_Objections to the Protective Regulation of the Labour of Women and Children._--Many objections have been advanced, chiefly by the employers of labour, against the protective regulations we have been considering. Most of these objections were first heard in England more than a century ago, at the time of the first legislation for the protection of child-workers; but they are continually and loudly reiterated to-day. They are the following: (_a_) Arduous physical toil, the work of the proletarians, women’s labour, are merely parts of the struggle for existence with which we have no business to interfere. (_b_) The work of women and children is indispensable to modern industry, for certain of its processes can be carried out only by women, or by children, as the case may be. (_c_) The work is not injurious to the health either of women or of children; on the contrary, it does them good. (_d_) The children ought to be at work, otherwise they are either loafing about the streets or making themselves a nuisance to their parents at home. (_e_) To abolish women’s labour and child-labour would simply be to deprive them of their means of livelihood. (_f_) The suppression of women’s labour and child-labour renders it more difficult for national industry to compete with foreign industry; indeed, it threatens the very existence of the national industry. (_g_) Many advocates of the emancipation of women oppose the protection of women’s labour on the ground that such protection limits women’s right to sell their labour. (_h_) In regions inhabited by two or more nationalities regarded as being of unequal value, it is thought to be permissible to exploit the labour of the women and children of the reputedly inferior race. (In the United States of America, for example, we are told that the question is not one concerning American children, but one concerning Slavonic and Italian children, which, however hard they may have to work, are yet better off than they would have been in their own fatherland. It is worthy of remark that in the United States of America, especially in the Southern and the Western States, the conditions in the matter of child-labour are much the same as those that obtained in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century.)