The next class which should be examined is that made up by the clerks and routine brain-workers. As already noted, there is little or no material available for the study of the budgets of this class. The Economic Club published a few years ago a collection of family budgets, four of which might be taken as illustrating the home life of this important section of the community. From these and from the rather unreliable divisions of income given in some of the smaller women's papers, I have come to the conclusion that food absorbs 30 to 40 per cent. of the income, and rent 15 to 20 per cent. The expenditure on clothing is much more liberal, and I am inclined to believe that the poorer clerks are sometimes insufficiently fed. It should be noted that in this class the cost of education tends to be borne by the parent and not by the State; no doubt there is here a genuine grievance, one, however, which the provision of municipal secondary schools is gradually removing. But a thorough and accurate study of the circumstances of the lower middle-class would be of the utmost value at the present time. It is certain that its needs and demands are to some extent at all events overlooked through the increasing power of organised labour on the one hand and the increasing wealth of the upper classes on the other. (3) _The Budget of the Well-to-do_ Probably it is in the budgets of these wealthier classes that the reader of these pages will be most interested from a personal standpoint. Under this head there is very little scientifically collected material; but on the other hand the ladies' papers and the housekeeping handbooks afford considerable information of somewhat varying value. It is in this class that service becomes an important item; it is in this class that the artistic side of life, the enjoyment of physical and intellectual luxury, first becomes possible. In a sense the study of expenditure here is both more useful and more interesting. A fraction of the income would suffice for the satisfaction of the mere physiological needs, and there is a real choice possible in the disposition of the surplus. Therefore, in the case of these larger incomes, I propose to discuss rather the general principles of expenditure than the statistical facts. The latter are not thoroughly reliable, and at the same time the circumstances of the class in question are better known to my readers. The fundamental principle, as Marshall[87] states, is that the marginal utility of each separate division of expenditure should be equal. He means by this that our income should be so distributed that the last sixpence we spend on clothes should yield us the same amount of pleasure as the last sixpence expended on food or on books. And he rightly remarks that to the housekeeper the value of keeping accounts lies precisely in the fact that it makes the application of this principle easy.