her in turn, helpless both in their ignorance under the modern
Juggernaut that is destroying them, pushed ever more cruelly by
relentless competition, the last stronghold, the poor little home
itself, goes down. The mother has no time to care for her children,
nor money wherewith to procure for them the care of others. In her
frantic desire to keep them alive, she holds the whip over her own
flesh and blood, who have to spend their very babyhood in tying
feather-flues or pulling out bastings. Home-work, this unnatural
product of nineteenth-century civilization, as an agency for summarily
destroying the home is unparalleled. Nor do its blighting effects end
with homes wrecked, and children neglected, stunted and slain. The
proud edifice of modern industry itself, on whose account homes
are turned into workshops, children into slaves, and mothers into
slave-drivers, is undermined and degraded by this illegitimate
competition, the most powerful of all factors in lowering wages, and
preventing organization among regular factory hands. The matter lies
in a nutshell. Industry which originated in the home could be safely
carried on there only as long as it remained simple and the operations
thereof such as one individual could complete. As soon as through the
invention of power-driven machinery industry reached the stage of high
specialization and division of labor, at once it became a danger to
the home, and the home a degradation to it. It was at the call of
specialized industry that the factory came into existence, and only in
the factory can it be safely housed.

A similar and, if it were possible, a worse form of family and group
slavery prevails outside of the cities in the poorer farming regions
and in the cotton states. It is harder to reach and to handle, and
there is cause to fear that it is increasing. Especially in the busy
season when the corn has to be harvested or the cotton picked the