INDUSTRIAL RESERVE ARMY 97 against a machine that is making its way. The price of the goods which they produce adapts itself to the price of the kindred product of the machine and as the latter works more cheaply, its human competitor has but the lowest wages. The same thing happens to every operative employed upon an old machine in competition with later improvements." "Let us examine somewhat more closely the fact that machinery more and more supersedes the work of men. The human labour involved in both spinning and weaving, consists chiefly in piecing broken threads, as the machine does all the rest. This work requires no muscular strength, but only flexibility of finger. Men are therefore not only not* needed for it, but actually by reason, of the great muscular development of the hand, less fit for it than women and children and are therefore naturally almost superseded by them. Hence the more the use of arms, the expenditure of strength can be " transferred to steam or waterpower, the fewer men need be employed; and as women and children work more cheaply, and in these branches better than men, they take their places (p 434). "The employment of women at once breaks up the family, for when the wife spends twelve or thirteen hours every day in the mill, and the husband works the same length of time there or elsewhere, what becomes of children ?" (p 436). "In many cases the family is not wholly dissolved by the employment of the wife but turned upside down. The wife supports the family, the husband sits at home, tends the children, sweeps the room and" cooks. This case happens very frequently, in Manchester alone, many hundred such men could be cited, condemned to domestic occupations. It is easy to imagine the wrath aroused among the working men by this reversal of relations within the family, while the other social conditions remain unchanged" (pg 438.) "Can anyone imagine a more insane state of things than that described in this letter ? And yet this condition which unsexes the man and takes from the women all womanliness, without being able to bestow upon the man true womanliness, or the women true manliness—this condition which degrades, in the most shameful way, both sexes, and through them, Humanity, is the last result of our much-praised civilisation the final achievement of all the efforts ad struggles of hundreds of generations to improve their own situation and that of their posterity. We must either despair of mankind, and its aims and efforts, when w^ see all our labour and toil result in such a mockery, or we must admit that human society has hitherto sought salvation in a false direction; we must adrnit that so total a reversal of the position of the sexes can have come to pass only because the sexes have been placed in a false position from the beginning. If the reign of the wife over the husband, as inevitably brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman too. If the wife cannot have her supremacy upon the fact that she supplies the greater part, nay the whole of the common possession* is no true and rational one, since one member of the family boasts offensively of contributing the greater share. If the family of our present society is being thus dissolved, this dissolution