Yet the income of the upper-class family in the higher part of the house was a hundred a year; and the income of the lower class family in the cellar was fifty pounds more--that is, a hundred and fifty pounds a year! An employer in the same neighbourhood used to say, "I cannot afford lamb, salmon, young ducks and green peas, new potatoes, strawberries and such-like, until after my hands have been consuming these delicacies of the season for some three or four weeks." The intense selfishness, thriftlessness, and folly of these highly paid operatives, is scarcely credible.

Exceptions are frequently taken to calling the working classes "the lower orders;" but "the lower orders" they always will be, so long as they indicate such sensual indulgence and improvidence.

In cases such as these, improvidence is not only a great sin, and a feeder of sin, but it is a great _cruelty_.

In the case of the father of a family, who has been instrumental in bringing a number of helpless beings into the world, it is heartless and selfish in the highest degree to spend money on personal indulgences such as drink, which do the parent no good, and the mother and the children, through the hereditary bad example, an irreparable amount of mischief.

The father takes sick, is thrown out of work, and his children are at once deprived of the means of subsistence.