Food, i.e. oatmeal, 1¼ lb. of meat a day among _£_ _s._ _d._ eight persons, cocoa and bread 0 14 0 Rent for two small rooms 0 5 0 Schooling for four children 0 0 4 Washing 0 1 0 Firing and light 0 2 6 ----------- Total 1 2 10 [2] This table is taken from a paper written by my wife in the _National Review_, July 1886, in which she illustrates by many examples that the average wage is insufficient to support life. If to this 2_s._ a week be added for clothes (and what woman dressing on 100_l._ or 80_l._ a year could allow less than 5_l._ a year to clothe a working man, his wife, and six children) then the necessary weekly expenditure of the family is 1_l._ 4_s._ 10_d._ Few fathers or mothers are able to resist, or ought to resist, the temptation of taking or giving some pleasure; so even where work is regular, and paid at 1_l._ 5_s._ a week, there must be in the home want of food as well as of the luxuries which gladden life. Those dwellers in pleasant places, without experience of the homes of the poor, who will resolutely set themselves to think about what they do know must realise that those who make cheap goods are too poor to do their duty to themselves, their neighbours, and their country. The mystery, indeed, remains, how many manage to live at all. One solution is that there exists among these irregular workers a kind of communism. They prefer to occupy the same neighbourhood and make long journeys to work rather than go to live among strangers. They easily borrow and easily lend. The women spend much time in gossiping, know intimately one another’s affairs, and in times of trouble help willingly. One couple, whose united earnings have never reached 15_s._ a week, whose home has never been more than one small room, has brought up in succession three orphans. The old man, at seventy years of age, just earns a living by running messages or by selling wirework; but even now he spends many a night in hushing a baby whose desertion he pities, and whom he has taken to his care.