common standard which their democratic training presupposes belongs to
all of us. The charity visitor may regret that the Italian peasant
woman has laid aside her picturesque kerchief and substituted a cheap
street hat. But it is easy to recognize the first attempt toward
democratic expression.

The charity visitor finds herself still more perplexed when she comes to
consider such problems as those of early marriage and child labor; for
she cannot deal with them according to economic theories, or according
to the conventions which have regulated her own life. She finds both of
these fairly upset by her intimate knowledge of the situation, and her
sympathy for those into whose lives she has gained a curious insight.
She discovers how incorrigibly bourgeois her standards have been, and it
takes but a little time to reach the conclusion that she cannot insist
so strenuously upon the conventions of her own class, which fail to fit
the bigger, more emotional, and freer lives of working people. The
charity visitor holds well-grounded views upon the imprudence of early
marriages, quite naturally because she comes from a family and circle
of professional and business people. A professional man is scarcely
equipped and started in his profession before he is thirty. A business
man, if he is on the road to success, is much nearer prosperity at
thirty-five than twenty-five, and it is therefore wise for these men not
to marry in the twenties; but this does not apply to the workingman. In
many trades he is laid upon the shelf at thirty-five, and in nearly all
trades he receives the largest wages in his life between twenty and
thirty. If the young workingman has all his wages to himself, he will
probably establish habits of personal comfort, which he cannot keep up
when he has to divide with a family--habits which he can, perhaps, never
overcome.