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6
Fathers either completely out of work or on
"short time" for months; mothers taking the place
of the men and gone with the girls to work in factories
and workshops. In other instances the females bring
home work, and become what is known as "outworkers,"
and so add to the destruction of the "home"
by converting same into a workshop.
In either case the real and true position of the
woman is perverted, domestic duties necessarily neglected,
both house and children become more
uncleanly, and what is unfortunately the natural and
worst feature follows, in that hundreds of them are
apparently becoming quite acclimatised to their progressively
unsatisfactory and unwholesome surroundings.
In the result we are arriving by sheer dead weight
of circumstances to the destruction of all the best of
home life, to the very negation of all educational
effort, to social degeneration and national physical
deterioration.
As a whole, the people are not to blame, and I
am not attempting it. Circumstances quite beyond
their control are too strong for them, and they have
to go under.
To describe the devolution of the decent workman
through unemployed to demoralised unemployable,
until he becomes a problem beyond the control of
sanitarian and every other ameliorative agency, is
unnecessary.