view. For
instance, persuade the children to save to buy needed clothing, or the
parents to save to buy proper clothing, bedding, etc., for the
children. This strengthens family affection and leads the way to a
bank account later, by showing what money can do.[5]

Next to such immediate inducements to thrift comes the dread of pauper
burial, which is a far more influential motive with the poor than the
dread of either dependence or privation. {120} Respectability is
measured in poor neighborhoods by funerals, and, whether the
neighborhood standards of morality and respectability are ours or not,
we cannot afford, in our charity work, to ignore them. Extravagant
funerals are an evil, and we should use our influence to discourage
extravagance, even where it is rooted quite as much in affection as in
vanity; but an unsympathetic attitude on the part of the charitable, an
inability to understand the neighborhood point of view, has helped to
encourage an extravagant form of saving, namely, burial and child
insurance.

To enter into a discussion of the merits of industrial insurance, as
furnished in this country to the poor, is outside the scope of this
book, and the matter is treated quite fully, moreover, in another
volume of this series ("The Development of Thrift," by Mary Willcox
Brown), but the most enthusiastic advocates of industrial insurance can
hardly claim for it that it is an inexpensive form of saving. A very
large percentage of industrial policies lapse, and it is a common thing
to find that those who have kept up their payments and have {121}
become beneficiaries, spend everything on the funeral of the insured.
"Of $200.00 insurance received by one widow, $180.00 was given to the
undertaker, and the remaining $20.00 was expended for a mourning outfit
for herself. The family were being aided by the Emergency Society at
that time." [6] In New York, the agents of the Charity Organization
Society regard the following as a typical instance: A woman's husband
was insured for $136.00. When he died, she called the same undertaker
that had buried a child for them. His charges on the former occasion
had been moderate. The woman told him that she wanted a very
inexpensive funeral with only one carriage. This was the only
instruction that she gave. The undertaker asked whether the deceased
was insured, and was told that he was, whereupon he offered to collect
the insurance and to pay over to the widow what w