All these are of the best class of factory-workers that I came to know. There are other classes quite as clearly defined, and most of them have their representatives about our table. Men, for example, who have an honest interest in their work as such, and who have risen by force of ambition and sheer development of manual skill to good positions in the factory, and have there stood still, their congenital qualities incapable, presumably, of higher efficiency. But sadder far than theirs is the case of men who are often best endowed with native cleverness and aptitude, who rise quickly in the scale of promotion, and who might rise far higher than they do but for the curse of their careless living. They know no interest in their work nor pleasure in its doing. To them it is the sordid drudgery by which they gain the means of gratifying their real purposes and desires. With sullen perseverance they endure the torment of labor, with pay-day in view and then Saturday night and Sunday with their mad revels in what they call life. The future is a meaningless word, with no claim upon them beyond the prospect that it holds of more indulgence; the present is their sole concern, and only with reference to what it can be made to yield to ruling passions. From some phase of this last attitude to life none of the men whom I knew personally seemed to be entirely free. There is no improvidence like the improvidence of the poor. Doubtless there is no thrift like theirs, but among these young men, with all of life before them, their reckless prodigality in money-matters assumed at times an appalling nature. Some of them made no pretence of saving anything, and the few who did save would show at times an audacity of extravagance to match with the wastefulness of the worst. They were not a drinking set in any sense of excessive indulgence, for not one of them had the reputation of a drunkard, and their spending was much of it in comparatively innocent channels, but it was monstrous in relation to their means and to their prospects in the world. A perfectly well-recognized philosophy justified it to their minds. “We’ll never be young but once,” they would say, “and if we don’t have a good time now, we never will.” A good time was often secured at enormous cost. I do not know whether it is the habitual dissipation, or whether it happens to be the vogue for this winter, but it is very certain that to the men here the fancy-dress ball is now the incomparable attraction. One or more such functions within their range falls on nearly every Saturday night. They are given for the most part by certain “Brotherhoods” and labor organizations, and they are free, apparently, to all who come dressed in a manner sufficiently “fancy” to meet the views of “the committee,” and pay the price of a ticket, which admits “self and lady.”