expenses and give a little margin, they might
do better; but buying, as they are obliged to do, from hand to mouth,
they buy at extravagant prices. Coal, for instance, which costs me about
twenty-six shillings for a ton, costs the labourer half as much again as
that, because he can only pay for a hundredweight or so at a time. So,
too, the boots he can get for four or five shillings a pair are the
dearest of all boots. They wear out in a couple of months or so, and
another pair must be bought almost before another four or five shillings
can be spared. In its smaller degree, a still more absurd difficulty
handicaps the people in dealing with their own fruit-crops. To make
raspberry or gooseberry jam should be, you would think, an economy
delightful to the cottage women, if only as a piece of old-fashioned
thrift; yet they rarely do it. If they had the necessary utensils,
still the weekly money at their disposal will not run to the purchase of
extra firing and sugar. It is all too little for everyday purposes, and
they are glad to eke it out by selling their fruit for middle-class
women to preserve, though in the end they have to buy for their own
families an inferior quality of jam at a far higher price.

Wherever you follow it up, you will find the modern thrift not quite
successful in the cottages. It is not elastic enough; or, rather, the
people's means are not elastic enough, and will not stretch to its
demands. There is well-being in it--variety of food, for instance, and
comfort of clothing--as soon as both ends can be made to meet and to lap
over a little; but it strains the small incomes continually to the
breaking-point, so that every other consideration has to give way under
it to a pitiful calculation of pence. For the sake of pence the people
who keep fowls sell the eggs, and feed their children on bread and
margarine; and, on the same principle, they do not even seek to produce
other things which are well within their power to produce, but are too
luxurious for their means. "'Twouldn't be no use for me to grow
strawberries," a man explained; "my children'd have 'em." It sounded a
strange reason, for to what better use could strawberries be put? But it
shows how tightly the people are bound down by their commercial
conditions. In order to make the Saturday's shopping easier, they must
weigh the shillings and pence value of everything they possess and
everything they attempt to do.

These considerations, h