is very great.  We have no reason to believe that the small retailers who sell to the poor die millionaires.  The poor, partly of necessity, partly by habit, make their purchases in minute quantities.  A single family has been known to make seventy-two distinct purchases of tea within seven weeks, and the average purchases of a number of poor families for the same period amounted to twenty-seven.  Their groceries are bought largely by the ounce, their meat or fish by the half-penn’orth, their coal by the cwt., or even by the lb.  Undoubtedly they pay for these morsels a price which, if duly multiplied, represents a much higher sum than their wealthier neighbours pay for a much better article.  But the small shopkeeper has a high rent to pay; he has a large number of competitors, so that the total of his business is not great; the actual labour of dispensing many minute portions is large; he is often himself a poor man, and must make a large profit on a small turn-over in order to keep going; he is not infrequently kept waiting for his money, for the amount of credit small shopkeepers will give to regular customers is astonishing.  For all these, and many other reasons, it is easy to see that the poor man must pay high prices.  Even his luxuries, his beer and tobacco, he purchases at exorbitant rates.

It is sometimes held sufficient to reply that the poor are thoughtless and extravagant.  And no doubt this is so.  But it must also be remembered that the industrial conditions under which these people live, necessitate a hand-to-mouth existence, and themselves furnish an education in improvidence.

Sec. 5.  Housing and Food Supply of the Poor.—­Once more, out of a low income the poor pay high prices for a bad article.  The low physical condition of the poorest city workers, the high rate of mortality, especially among children, is due largely to the quality of the food, drink, and shelter which they buy.  On the quality of the rooms for which they pay high rent it is unnecessary to dwell.  Ill-constructed, unrepaired, overcrowded, destitute of ventilation and of proper sanitary arrangements, the mass of low class city tenements finds few apologists.  The Royal Commission on Housing of the Working Classes thus deals with the question of overcrowding—­

“The evils of overcrowding, especially in London, are still a public scandal, and are becoming in certain localities a worse scandal than they ever were.  Among adults, overcrowding causes a vast amount of suffering which could be calculated by no bills of mortality, however accurate.  The general deterioration in the health of the people is a worse feature of overcrowding even than the encouragement by it of infectious disease.  It has the effect of reducing their stamina, and thus producing consumption and diseases arising from general debility of the system whereby life is shortened.”  “In Liverpool, nearly one-fifth of the squalid houses where the poor live in the closest quarters are reported to be always infected, that is to say, the seat of infectious diseases.”