naturally because she comes from a family and circle of professional and business people.  A professional man is scarcely equipped and started in his profession before he is thirty.  A business man, if he is on the road to success, is much nearer prosperity at thirty-five than twenty-five, and it is therefore wise for these men not to marry in the twenties; but this does not apply to the workingman.  In many trades he is laid upon the shelf at thirty-five, and in nearly all trades he receives the largest wages in his life between twenty and thirty.  If the young workingman has all his wages to himself, he will probably establish habits of personal comfort, which he cannot keep up when he has to divide with a family—­habits which he can, perhaps, never overcome.

The sense of prudence, the necessity for saving, can never come to a primitive, emotional man with the force of a conviction; but the necessity of providing for his children is a powerful incentive.  He naturally regards his children as his savings-bank; he expects them to care for him when he gets old, and in some trades old age comes very early.  A Jewish tailor was quite lately sent to the Cook County poorhouse, paralyzed beyond recovery at the age of thirty-five.  Had his little boy of nine been but a few years older, he might have been spared this sorrow of public charity.  He was, in fact, better able to well support a family when he was twenty than when he was thirty-five, for his wages had steadily grown less as the years went on.  Another tailor whom I know, who is also a Socialist, always speaks of saving as a bourgeois virtue, one quite impossible to the genuine workingman.  He supports a family consisting of himself, a wife and three children, and his two parents on eight dollars a week.  He insists it would be criminal not to expend every penny of this amount upon food and shelter, and he expects his children later to care for him.

This economic pressure also accounts for the tendency to put children to work overyoung and thus cripple their chances for individual development and usefulness, and with the avaricious parent also leads to exploitation.  “I have fed her for fourteen years, now she can help me pay my mortgage” is not an unusual reply when a hardworking father is expostulated with because he would take his bright daughter out of school and put her into a factory.

It has long been a common error for the charity visitor, who is strongly urging her “family” toward self-support, to suggest, or at least connive, that the children be put to work early, although she has not the excuse that the parents have.  It is so easy, after one has been taking the industrial view for a long time, to forget the larger and more social claim; to urge that the boy go to work and support his parents, who are receiving charitable aid.  She does not realize what a cruel advantage the person who distributes charity has, when she gives advice.