Finally, we come to the central problem of the mother who has a living husband in employment. It is the case of the working classes that really concerns us, not least because the greater part of the birth-rate comes therefrom. It is the contemporary settling-down of the birth-rate in this class, combined with the novel consequences of modern industrialism, especially in the form of married women's labour, that makes the question so important. Before we go any further, the proposition may be laid down that married women's labour, as it commonly exists, is an intolerable evil, condemned already by our first principles. It need scarcely be said that one is not here referring to the labours of the married woman who writes novels or designs fashion-plates. There is no condemnation of any kind of labour, in the home or outside it, if the condition be complied with, that it does not prejudice the inalienable first charge upon the mother's time and energy. Her children are that first charge. It may perfectly well be, and often is, chiefly though not exclusively in the more fortunate classes, that the mother may earn money by other work without prejudice to her motherhood. Such cases do not concern us, but we are urgently concerned with married women's labour in the ordinary sense of the term, which means that the mother goes out to tend some lifeless machine, whilst her children are left at home to be cared far anyhow or not at all. No student of infant mortality or the conditions of child life and child survival in general has any choice but to condemn this whole practice as evil, root and branch. And from the national and economic point of view it may be said that whatever the mother makes in the factory is of less value than the children who consequently die at home. The culture of the racial life is the vital industry of any people, and any industry that involves its destruction and needs the conditions which make up that destruction, is one which the country cannot afford, whatever its merely monetary balance-sheet. A complete balance-sheet, with its record of children slain, would only too readily demonstrate this.