The Use of Credit Instruments receive about $500. If one man and one woman in the same family are working, we would have, therefore, an aggregate family income of from $800 to $1,000, which is approximately the amount previously estimated. The matter of using checks is largely determined by the social class of the individual. As has been remarked before, a clerk with an income of $1,000 or $1,200 would probably have a bank account and check against it, when a laborer would not. The same is true in a measure of teachers, stenographers, private secretaries, and most of the other people employed in this kind of personal service. The same is true, too, to a much greater extent of the professional classes and the so-called wealthy class. Now, those who use checks doubtless make far the largest part—possibly 90 per cent—of their payments therewith. Their per capita expenditure undoubtedly exceeds that of the wage-earning class. How much we do not know, but we might guess that it would be more than double. If, then, we consider the aggregate of the expenditures of those people in trade and the manufacturing industries and in transportation who are in the habit of using checks, together with those of the various classes just mentioned, concerning whose practice there is little doubt, there seems little ground for not believing that the larger proportion of the expenditure of the community is made by means of checks. This is the conclusion to which our tables also point. Another way of going at the problem may perhaps be based on the character of the population. In the inquiry of 1896 there was a discussion of the probable percentage of checks used by negroes and the foreign population. An 1 >9