Professor H. R. Seager, a careful economist, has suggested that the population of the United States may be roughly divided into five classes or strata, which are largely non-competing, in the sense that individuals are in great part shut off from opportunities in classes above their own. The highest class, enjoying family incomes of more than three thousand dollars a year, has the fullest opportunity. In the second class, with incomes of from one thousand five hundred dollars to three thousand dollars, the boys begin work at sixteen or seventeen years, and are handicapped in starting by lack of resources and outlook. They are too apt to choose work which pays well at once, but does not lead to advancement, and only a very small per cent rise above the condition of their parents. A third class, with incomes of from six hundred dollars to one thousand five hundred dollars, is marked by early marriages, large families, early withdrawal from school, and lack of outlook. Its members are rarely able to compete for the better positions with classes one and two. A fourth class, of wage-earners at from one to two dollars a day (at the time the book was published), shows the same conditions accentuated. Their necessarily low standard of living and its mental and social implications bar a rise in the world, and they compete, as a rule, only for that grade of work to which they are born. The fifth is a misery class, in which the most destructive and degrading conditions prevail.[14] I am not sure that this analysis is not somewhat one-sided, especially in allowing too little influence to the relaxing effects of ease upon those born in the upper class, but it is certainly nearer the truth than the optimistic dogma that in this free country every one has an equal chance. And lack of pecuniary resource is by no means the only thing that restricts opportunity and confines one within a class. To grow up where the schools are poor and the neighborhood associations degrading, to belong to a despised race, to come of an immigrant group not yet assimilated to the language and customs of the country, or simply to have vicious or unwise parents, may prevent healthy development irrespective of economic resources.[15] The existence of inherited stratification is due to the fact that the child is involved in the situation of the family. As long as the latter surrounds him, determining his economic support and social environment, there must be a strong tendency for the condition of the parents to be transmitted. And this merging of the child in the family is in itself no evil, but arises naturally out of the functions of the family as the group charged with the nurture of the coming generation.