It is impossible to look into facts of this class without realising that natural laws impose severe limitations, and will probably continue to impose much the same restrictions, as to health and strength on women workers; and when these marry there arise ties which conflict, and, as far as one can see, will always conflict, with the efficiency and regularity of the labour of married women. The violation of these restrictions on any large scale not only constitutes a danger to the state by causing the steady deterioration of a large section of the population, but the intermittent character of the supply of labour from the ranks of married women greatly heightens the difficulties with which those who are concerned with the organisation of modern industry have to deal. It is indeed a commonplace now-a-days, that without improved organization and regulation of the labour of women there can be no security for the majority of breadwinners. The present state of anarchy in the labour world, and the difficulties of our industrial situation, have been appreciably heightened by the course of conduct pursued and advised by those who persist in regarding the interests of women as in themselves separate from the interests of men. Colossal fortunes are built up in large measure by the enforced labour of women and children, who are encouraged in their suicidal rivalry with their husbands and fathers in the labour market by those who do not realise the retribution which follows on the adoption of their counsels. I have used the word “enforced” advisedly; unchecked competition is a force of great power. There are masses of workers in England who are no more free to choose their work, or to make terms for it, than were the slaves on a Virginian plantation. The Newcastle woman in the white lead works of Elswick, who counts seven little ones at her board, whose man is out of work, is tied and bound as with chains. Her man, her children, look to her for food, and at her heels are hundreds of other women in similar distress, whose breadwinners are, perhaps through no fault of their own, also out of work, or in receipt of wages wholly inadequate to the maintenance of the family. Those who encourage our women to treat men as their rivals, to compete with them, and by their competition to persistently reduce the earnings of men, are doing their best to aggravate this state of things. The wages of the husband and father being reduced by the entrance into his trade of the women who undersell him, the wife and mother needs must turn her back upon her home, and give her working day to make up the difference. In this way the homes of our working classes are too often destroyed, and the health of future generations sacrificed.