Perhaps it will be as well here to reiterate the statement that these chapters are descriptive of the lives and conditions of families where the wage of the father is continuous, where he is a sober, steady man in full work, earning from 18s. to 30s. a week, and allowing a regular definite sum to his wife for all expenses other than his own clothes, fares, and pocket-money. Experience shows how fatally easy it is for people to label all poverty as the result of drink, extravagance, or laziness. It is done every day in the year by writers and speakers and preachers, as well as by hundreds of well-meaning folk with uneasy consciences. They see, or more often hear of, people whose economy is different from their own. Without trying to find out whether their own ideas of economy are practicable for the people in question, they dismiss their poverty as “the result of extravagance” or drink. Then they turn away with relief at the easy explanation. Or they see or hear of something which seems to them bad management. It may be, not good management, but the only management under the circumstances. But, as the circumstances are unknown, the description serves, and middle-class minds, only too anxious to be set at rest, are set at rest. Drink is an accusation fatally easy to throw about. By suggesting it you account for every difficulty, every sorrow. A man who suffers from poverty is supposed to drink. That he has 18s. or 20s. a week, and a family to bring up upon that income, is not considered evidence of want. People who have never spent less than £4 a week on themselves alone will declare that a clever managing woman can make 18s. or 20s. a week go as far as an ordinary woman, not a good manager, will make 30s. They argue as though the patent fact that 30s. misspent may reduce its value to 18s. could make 18s. a week enough to rear a family upon. It is not necessary to invoke the agency of drink to make 20s. a week too small a sum for the maintenance of four, five, six, or more, persons. That some men in possession of this wage may drink does not make it a sufficient wage for the families of men who do not drink.