686 SOCIAL SCIENCE 



centre of the family circle. The domestic system of industry, how- 

 ever, was never ideal, and one of the way-marks of modern industrial 

 progress is undoubtedly to be noted in the separation of the shop 

 from the house and the restoration of the home to the family. But 

 the family has never been subjected to such a strain as by the in- 

 creasing industrial necessity for the wife and mother to do so much 

 of her work out of the house and away from her home and children. 

 The growing economic independence of women may partially com- 

 pensate for this loss to individual homes by benefiting the institu- 

 tion of marriage in general. The abject dependence of so large a 

 proportion of women upon marriage for their livelihood did not 

 previously tend to purify the marital relation or put the wife in her 

 rightful place on an equality with her husband in the family circle. 

 Capacity for economic independence cannot fail to admit both the 

 man and the woman to the marriage contract on more equal terms 

 and establish the status which it involves upon a freer and more 

 ingenuous basis. 



But great as is the gain of this more just and moral economic 

 independence of woman, it is attended with serious disadvantages, 

 not necessarily inherent in it, yet closely involved with it. The 

 dependence of the family upon it for support is at a fearful cost to 

 childhood and home life, and in a large proportion of cases under- 

 mines the self-respect and dependableness of the husband. Those 

 forms or methods of industrialism which have ignored the humanities 

 of sex and age stand at the judgment-seat of the medical profession, 

 the school-teacher's experience, the government's statistics, and all 

 child-labor legislation, convicted of deteriorating the very stock of 

 the race. 



Wholesale emigration is for one or two generations a more serious 

 crisis in family life than is generally known. Especially among the 

 less assimilable races, and where a primitive peasant folk are precipi- 

 tated into the heart of the great and terrible city wilderness, the 

 effect is well-nigh destructive not only to family relationships, but to 

 individual character. The man who was seldom or never away from 

 home in the old country must wander far and wide in search of work 

 or stay away for months to keep it. The woman, if not overworked 

 in industry, is idle as never before in the crowded tenement-house. 

 The children, without knowledge or confidence in the ways of 

 the new world to compensate for the loss of their restraint and 

 familiarity in the old home-land, disobey their parents before learn- 

 ing self-control, have too little schooling before they begin work, and 

 too fragmentary employment to give them the discipline of the shop 

 or the acquisition of a trade. Thus among the many immigrant 

 families who strike root and bear the best fruitage grown on Ameri- 

 can soil at least, there are not a few who, despite the best intent, 



