to this truth.  Take, for example, thrift.  It is not possible to expect that large class of workers who depend upon irregular earnings of less than 18s. a week to set by anything for a rainy day.  The essence of thrift is regularity, and regularity is to them impossible.  Even supposing their scant wage was regular, it is questionable whether they would be justified in stinting the bodily necessities of their families by setting aside a portion which could not in the long run suffice to provide even a bare maintenance for old age or disablement.  To say this is not to impugn the value of thrift in maintaining a character of dignity and independence in the worker; it is simply to recognize that valuable as these qualities are, they must be subordinated to the first demands of physical life.  Those who can save without encroaching on the prime necessaries of life ought to save; but there are still many who cannot save, and these are they whom the problem of poverty especially concerns.  The saying of Aristotle, that “it is needful first to have a maintenance, and then to practise virtue,” does not indeed imply that we ought to postpone practising the moral virtues until we have secured ourselves against want, but rather means that before we can live well we must first be able to live at all.

Precisely the same is true of the “inefficiency” of the poor.  Nothing is more common than to hear men and women, often incapable themselves of earning by work the money which they spend, assigning as the root of poverty the inefficiency of the poor.  It is quite true that the “poor” consist for the most part of inefficient workers.  It would be strange if it were not so.  How shall a child of the slums, ill-fed in body and mind, brought up in the industrial and moral degradation of low city life, without a chance of learning how to use hands or head, and to acquire habits of steady industry, become an efficient workman?  The conditions under which they grow up to manhood and womanhood preclude the possibility of efficiency.  It is the bitterest portion of the lot of the poor that they are deprived of the opportunity of learning to work well.  To taunt them with their incapacity, and to regard it as the cause of poverty, is nothing else than a piece of blind insolence.  Here and there an individual may be to blame for neglected opportunities; but the “poor” as a class have no more chance under present conditions of acquiring “efficiency” than of attaining to refined artistic taste, or the culminating Christian virtue of holiness.  Inefficiency is one of the worst and most degrading aspects of poverty; but to regard it as the leading cause is an error fatal to a true understanding of the problem.