When, in the early sixties of last century, due to the American Civil War for the emancipation of the negroes, many thousands of workingmen in the English cotton industries were out of work, physicians made the remarkable discovery that, despite great want among the population, mortality among children had declined. The cause was simple. The children now enjoyed the mother's nourishment and better care than they had ever had during the best seasons of work. The same fact was attested by physicians during the crisis of the seventies in the United States, especially in New York and Massachusetts. The general lack of employment compelled the women to rest from labor, and left them time for the care of their children. Similar observations were also made by Dr. v. Recherberg during the inquiry into the condition of the weavers of the region of Zittau in Saxony, as shown by him in a work that he wrote during the summer of 1890.
In the home-industries, which romantic economists love to represent as idyllic, conditions are no better. Here the wife is chained to her husband, at work early and late into the night, and the children are from an early age hitched on. Crowded into the narrowest space imaginable, husband, wife and family, boys and girls, live together, along with the waste of materials, amidst the most disagreeable dusts and odors, and without the necessary cleanliness. The bedrooms are of a piece with the sitting and working rooms: generally dark holes and without ventilation, they would be sufficiently unsanitary if they housed but a part of the people huddled into them. In short, the conditions of these places are such as to cause the skin to creep of anyone accustomed to a life worthy of a human being.
The ever harder struggle for existence often also compels women and men to commit actions and tolerate indignities that, under other circumstances, would fill them with disgust. In 1877 it was authentically established in Munich that, among the prostitutes, registered by and under the surveillance of the police, there were not less than 203 wives of workingmen and artisans. And how many are not the married women, who, out of distress, prostitute themselves without submitting to a police control that deeply lacerates the sense of shame and dignity!
But we have wandered somewhat from our subject. It was shown that the number of actions for divorce is on the increase in all countries of civilization, and that the majority of these actions proceed from wives. This steadily rising figure of actions for divorce is a sign of the decay of bourgeois marriage, which is answering its purpose ever less. But a still much worse sign of its decay is the circumstance that, simultaneously, the number of marriages is in almost all these countries steadily on the decline. Experience tells that high prices for corn in one single year have an unfavorable effect both upon the number of marriages and that of births. Long industrial crises, and increasing deterioration of the general economic condition must, accordingly, have a lasting evil effect. This is confirmed by the statistics of marriages for almost all countries in civilization.
In France, marriages between 1881-1890 cast the following picture on the canvas. Marriages were contracted in—
| 1881 | 282,079 |
| 1882 | 281,060 |
| 1883 | 284,519 |
| 1884 | 289,555 |
| 1885 | 283,170 |
| 1886 | 283,208 |
| 1887 | 277,060 |
| 1888 | 276,848 |
| 1889 | 272,934 |
| 1890 | 269,332 |
There is, accordingly, a considerable decrease of marriages.
In the German Empire, the number of marriages was highest after the close of the war between Germany and France, during which they had stood still. In 1872 there were 423,900 marriages contracted, but in 1876 they numbered only 366,912, and during the worst year of the crisis, the year 1879, they dropped to 335,113. They have since risen again slowly, and numbered in
| 1882 | 350,457 |
| 1886 | 372,326 |
| 1889 | 389,339 |
| 1892 | 398,775 |