Moreover, the poor family is, in a material way, less able to meet these disasters when they come, than the well-to-do family. This is in some degree due to ignorance, for ignorance, whether as cause or result, almost always goes with poverty. In a very large degree, however, it is due to poverty itself. It is because they have no reserve fund to fall back on in emergencies. Suppose a young steel worker with a family gets a long, sharp chip of steel in his eye. He cannot go to the best specialist, to the man who knows all that anybody knows about saving eyes. Through ignorance or lack of interest on the part of the doctor who treats him, he loses his eye. Thus an injury which might mean but a few weeks of fearful anxiety to a well-to-do man, may result in lasting misery to a poor man. In the same way, too, what might often be in a well-to-do family a short struggle with disease, crowned with success, is more likely to be in a poor family an unrelieved tragedy.
Thus are the poor, by reason of their very poverty, not only more open to attack from these bodily foes, but also, and again by reason of their poverty, less equipped to fight and conquer them. "St. George killed the dragon; St. George wore the finest armor of his day and his sword was tested steel."
With these workers whom I met,--poor people, not as the charity visitor knows them, but poor, as the rank and file of wage earners are poor,--misfortune is almost part of the regular course of things. They are used to hard knocks, if not yet in their own lives, then in the lives of their relatives, friends, and neighbors. Consequently, there is often in their attitude toward trouble a certain matter-of-fact calmness, which looks like indifference. Thus, I have had a mother tell me about her sixteen-year-old son's losing two fingers in the mill. She couldn't remember exactly how or when it happened; she thought he had lost only a week's work; and she had no comment upon it but that it might have been worse. An old steel worker whom I questioned about his injuries answered, "I never got hurt any to speak of." After persistent inquiry, however, he recalled that he had once fractured his skull, that a few years later he had lost half of a finger, and that only three years ago he was laid up for nine weeks with a crushed foot. Troubles like these are the common lot; they are not treasured up and remembered against fate.