And in all these cases the obvious fact is overlooked that such charitable effort is inevitably self-defeating. Overworked mothers, like other overworked human beings, break down and are added to that burden of the dependent sick which society perpetually creates for itself. We have preferred to live in a fool’s paradise, ignoring the social implications of our stupendous industrial development. We have, therefore, adopted only one of all the palliatives with which other industrial nations have been experimenting during the past sixty years. In our textile manufacturing states the men (though a minority of employes in the industry) have succeeded in so bringing to bear their trade organizations and their votes as to obtain legal restrictions upon the working hours of women in industry. For married women the net result of this palliative measure has, however, proved largely illusory. Every shortening of the working day tends to be followed by speeding up of the machinery to keep the output as large as before, or by a cut in wages due to reduced output if no change is made in the speed. Now married women, particularly when mothers of young children, are inevitably the least organized and self-defending part of the adult working class. And they have, in fact, suffered both speeding up and the worst rates of wages in their branches of industry. Thus the numbers of married women enabled to continue in industrial employment without breaking down have not necessarily been greatly increased by our one attempt at legislation in behalf of their health. Because we have never observed or recorded the facts in relation to the industrial work of married women we have no statutory provision for rest before and after confinement, yet many textile manufacturing communities have their body of knowledge (common and appalling knowledge) of children born in the mill, or of mothers returning to looms or spinning frames when their babies are but three or four days old. Those industrial nations which scorn the fool’s paradise gather the facts, face the truth, and act upon it. Thus Bavaria, which accepts as inevitable the factory work of mothers of young children, began in 1908 to encourage employers to establish nurseries in the mills and permit mothers to go to them at regular intervals. The government voted 50,000 marks for payment to physicians and nurses who supervise the nurseries. The avowed object of these institutions is to reduce the disease which has ravaged bottle-fed babies left to the care of neighbors and of older brothers and sisters. In Italy, also, for several years employers have been constrained by law to give to mothers regular intervals for nursing their babies. Fourteen nations of Europe, and the state of Massachusetts, have abolished night work by women in manufacture. This is obviously a boon to working mothers.