_These Objections Answered._--(_a_) The answer to this and to similar arguments was given in our discussion of Darwinism in relation to child-protection. (_b_) There are no processes for whose performance women and children are indispensable. When, for certain stages of manufacture, women and children are unobtainable, these stages are very well performed by men or by machinery. (_c_) This is true only when the conditions of work are properly regulated. (_d_) It is true that certain work may exercise an educative influence; but wage-labour is entirely devoid of moralising and educative influences. When we are told that by putting the child to work it learns to love work, that it becomes thrifty and diligent, that it is restrained from vagabondage, we may answer, that under present conditions wage-labour for children has the very opposite effects. If child-labour in factories and workshops really exerted such an educative influence as the employers pretend, why do they not send their own children to work in the factories, and why do they reserve these advantages for the children of the proletariat? (_f_) Wherever, in certain branches of industry, woman’s labour and child-labour have been forbidden, as, for example, in England, the following results have been noted. An improvement in working conditions is invariably followed by an increase in the intensity of the work performed, and also by an improvement in its quality. Manufacturing industry does not come to a standstill because, in consequence of regulation, certain processes previously performed by women and children have now to be carried out by machines or by men; on the contrary, as a result of this, the industry becomes more vigorous and more efficient. It does so, first of all, because the latest improvements in technique are perforce adopted when cheap labour can no longer be exploited; in the second place, because the health of the workers, upon which above all the efficiency of the industry depends, is increased. Regulation therefore actually increases the power of a national industry to make headway against foreign competition. We have also to remember that the same objections that we are now considering have been advanced against the protection of adult male labour, and have been shown by experience to be invalid in this case also. This objection commonly makes its appearance in the following form: in many branches of industry the protection of the workers increases the cost of production and lowers the quality of the goods produced; this resulted, for example, when the use in certain processes of lead, mercury, phosphorus, and arsenic was forbidden, and the sequel was that the commodities in question were imported from countries in which such protection of labour did not exist. But this argument is in fact an argument for the internationalisation of the legislative protection of labour. For it involves an admission that the disadvantages of such regulation cease to exist when in a