To the question: “Why do not working people save?” truth requires the paradoxical reply that they do save, and that they cannot afford to do so. As a class, working people save a larger proportion of their income than any other class of the community. The shares in Industrial Co-operative Societies amounted in 1904 to £27,739,123; the Reserve and Insurance funds of the same societies to £2,677,420. The great Friendly and Provident Societies are supported almost wholly by working class contributors; and, in addition to these, the majority of Trade Unions are also provident Societies.[75] Of the thirty families whose household expenditure has been tabulated in Vol. I. of Mr Booth’s _Life and Labour_ (East London), only five spent nothing upon insurance or club money; and in one household this item ran up to 11½ per cent. of the whole expenditure. Considering that the weekly income, as estimated, ranged from about 10s. 3½d. to about 33s. 7d. and that the households consisted seldom of less than four, and in one case of eight persons, these contributions are by no means trifling. Yet it is probable that not two families out of the thirty were able to make anything like an adequate provision for old age. It hardly, indeed, requires demonstration that a person earning just enough to support life can only make an adequate provision for his old age by laying by 100 per cent. of his income. Upon 10s. a week, or less, the saving of money becomes something very near to a slow form of suicide. Moreover, at the risk of horrifying every middle class reader, I must frankly declare that, in my opinion, a worker does more wisely to abstain from all forms of thrift beyond participation in his trade union and his co-operative society. His union will help to keep up his wages; his co-operative society will increase their purchasing power; the return upon both these investments is immediate and certain: but anything more is apt to cost too dear. It is now a good many years since an old Scotchman of great intelligence and judgment, the secretary of his trade union, a member of the municipal council, and justly respected by his fellow townsmen of various ranks, gave me his opinion on this subject. He related to me how, as a young man, he had accompanied a benevolent gentleman to a lecture upon thrift, and how, as they afterwards walked away, the gentleman waxed eloquent upon the duty of every man to lay by. But my old friend, canny even at five-and-twenty or so, replied that he was a married man with two children, that his earnings were two pounds a week, that, if he spent less, either his children must go short of what was necessary to make them strong, healthy and well trained, or he himself must go short of what was necessary to maintain his efficiency; and that, in his belief, the best form of thrift for a man in his position was to maintain the highest standard of living which his small total income would secure. In his case the plan had fully succeeded.