These by no means exceptional cases show how conditions of work for laboring women were increasing in intensity in the United States. That they were becoming worse in other ways was evidenced in New England manufacturing towns, where employment of women and children as the cheaper wage-taking element was gradually extinguishing the male operative.[185] In the manufacturing towns of Fall River, Lawrence, Lowell, etc., the family life was so demoralized that men were obliged to be supported in idleness by mothers, wives, or sisters or children, because no work was to be had for them in the mills. It was said that some of these men, displaced by the light-running machinery that a child’s hand might guide, remained at home and did the housework and minded the children, while the women went forth as the bread-winners; others, less patient, took to loafing, and ended generally in prisons. “This,” as Engels termed it, “insane state of things” affected all unfavorably. Women learned to care so little for themselves that it was said “a girl in Fall River comes out of the mill with bare feet and a shawl thrown over her head, and all she cares for is a loaf of bread and a mug of beer.” Children, going too early into the mills, were corrupted, morally and physically; yet mothers, unable from their own slender wages to support the family, were tempted to swear “false oaths in regard to their children’s ages, so as to get them into the mills and thus make more money.” This Moloch of cheap labor, which demanded both women and children, did not stop at making mothers commit perjury for the sake of bread; it rifled the eleemosynary institutions of little ones left there for safe keeping, and sent them in ship or car loads to the West.[186] The claim was made in New York in 1888 that[187] “during the last forty years not less than two hundred thousand children had been sent into the Western States, many of whom had been sold outright,” by managers of asylums, who refused to allow the names of these little ones to be known, for fear that parents or relatives, who had surrendered them in seasons of distress, might wish to reclaim them when fortunate enough to procure work. These children, not sold in the open market as their black brothers and sisters had been, but disposed of in the name of _Charity_, had their identity concealed by change of name; cases are on record where brothers and sisters have grown up, met, and married, and “after marriage learned to their horror that they were children of the same parents.”