fact, saving at the expense of health, or training, or some other
necessary preparation for successful living, is always unthrifty. It
is unthrifty to live in damp rooms to secure cheaper rent; it is
unthrifty to put aside money for burial insurance when the children are
underfed; it is unthrifty either to buy patent medicines or to neglect
early symptoms of disease in order to save a doctor's bill; above all,
it {111} is unthrifty to take young children away from school and force
them to become breadwinners. Thrift, therefore, includes spending as
well as saving.

Charity workers often complain that, in the poor families known to
them, thrift is impossible, because there is nothing to save. More
often than not this means that their relations with the poor have
ceased as soon as acute distress is past, and that they have stopped
visiting at the very time when improved material conditions have made
the best friendly services possible.

Any attempt to divide the poor into classes is to be deprecated,
because human beings are not easily classified. But, speaking roughly,
and using the classification merely as a temporary convenience, charity
workers will find that the thrift habit divides the poor into three
classes. First, those who are very thrifty, and this is a large class.
Misfortune may overtake the most provident during long periods of
industrial depression, or they may become temporarily dependent through
sickness or some unforeseen accident. The second class includes {112}
those who are willing to work when work is plentiful, but who have
little persistence or resourcefulness in procuring work. In the busy
season they spend lavishly on cheap pleasures and soon become
applicants for relief in troubled times. Debt has no terrors for them,
and, from their point of view, it is useless to save because they
cannot save enough to make it seem worth while. In the third class we
find the lazy and vicious, who shirk work, and, living by their wits,
are better off in bad times than in good. "It is with the second class
that the charitable may work lasting harm or lasting good. To let them
feel that no responsibility rests with them during the busy season, and
that all the responsibility rests with us to relieve their needs when
the busy season is over, rapidly pushes them into the third class. To
teach them, on the other hand, the power and cumulative value of the
saving habit, and so get them beforehand with th