The working man is the greatest enemy of women’s equal value, I am afraid. Among the mining population, where his wages are high enough to make him independent, the woman he has married holds a very low position--very much what middle-class women held early in the nineteenth century. The working man of prudence and forethought is of course limiting his family with as much care as the rest of the world. But the others, who drive away drab intelligence by a Saturday orgy, forget prudence, and the result is that their wives are always in the pangs of childbirth or miscarriage. The usual self-sacrifice of women comes dangerously near suicide in this matter. To save her husband from a few moments of self-control she goes through months of drugging, loses her beauty, undermines her health in the endeavour to exercise prudence and to avoid bringing children into the world for whom she has no hope of making provision. A romance of the mining world, in September, 1909, is instructive reading. One Friday night, at 10 o’clock, the husband came home with two former lodgers, two old friends, and one stranger. They brought plenty of beer with them. The wife was upstairs in bed, but she called over the banisters to them to make themselves at home, and returned to her sleep. Later on, when the men were nearly all dead drunk, one of the former lodgers heard screams upstairs. He found the stranger undressed and making an assault on the wife of his host. The lodger flung him downstairs, and to his horror found that he had killed him. He was terrified, and he and the woman left the house, calling to the others to fetch a doctor at once. Whatever the woman and he said to each other it was tragic, for she hurried to a pond and drowned herself, while he went to his sister’s house and waited arrest. The husband was severely reprimanded for his “negligence.” A woman counts for very little in the mining districts, she takes the German position of a kind of upper servant, in whose emotions, if she has any, none take any interest. In the manufacturing districts the working man’s wife is generally a breadwinner herself, and she only needs a little enterprise to make her position much more favourable than it is at present. Nearly all the police court cases turn on the question of the wife’s housekeeping allowance. It is an endless source of dispute, and if it could be regulated, irrespective of caprice, most of the miseries of married poverty would cease. The poor are simple, and in this truth about them we see the truth about ourselves. We all want a regular income, and very few of us gain from being dependent on the affection of our family. Divorce, then, is sordid with regard to sentiment and with regard to money, and in these ways is greatly in need of change. V THE GREEN HOUSES OF JAPAN This chapter deals with the subject of prostitution from the point of view of public health, so that the nervous reader had better skip it.