of two rooms there are a mother and father and four children; the father earns 24s. per week, and the mother has not worked in the factory since the first child was born, but she occasionally earns a little by washing. The house is clean and comfortable, the children healthy and well kept. Neither of the parents drinks, which accounts largely for the well-being of the house.

A few doors away is a family of eight children, one dead, all healthy, all nursed by the mother in infancy. The husband has never allowed his wife to go to the factory, although with a wage of 258. the struggle against poverty must have entailed selfsacrifice on the part of both parents.

Contrast this with another in the same street where the total earnings are over 50s. per week. Of ten children, the first died at three months, the second is alive and earning 3s. 6d. as a halftimer. The third, fourth and fifth died in infancy, the sixth and seventh are alive and neglected, the eighth and ninth died within the last year. Both parents work in the factory, both are intemperate, the house is dirty and the children miserably illfed and rickety.

The so-called poverty would be reduced 80 per cent. if all the money spent on unnecessary luxuries were properly utilised. Football, music-halls and roller-skating, gambling and drink, dispose of a disproportionate amount of the worker's wage. Hundreds of thousands of pounds are squandered every year at holiday time by the operatives who leave home with all they can draw from the holiday fund with the intention of spending every penny before they get back.

The money is paid into holiday clubs 'every week or deducted from their wages to be drawn at the beginning of the holiday

season.

It is typical of the improvidence and lack of foresight of the Lancashire operatives that a family will cheerfully spend forty or fifty pounds on their summer holiday, whilst owing a large doctor's bill, even when scarcity of work and poverty later in the year are almost certain to come.

It is true that their thriftlessness and improvidence are due to ignorance, to the fact that their education has not included practical teaching in household economies. The people to whom such knowledge would be most valuable are those who have the

least idea how to spend a small income with the maximum of profit and benefit to themselves.

There is a real need for a comprehensive scheme of social education, to teach the people, to raise the standard of the worker, to foster ideals of home life. The health visitors, the educated midwives are doing good work, and the keen desire displayed by the women to acquire knowledge of hygiene, child management and cooking indicates strongly that money spent by the municipal authorities on these lines is well spent. In every district a school for mothers should be organised. It would prove a centre for the dissemination of knowledge which would go far to diminish the infant mortality rate in England.

It is only by co-ordination of individual, municipal and legislative effort that any lasting reform can be achieved. Good work can be done by teaching the older girls household economy in the schools.

The provision of pure milk, better housing and sanitation by the municipal authorities would prove a real economy in the end. Good homes, healthy children represent wealth to the State. It is a good thing to spend money which will improve the physical and moral health of the people, because it saves expenditure on defectives, degenerates and criminals, the natural results of neglected homes, and poor motherhood.

The deepest interests of the country are coincident with the interests of the women and children, the preservation of family life.

Legislative limitation of married women's labour will have to come. At present, the State has only one measure, that which prohibits a woman returning to work until one month after the birth of her child. That safeguards the mother's health to a slight extent, the child's even less. The thousands of women who are attending our hospitals and outdoor dispensaries as a result of strain and overwork at childbirth are a disgrace to our civilisation.

It is only by prohibiting married women's labour for three months before and six months after childbirth that the health of the mother and the well-being of the child can be assured. Legislation to keep married women in the home and to abolish the

labour of children under fourteen years of age would raise the working man's wage.

But if women are to be made to stay in the home, it must not be as unpaid workers. The working man should be compelled to give a definite proportion of his wages to his wife for household expenditure; and a system of maternal insurance should be established in all factories which employ married

women.

According to the evidence of the commission on physical deterioration there is no provident society of the Maternity Fund type in Lancashire. Legislation should aim at abolishing married women's labour in the factory or away from home unless they can produce evidence that the husband is incapable of earning and that the children are properly cared for by licensed nurses, duly inspected by the proper authorities.

The ideal plan would be to make it possible for married women with children to remain at home to care for the family under all circumstances. If a woman has no person to earn for her, if she has a sick husband, if she is a widow with young children, a deserted wife, or a daughter with infirm parents, she ought to be paid by the State for her care of the helpless members of the community just as the attendant in the pauper asylum, the workhouse or the prison is paid.

The value of woman's work in the home to the family, the community and the nation at large is not sufficiently recognised. The husband is not compelled to give any given proportion of his wage to his wife for the maintenance of the family. He may earn 30s. per week, give his wife 16s. for household expenses and spend the rest on himself.

A wife has practically no power to compel him to support her and their children. Ordinary justice demands that the wife who works honestly in the home for the husband and family should be legally able to obtain maintenance from the husband's employer by securing a certain proportion of his weekly wage. Any legislation which abolishes married women's labour in the factory without protecting the interests of the home woman, the wife and mother, will only prove an additional hardship to those it aims at protecting.

ELIZABETH SLOAN CHESSER.

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE ALEXANDER

URE, K.C., M.P. TO DATE

(APPROXIMATELY)

WHO can hope to keep pace with the unspeakable Mr. Ure? While we were fastidiously revising our sheets and adjusting our commas, this nimble person sped on-seeking fresh fibs and falsehoods new-and we were left in the tardy discussion of comparatively ancient history! This, in all likelihood, will be our fate. again. Why then attempt to pursue him? Why join in this most unequal hue and cry? The answer is that, as a study in depravity, his case has greatly increased in interest since we tried last month to trace its progress. In a single step the (still) Right Honourable Gentleman has advanced from the position of a meritorious, but somewhat obscure, seeker after the untruth into the full blaze of the fiercest notoriety; while, in the process, he has shown himself to be possessed of other unlovely qualities besides his superlative inaptitude for the truth.

It is necessary to recapitulate, very briefly, the familiar facts. Scarcely had Mr. Ure taken French leave of Montagu House, when we found him spending his evenings in the dissemination of the Old Age Pensions fraud. In fairness to others it must be borne in mind that on the Radical Scroll of Fame, our Right Honourable Gentleman is not entitled to be enrolled as the inventor of this surpassing piece of untruth. Even if we dismiss Mr. Birrell's claim as spurious (which we think we may), at least two others had anticipated Mr. Ure in the ingenious move. Moreover, after Mr. Balfour had called attention to these early experiments with the proposed substitute for the "Chinese Slavery" fraud, three leading Radical newspapers had declared the falsehood to be a falsehood. But this was just the kind of

weapon-thus discredited and condemned-to commend itself irresistibly to the diseased daring of Mr. Alexander Ure and to his perverted sense of what is honourable and fair. Eagerly his fingers closed round it. For five nights in one week the Lord Advocate-in whose name, forsooth, run all the Scottish indictments for "Falsehood, Fraud, and Wilful Imposition”—declaimed the falsehood from one platform after another. On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday of the week beginning October 18 he was thus engaged-there must have been some miscarriage of the arrangements for Friday, for a whole evening's silence was never of his choice. The formula adopted in these oratorical treats did not vary. And, truly, if a man speaks every night his audiences cannot reasonably expect him to change even the garb of his ideas; besides which, in uncivilised warfare of this kind, it is probably sound policy to stick to a good brand of poisoned arrow when you have got it. He asserted, without qualification of any kind, that "the nervous apprehension which old folks felt that if there was a change of Government they would lose their pensions was, in his deliberate judgment, a well-founded terror" (thus, at Walsall, on October 20); and that "he had been told that many of the recipients of Old Age Pensions were apprehensive of losing their pensions if the Budget were thrown out. He, for his part, shared their apprehension, and he thought their terror had been well founded" (thus, at Acton, on October 21). Now, to assert that terror or apprehension that a certain thing will happen is well founded is (with apologies for being so tediously elementary) to state that the thing will happen. It needs no ghost risen from the dead to tell us that. What the speaker's grounds for his "deliberate judgment" were is utterly irrelevant. He stated (notwithstanding Mr. Balfour's previous assurance) that the Unionist Party, if placed in office, would repudiate this single, isolated item of the nation's vast liabilities, and that the payment of Old Age Pensions would cease. This was the only meaning which the audiences of Mr. Ure's Gala Week in October could take, or were intended to take, from his infamous words. No amount of cheering, no number of inflated resolutions at a later date-not even theatrical handshaking by a real, live Prime Minister-can retrospectively alter that plain, stubborn fact. It