have to depend upon her children's wages. She can afford to be lax with
them, because even if they don't give money to her, she can get along
without it."

There are an impressive number of children who uncomplainingly and
constantly hand over their weekly wages to their parents, sometimes
receiving back ten cents or a quarter for spending-money, but quite as
often nothing at all; and the writer knows one girl of twenty-five who
for six years has received two cents a week from the constantly falling
wages which she earns in a large factory. Is it habit or virtue which
holds her steady in this course? If love and tenderness had been
substituted for parental despotism, would the mother have had enough
affection, enough power of expression to hold her daughter's sense of
money obligation through all these years? This girl who spends her
paltry two cents on chewing-gum and goes plainly clad in clothes of her
mother's choosing, while many of her friends spend their entire wages on
those clothes which factory girls love so well, must be held by some
powerful force.

The charity visitor finds these subtle and elusive problems most
harrowing. The head of a family she is visiting is a man who has become
black-listed in a strike. He is not a very good workman, and this, added
to his agitator's reputation, keeps him out of work for a long time. The
fatal result of being long out of work follows: he becomes less and less
eager for it, and gets a "job" less and less frequently. In order to
keep up his self-respect, and still more to keep his wife's respect for
him, he yields to the little self-deception that this prolonged idleness
follows because he was once blacklisted, and he gradually becomes a
martyr. Deep down in his heart perhaps--but who knows what may be deep
down in his heart? Whatever may be in his wife's, she does not show for
an instant that she thinks he has grown lazy, and accustomed to see her
earn, by sewing and cleaning, most of the scanty income for the family.
The charity visitor, however, does see this, and she also sees that the
other men who were in the strike have gone back to work. She further
knows by inquiry and a little experience that the man is not skilful.
She cannot, however, call him lazy and good-for-nothing, and denounce
him as worthless as her grandmother might have done, because of certain
intellectual conceptions at which she has arrived. She sees other
workmen come to him for shrewd advice; s