Page:May Walden - Socialism and the Home (1900).pdf/15

 Rh "But your remedies are so far away," some one says to me: "you do not even touch the spot you want to heal." We do not need to; we believe in purifying the system, then these plague spots will go away naturally. Most women, if they have half a chance, are good housekeepers. And these questions of sanitary conditions and the public health are simply questions of good housekeeping. Under socialism when men and women elected to office look faithfully to their duties instead of squandering the public money, as is done now under capitalism, there will be put into use systems of engineering and scientific and economical methods of caring for the disposal of waste matter so that this suicidal way of poisoning our lake and river water and using it again for household purposes will be quickly abolished. We must have sound bodies before we can have sound minds, and the cleaner people are physically the healthier they are mentally and the purer they are morally.

Not many years ago much of the work which is now done by machinery was done by hand, or by small tools that each family either owned or borrowed from their neighbors. Very rapidly new inventions have been made so that fewer people are needed to produce a certain amount. The machines were simplified and the men who attended them were displaced by women who would work cheaper. Finally now the machines are made so simple that tiny children of eight and ten years of age can attend them and they are taking the places of women and working for a few cents a day.

A few instances of how machinery has displaced individual workers may be given as follows. One man with a machine can make as many nails as a thousand men used to do. Three people with machinery can mold twenty thousand loaves of