greatly improved the position of women in the districts most affected by them; and reformers are constantly urging their extension to fresh trades. This movement was not understood, and was in consequence opposed by the women of the middle-classes, whose position was affected quite differently by the industrial revolution. They too found their occupations within the home to a large extent destroyed. And in other ways their situation was altered. For some reason not yet explained, there appeared in the middle-classes a surplus of women. This is no doubt partly due to the colonial expansion of the period, which sent young men out to Australia, Canada, and South Africa, while their natural mates remained behind in England. It is not easy to give precise statistics, as our statistical tables make no distinction of classes, but common observation and the description of social life in the novels of the nineteenth century afford evidence of this fact. Some statistics bearing on the subject can be found in Miss Clara Collet's[70] article, "Prospects of Marriage for Women," and also in "Die Frauenfrage," by Lilie Braun, pp. 157 _ff._ Frau Braun, whose book is marked throughout by characteristic German thoroughness, sums up:[71] "Es hat sich gezeigt, dass die Zunahme der allein stehenden Frauen, die Abnahme der Heiratsfrequenz und die wirtschaftliche Not als Ursache der Frauenbewegung in aller Lände anzusehen sind."