Though trade has invariably its cycles of good and bad years, like the lean and fat kine in Pharaoh’s dream—­its bursts of prosperity, followed by glut, panic, and distress—­the thoughtless and spendthrift take no heed of experience, and make no better provision for the future.  Improvidence seems to be one of the most incorrigible of faults.  “There are whole neighbourhoods in the manufacturing districts,” says Mr. Baker in a recent Report, “where not only are there no savings worth mentioning, but where, within a fortnight of being out of work, the workers themselves are starving for want of the merest necessaries.”  Not a strike takes place, but immediately the workmen are plunged in destitution; their furniture and watches are sent to the pawnshop, whilst deplorable appeals are made to the charitable, and numerous families are cast upon the poor-rates.

This habitual improvidence—­though of course there are many admirable exceptions—­is the real cause of the social degradation of the artizan.  This too is the prolific source of social misery.  But the misery is entirely the result of human ignorance and self-indulgence.  For though the Creator has ordained poverty, the poor are not necessarily, nor as a matter of fact, the miserable.  Misery is the result of moral causes,—­most commonly of individual vice and improvidence.

The Rev. Mr. Norris, in speaking of the habits of the highly paid miners and iron-workers of South Staffordshire, says, “Improvidence is too tame a word for it—­it is recklessness; here young and old, married and unmarried, are uniformly and almost avowedly self-indulgent spendthrifts.  One sees this reckless character marring and vitiating the nobler traits of their nature.  Their gallantry in the face of danger is akin to foolhardiness; their power of intense labour is seldom exerted except to compensate for time lost in idleness and revelry; their readiness to make ‘gatherings’ for their sick and married comrades seems only to obviate the necessity of previous saving; their very creed—­and, after their sort, they are a curiously devotional people, holding frequent prayer-meetings in the pits—­often degenerates into fanatical fatalism.  But it is seen far more painfully and unmistakably in the alternate plethora and destitution between which, from year’s end to year’s end, the whole population seems to oscillate.  The prodigal revelry of the reckoning night, the drunkenness of Sunday, the refusal to work on Monday and perhaps Tuesday, and then the untidiness of their home towards the latter part of the two or three weeks which intervene before the next pay-day; their children kept from school, their wives and daughters on the pit-bank, their furniture in the pawnshop; the crowded and miry lanes in which they live, their houses often cracked from top to bottom by the ‘crowning in’ of the ground, without drainage, or ventilation, or due supply of water;—­such a state of things as this, co-existing with earnings which might ensure comfort and even prosperity, seems to prove that no legislation can cure the evil.”