Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/45

 loses the means to indulge in luxury. In consequence of this the number of unmarried women increases, and ever larger is the number of those families in which mother and daughter must become wage-earners. Accordingly the number of women wage-earners increases, not only in large and small production and commerce, but in government offices, in the telegraph and telephone service, in railroads and banks, in the arts and sciences. However loudly personal interests and prejudices may rebel against it, the labor of women presses itself forward more and more into the various professional pursuits. It is not vanity, nor forwardness nor arrogance, but the force of economic development that drives women to labor in these as well as in other fields of human activity. If men have succeeded in preventing the competition of women in certain branches of intellectual labor which are still organized on craft lines, women workers tend to crowd all the more into the pursuits not so organized, for example, authorship, painting, music.

The result of this whole development is that the number of educated people has increased enormously. Nevertheless, the beneficent results which the idealists expected from an increase of education have not followed. So long as education is a merchandise, its extension is equivalent to an increase in the quantity of that merchandise, consequently to the falling in its price and the decline in the condition of those who possess it. The number of educated people has grown to such an extent that it more than suffices for the