It is perfectly easy to conceive of a prosperous village in New England or the state of Washington, with coöperative intensive culture of gardens and orchards, with coöperative dairy, laundry, bakery, store and workshops. In such a village the high school might well have as its adjunct a nursery where the oldest girls could learn the art of caring for babies and little children, as the normal school of today has its kindergarten and primary classes for the benefit alike of the children and the teachers in training. The citizens of such a village would obviously be highly enlightened folk, and might be expected to limit their working day to four, five, or six hours. Given these easily conceivable conditions, the industrial work of mothers of children as young as one year might perhaps be an asset for every one concerned. It is, indeed, one serious charge in the indictment against the present competitive organization of industry that the industrial employment of married women to-day does harm and only harm. With the increasing industrial work of married women in our competitive industry comes increase in the number of children who are never born. In industrial centers, the world over, wherever records are kept, the decreasing birth rate manifests itself. Where this is due to drugs or surgery it is of the gravest social significance. Childless working wives are a permanently demoralizing influence for husbands. If these are inclined to idleness they can idle the more because the wives work. However disposed to hard work the men may be, the presence in the market of a throng of unorganized and irregular workers (and married women are both more unorganized and more irregular than others) presses upon the wage rate of men. Whether the wife leaves home to work in cotton mill or laundry, or whether she stays at home working under the sweating system, she suffers the disadvantage of carrying the double burden and enduring the twofold strain of home maker and wage earner. And she presses upon the wage scale of her competitors as the subsidized or presumably subsidized worker must always do. Aside from childless wives, married women wage earners consist of deserted mothers, widowed mothers and women who have both children and husband. All these are ordinarily subsidized workers, the deserted and widowed receiving charitable relief, and the women with husbands having, at least in the theory which underlies their wages, some support from them. The heaviest strain of all falls upon the wife who has husband and children and is still herself a wage earner; for she has usually child-bearing as well as wage-earning duties. Even where her wage earning is due to the husband’s tuberculosis, or epilepsy, or other disability, this does not ordinarily end the growth in number of mouths for which the industrially working mother attempts to provide.