But we must understand that this sublimation of life is an investment. It requires that incessant attention and effort illustrated in document No. 36 (p. 62) and goes on best when life is economically secure. And there are families and whole strata of society where life affords no investments. There is little to gain and little to lose. Social workers report that sometimes overburdened mothers with large families complain that they have no “graveyard luck”—all the children live. In cases of great neglect the girl cannot be said to fall, because she has never risen. She is not immoral, because this implies the loss of morality, but a-moral—never having had a moral code. 55. Nine of the fifteen families [of the working class in Rome] are formed on a non-legitimate basis.... In fourteen of the fifteen families there is habitual obscenity.... The children hear and repeat the obscenity and are laughed at. Each member lives on the average on 25 lire a month.... Criminals and prostitutes frequent the homes and have liaisons with the girls. Mothers, going to work, leave the children with a prostitute.... The finer sentiments are notably lacking. Brothers and sisters quarrel and fight.... Fights are habitual in eight of the fifteen families.... The sentiment of modesty and delicacy does not develop in the young. The regard for the child is expressed in the remark of a father (about children who were not fed and picked up scraps on the street): “Let them have food when they make their own living.”[57] 56. Any person who has dwelt among the denizens of the slums cannot fail to have brought home to him the existence of a stratum of society of no inconsiderable magnitude in which children part with their innocence long before puberty, in which personal chastity is virtually unknown, and in which “to have a baby by your father” is laughed at as a comic mishap.[58]