A few parents of heroic mould may have succeeded in bringing up children to healthy and useful manhood and womanhood on small wages. Tales of such are repeated in select circles, but these families generally belong to a generation less open to temptation than the present. There are now few, very few, parents who, with an uncertain wage of 30s. a week, never spend a penny for the sake of pleasure, taste, or friendship. The result is that their own or their children’s physical health and well-being are sacrificed. The boys are rejected when they offer themselves as soldiers, the infant mortality is high, and the girls unprotected are more ready to become the victims of vice. The saddest of all experiences of life among the poor is the gradual declension of respectable families into the ranks of the destitute, when loss of work finds them without resources in body or skill. It is the poverty of the great multitude of the working people and not the destitution of the very poor which is the force of the present discontent. This is not realized even by Mrs. George Kerr, whose book, “The Path of Social Progress,” seems to me one of the best of those lately published on the subject. She speaks of Dr. Chalmers as having advocated a policy “which still holds the field,” and is the “only scheme which actually did diminish poverty”. But this policy aimed at diminishing a poverty which was practically destitution, and its method was to strengthen the people in habits which would enable them to live independent lives on wages of 20s. a week. Mrs. Kerr herself talks of the importance of a wife averaging her husband’s wages, so that if her husband as a painter earns 36s. a week for four months the family expenditure ought to be limited within 18s. a week, and she evidently condemns as waste the purchase of a perambulator or bicycle. The methods she advocates by which character may be raised and strengthened are admirable, and the lead given by Dr. Chalmers cannot be too closely followed, but they have reference to destitution and not to the poverty from which working people suffer whose wages reach a more or less uncertain 30s. or 40s. a week.