ffice Savings' Bank is there security--not even
in the gilt-edged respectability of Consols, which in the last ten
years have fallen from 114 to under 82. Consider the adventure of the
thrifty well-meaning citizen who used his savings-bank hoard to buy
Consols at the former price, and now finds himself the poorer for not
having buried his savings in his garden. The middling sort of man
saves for the sake of wife and child; our State not only fails to
protect him from the adventures of the manipulating financier, but it
deliberately avoids competition with banker, insurance agent and
promoter. In no way can the middle-class or artisan parent escape the
financier's power and get real security for his home or his children's
upbringing.

Not only is every parent of any but the richest classes worried and
discouraged by the universal insecurity of outlook in this private
adventure world, but at every turn his efforts to do his best for his
children are discouraged. If he has no children, he will have all his
income to spend on his own pleasures; he need only live in a little
house, he pays nothing for school, less for doctor, less for all the
needs of life, and he is taxed less; his income tax is the same, no
bigger; his rent, his rates, his household bills are all less....

The State will not even help him to a tolerable home, to wholesome
food, to needed fuel for the new citizens he is training for it. The
State now-a-days in its slow awakening does show a certain concern in
the housing of the lowest classes, a concern alike stimulated and
supplemented by such fine charities as Peabody's for example, but no
one stands between the two-hundred-a-year man and his landlord in the
pitiless struggle to get. For every need of his children whom he toils
to make into good men and women, he must pay a toll of owner's
profits, he must trust to the anything but intelligent greed of
private enterprise.

The State will not even insist that a sufficiency of comfortable,
sanitary homes shall be built for his class; if he wants the
elementary convenience of a bathroom, he must pay extra toll to the
water shareholder; his gas is as cheap in quality and dear in price as
it can be; his bread and milk, under the laws of supply and demand,
are at the legal minimum of wholesomeness; the coal trade cheerfully
raises his coal in mid-winter to ruinous prices. He buys clothes of
shoddy and boots of brown paper. To get any other is nearly impossib