198 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
must work therefore know how to work. Self-supporting arts are neither an endowment of nature nor taught as yet in our schools. In shops and factories, too, so far has division of labor been carried, an expert in one branch can perform no other func- tion. Girls can seam up a garment but cannot cut or finish it ; can stitch straw hats, but are unable to trim them ; can tuck the bosom of a shirt while they would botch the collar. All-around instruction has been abolished under the thraldom of machinery, which tends more and more to specialize. This narrow training, the sole preparation of our wage-earners, not being pieced out by manual education, our girls especially lack those handicrafts which would qualify them for self-maintenance, and that indus- trial skill which simplifies household pursuits and helps to make comfortable and to adorn the home.
It is a fact of much ethical as well as economic significance that, in the domestic management of the poor, wages or the greater part of them are usually turned over absolutely to the wife. She it is who expends the funds. Every week or month she holds in her hand what represents and ought to secure the physical and moral welfare of her family rent, food, raiment, schooling, thrift and content, but which sometimes is converted by waste into misery alone. If, as seldom happens, the woman knows how to make the utmost of her resources, knows how to select nourishing food, to provide suitable attire, to attract her children to their home and neutralize the temptations of the street ; if she is wise enough to turn and save, that they may go longer to school, instead of being broken in early to the prema- ture toil that means bodily and spiritual deterioration, this hum- ble mother becomes in the moral and economic world as mighty a factor as the steam engine is in the material universe. She has generated power from crude elements and has created a new moral dynamo.
But the " instincts of motherhood " alone are not to be trusted where the welfare of millions is at stake. Higher sanitary stand- ards make the wiser portion of society revolt from leaving even the care of infancy to unguided maternal freaks. A wretchedly
