on, and her
sympathy for those into whose lives she has gained a curious insight.
She discovers how incorrigibly bourgeois her standards have been, and it
takes but a little time to reach the conclusion that she cannot insist
so strenuously upon the conventions of her own class, which fail to fit
the bigger, more emotional, and freer lives of working people. The
charity visitor holds well-grounded views upon the imprudence of early
marriages, quite naturally because she comes from a family and circle
of professional and business people. A professional man is scarcely
equipped and started in his profession before he is thirty. A business
man, if he is on the road to success, is much nearer prosperity at
thirty-five than twenty-five, and it is therefore wise for these men not
to marry in the twenties; but this does not apply to the workingman. In
many trades he is laid upon the shelf at thirty-five, and in nearly all
trades he receives the largest wages in his life between twenty and
thirty. If the young workingman has all his wages to himself, he will
probably establish habits of personal comfort, which he cannot keep up
when he has to divide with a family--habits which he can, perhaps, never
overcome.

The sense of prudence, the necessity for saving, can never come to a
primitive, emotional man with the force of a conviction; but the
necessity of providing for his children is a powerful incentive. He
naturally regards his children as his savings-bank; he expects them to
care for him when he gets old, and in some trades old age comes very
early. A Jewish tailor was quite lately sent to the Cook County
poorhouse, paralyzed beyond recovery at the age of thirty-five. Had his
little boy of nine been but a few years older, he might have been spared
this sorrow of public charity. He was, in fact, better able to well
support a family when he was twenty than when he was thirty-five, for
his wages had steadily grown less as the years went on. Another tailor
whom I know, who is also a Socialist, always speaks of saving as a
bourgeois virtue, one quite impossible to the genuine workingman. He
supports a family consisting of himself, a wife and three children, and
his two parents on eight dollars a week. He insists it would be criminal
not to expend every penny of this amount upon food and shelter, and he
expects his children later to care for him.

This economic pressure also accounts for the tendency to put children to
work over