But once married, a Dutch home is indeed 'Home, sweet home,' as is the case more or less in all the northern countries, where the changeful climate compels people to live a great deal within four walls. Dutch fathers are kind, and the mothers are indulgent, and among the poorer classes especially family affection is very great. Most beautiful and touching instances might be abundantly quoted of family devotion, and a society like that for the 'prevention of cruelty to children' would find little to do in Holland. Chapter V The Workman of the Towns The condition of the Dutch urban working classes is by no means an enviable one. Granting that wages are much higher than half a century ago, when bread cost fivepence-halfpenny the loaf as against three halfpence to-day, and when clothes and furniture cost fifty per cent. more than now, the average working-man cannot be otherwise described than as distinctly poor when compared with his English colleague. Yet it would be misleading to judge exclusively by the scale of wages, and against making comparisons of the kind the reader should at once be warned. The fact is that there are very wide divergences of condition amongst the working classes of Holland. A carpenter or a blacksmith earning from £1 to £1 10s. in weekly wages all the year round will rank, if sober and well-behaved, as a comparatively well-to-do workman. On the other hand, a bricklayer or a painter, whose work in winter is very uncertain, and who earns, maybe, a bare £1 a week during the nine months of the year wherein he can find work, is a poor workman at the best, and his condition is greatly to be deplored. More pitiable still, however, is the case of working-class families in some of the manufacturing towns, where wages are still lower, and where an even tolerable standard of life cannot be maintained unless mother and children take their place in the factory side by side with the head of the household as regular wage-earners. For, as labour is cheap and families are numerous in Holland, as soon as the boys and girls have reached the sacramental age of twelve, at which Dutch law allows them to work twelve hours a day, they leave school, and enter the factory and workshop. It is no joke for these children, who have to leave their little beds, frequently under the tiles, at 5 or 6 a.m., or earlier, summer and winter, to gulp down some hot coffee, or what is conveniently called so, to swallow a huge piece of the well-known Dutch 'Roggebrood,' or rye-bread, and then to hurry, in their wooden shoes, through the quiet streets of the town to their place of work.