Thousands of mothers can testify to the cheerful sharing by fathers in the household burdens after a day of hard work; of cheerful going without necessities on the part of a father to give more than necessities to the children. Thousands of husbands and fathers will note the unselfishness and wisdom of a mother in caring for and enlarging the opportunities for the children, who are the common objects of love and ambition, and the confidence and love of the husband grows with the years. To the observer there is at the same time no more inspiring and depressing revelation than the parental love which asks nothing for itself, but all that life can give for the children, the visible expression of their mutual love. Often there is no thought given to a future of possible dependence. Wages do not make possible the care of the children at the standards of the parents, the buying of an environment that the experience of intelligent parents demands for them, and a bank account. The last is desirable, the first demand imperative. Faith is the anchor kept to be thrown out when the life currents are running toward the rocks of want and dependence. Nothing is kept back for personal use by these fathers and mothers. Sometimes this very unselfishness, when unregulated by wisdom, leaves them lonely and forsaken in old age. Those to whom they have given their lives have by the gift been placed in social positions that seemingly bar out the parents who made achievement possible. Even in the loneliness of old age the parents rejoice at the success and forget and forgive the separation. The end for which they worked has been attained, their children are successful, and they still count themselves nothing compared with their children. It is the independent wage-earners who make the largest contributions to our wealth, commercial greatness, national prestige; yet the world, counting wealth by dollars, classifies these as poor. They are as far removed from the incapable, the degraded, the vicious, the dependent, the ignorant--who provide the themes for books--as far removed from the worthless, the deficient, the mentally, morally weak, so familiar to the people of wealth who give money or time, or both, to lessen their miseries, as they are in standard and ambition from the people counted wealthy. The cost of floor space on which to make a home may make them neighbors of the people who are the problems of a great city; they may live in regions that are the laboratory of the student of social and political conditions, but they live behind closed doors, bring up their children, so far as they can, uncontaminated by neighborhood evils, and overcome their environment to a surprising degree. There is no word to distinguish them from those who make capital of their poverty, and the world loses much because of the lack of a term that would express the class who are the hope of this nation, whose children are the promise of its established greatness.