Here is a population in many respects more fortunate than its fellows. Its wages are high; its hours of work are few. Its life, though exacting and laborious, demanding, perhaps, from human nature more than human nature can readily give, is more exhilarating than the long hours in the humid air of the cotton factory, or the perpetual scribbling in an underground office cellar. It is wrestling continually with the iron: tearing it out of the ironstone, directing rivers of molten metal into their proper channels, bending the intractable stone and the huge forces of heat and affinity to the will of man. And in life also it is wrestling with huge forces which it but dimly understands, poised on a perilous pathway from which one slip means utter destruction. “The path the iron worker daily treads at the edge of the sandy platform, that narrow path that lies between running streams of fire on the one hand and a sheer drop on the other, is but an emblem of the Road of Life along which he must walk. If he should stumble, either actually or metaphorically, as he goes, he has but a small margin in which to recover himself.” There is a less defensible side of the people’s life in the enormous disproportion of attendance at public-houses and at places of religious worship; the universal prevalence of betting and gambling; the thoughtlessness and wastefulness which often produces economic collapse; the ignorance of child-rearing and the laws of health; the darker side of the artificial restriction of families. But these become explained rather than condemned by the revelation of the contrast in the condition of child-bearing in one of these crowded, tiny homes with the condition in the surroundings of those who live in another universe. Boys and girls of fourteen or younger are turned loose to pick their way through the most difficult period of life, just at the season when the boys and girls of another class are most completely surrounded with careful and humane influences. The married woman of the working classes, “handicapped as she is by physical conditions and drawbacks, with but just bodily strength enough to encounter the life described,” may be defended against the fluent criticism of “her more prosperous sisters--whose duties are divided among several people, and even then not always accomplished with success.”