Though fond of the children when they are there, this life of stress and strain makes the women dread nothing so much as the conviction that there is to be still another baby with its inevitable consequences—more crowding, more illness, more worry, more work, and less food, less strength, less time to manage with. There are people who argue that marriage should be put off by the poor until they have saved up enough to secure their economic independence, and that it would not hurt young men on £1 a week to put off marriage till they are thirty, they, meantime, saving hard during those ten years. Should the poorly paid workman overcome his young impulse to marry the moment his wage reaches £1 a week, and should he remain a bachelor until thirty, it is quite certain that he would not marry at all. This may be a good thing or a bad thing, but it would be so. A man who for ten years had had the spending of 20s. a week—and it is a sum which is soon spent without providing luxuries—would not, at thirty, when perhaps cold reason would direct his impulse, feel inclined to share his £1 a week with an uncertain number of other people. His present bent is towards married life. It provides him for the first year or two with attention to his comfort and with privacy and freedom for his personality, as well as satisfying his natural craving for sex-relationship. Should he thwart that impulse, he, being an average, normal man, will have to find other ways of dealing with these desires of his. He is not likely to starve every instinct for ten years in order, perhaps, to save a sum which might bring in an income of a couple of shillings a week to add to his weekly wage. He would know, by the time he was thirty, that even 22s. a week does not guarantee a family against misery and want. The self-sacrifice demanded of the father of even a small family on such an income would appal him.