half-mechanical element to some trivial industrial product."
Nevertheless, such a woman whose wages are fixed on the basis of
individual subsistence, who is quite unable to earn a family wage, is
still held by a legal obligation to support her children with the
desperate penalty of forfeiture if she fail.

I can recall a very intelligent woman who long brought her children to
the Hull House day nursery with this result at the end of ten years of
devotion: the little girl is almost totally deaf owing to neglect
following a case of measles, because her mother could not stop work in
order to care for her; the youngest boy has lost a leg flipping cars;
the oldest boy has twice been arrested for petty larceny; the twin boys,
in spite of prolonged sojourns in the parental school, have been such
habitual truants that their natural intelligence has secured little aid
from education. Of the five children three are now in semi-penal
institutions, supported by the state. It would not therefore have been
so un-economical to have boarded them with their own mother, requiring a
standard of nutrition and school attendance at least up to that national
standard of nurture which the more advanced European governments are
establishing.

The recent Illinois law, providing that the children of widows may be
supported by public funds paid to the mother upon order of the juvenile
court, will eventually restore a mother's care to these poor children;
but in the meantime, even the poor mother who is receiving such aid, in
her forced search for cheap rent may be continually led nearer to the
notoriously evil districts. Many appeals made to landlords of
disreputable houses in Chicago on behalf of the children living adjacent
to such property have never secured a favorable response. It is
apparently difficult for the average property owner to resist the high