quantity and quality of work under such conditions. Anaemia is a frequent result of overstrain, not to mention the constant colds and rheumatism due to overheated rooms. The sickness among women from these and other worse evils alluded to above have become apparent for the first time through the serious strain put on sick benefit funds in the first year of the Insurance Act. At one very important centre of the cotton trade, out of 8056 members 2800 received sick benefit in the first twelve months. The Insurance Act, whatever its defects, has at all events given many poor women the chance to take a little rest and nursing that they sorely needed and could not afford. The sneer of "malingering" is easily raised, but it is doubtful whether real malingering has much to do with it. The conditions of industry, greatly improved as they are from the sanitary point of view, are certainly increasing the kind of strain that women are constitutionally least able to bear. The industrial efficiency in the young girl that she and her employer are often so proud of may be paid for later in painful illness and incapacity. Mr. Arthur Greenwood quotes medical opinion to the effect that the industrial strain to which several generations of women in the textile districts have now been subjected is responsible not only for serious disease, but even for sterility among women.[45] So far the subject of the declining birth-rate has been discussed chiefly as a theme for homilies on the "selfishness" of women, who, it is alleged, prefer ease and comfort to unrestricted child-bearing. If Mr. Greenwood is right, the cause, in part at all events, is the force of capitalistic competition feeding on the very life of the people. Surely the subject needs medical study and investigation of a more searching kind than it has yet received.