The head of a kindergarten training-class once addressed a club of working women, and spoke of the despotism which is often established over little children.  She said that the so-called determination to break a child’s will many times arose from a lust of dominion, and she urged the ideal relationship founded upon love and confidence.  But many of the women were puzzled.  One of them remarked to the writer as she came out of the club room, “If you did not keep control over them from the time they were little, you would never get their wages when they are grown up.”  Another one said, “Ah, of course she (meaning the speaker) doesn’t have to depend upon her children’s wages.  She can afford to be lax with them, because even if they don’t give money to her, she can get along without it.”

There are an impressive number of children who uncomplainingly and constantly hand over their weekly wages to their parents, sometimes receiving back ten cents or a quarter for spending-money, but quite as often nothing at all; and the writer knows one girl of twenty-five who for six years has received two cents a week from the constantly falling wages which she earns in a large factory.  Is it habit or virtue which holds her steady in this course?  If love and tenderness had been substituted for parental despotism, would the mother have had enough affection, enough power of expression to hold her daughter’s sense of money obligation through all these years?  This girl who spends her paltry two cents on chewing-gum and goes plainly clad in clothes of her mother’s choosing, while many of her friends spend their entire wages on those clothes which factory girls love so well, must be held by some powerful force.

The charity visitor finds these subtle and elusive problems most harrowing.  The head of a family she is visiting is a man who has become black-listed in a strike.  He is not a very good workman, and this, added to his agitator’s reputation, keeps him out of work for a long time.  The fatal result of being long out of work follows:  he becomes less and less eager for it, and gets a “job” less and less frequently.  In order to keep up his self-respect, and still more to keep his wife’s respect for him, he yields to the little self-deception that this prolonged idleness follows because he was once blacklisted, and he gradually becomes a martyr.  Deep down in his heart perhaps—­but who knows what may be deep down in his heart?  Whatever may be in his wife’s, she does not show for an instant that she thinks he has grown lazy, and accustomed to see her earn, by sewing and cleaning, most of the scanty income for the family.  The charity visitor, however, does see this, and she also sees that the other men who were in the strike have gone back to work.  She further knows by inquiry and a little experience that the man is not skilful.  She cannot, however, call him lazy and good-for-nothing, and denounce him as worthless as her grandmother might have done,