undred pounds a year families who
toil and deny themselves for love of their children, and do contrive
to rear them cleanly, passably well grown, decent minded, taught and
intelligent to serve the future. Consider the enormous unfairness with
which we treat them, the way in which the modern State, such as it is,
trades upon their instincts, their affections, their sense of duty and
self-respect, to get from them for nothing the greatest social service
in the world.

For while the least fortunate sort of children have at any rate the
protection of the police and school inspectors, and the baser sort of
parent has all sorts of public and quasi-public helps and doles, the
families that make the middle mass of our population are still in the
position of the families of a hundred years ago, and have no help
under heaven against the world. It matters not how well the home of
the skilled artisan's wife or the small business man's wife has been
managed--she may have educated her children marvellously, they may be
clean, strong, courteous, intelligent--if the husband gets out of work
or suffers from business ill-luck or trade depression, or chances to
be killed uninsured, down they all go to want. Such insurance as they
are able to make, and it needs a tremendously heavy premium to secure
an insurance that will not mean a heavy fall of income with the
bread-winner's death--must needs be in a private insurance office, and
there is no effectual guarantee for either honesty or solvency in
that. In most of the petty insurance business the thrifty poor are
enormously overcharged and overreached. Rumour has been busy, and I
fear only too justly, with the financial outlook of some of the
Friendly Societies upon which the scanty security of so many
working-class families depends. Such investments as the lower and
middle-class father makes of surplus profits and savings must be made
in ignorance of the manoeuvres of the big and often quite ruthless
financiers who control the world of prices. If he builds or trades, he
does so as a small investor, at the highest cost and lowest profit.
Half the big businesses in the world have been made out of the lost
savings of the small investor; a point to which I shall return later.
People talk as though Socialism proposed to rob the thrifty
industrious man of his savings. He could not be more systematically
robbed of his savings than he is at the present time. Nowhere beyond
the limit of the Post O