But in competitive employment workers who are below the standard, if not excluded and therefore wasted, are likely to be forced to conform to unsuitable hours and working arrangements. Moreover they are likely to drag down wages and to render more difficult the attempts of the normal workers to improve conditions. The standard minimum wage, with provision of “sub-minimum” wage scales for the handicapped, seems the only device to prevent their destructive effect on wage standards. As regards children, society adopts the policy of complete withdrawal from industry, not because it is good for a child to spend all his time in schooling, but because, as has been said, industry will not adapt its routine to juvenile requirements, and precludes almost all chance for education after work is once entered upon. As regards married women in industry, the situation is much the same as the situation with regard to children. They should stay out wholly because it is disastrous to the family for them to go in wholly and unreservedly, because their subsidized competition is likely to be injurious, and finally because the conditions of work are apt to be ruinous to their health. And yet for women after marriage to abstain from all employment outside the household is often wasteful and altogether undesirable. If married women could work some hours a day, or some days a week, or some months a year, or some years and not others, as circumstances indicated (as they conceivably might do under a more elastic and adaptable organization of employment), and if they could do so without damage to wage standards or workshop discipline, it would seem advantageous, in more ways than one, for them not to drop out of industry at marriage. Both marriage and employment might become sufficiently universal to make it usual to train every girl for both, at least in a general way. If marriage did not appear to girls (quite fallaciously in most cases) as a way of getting supported without working, their interest in increasing their earning power would be greater; if wives were normally and properly contributors in some degree to the money income of the family, marriage would be more general and, above all, earlier, especially if the giving of allowances to mothers, of which Mr. Wells dreams, ever came into practice.