How ridiculous that one should _suffer_ from want of a frill or a
furbelow! "I do not call a healthy young man, cheerful in his mind and
vigorous in his arms, I cannot call such a man _poor_," says the
eloquent Edmund Burke; "I cannot pity my kind as a kind, merely because
they are men." "It is the great privilege of poverty" says Dr. Johnson,
"to be happy unenvied, to be healthy without physic, and to be secure
without guard." Is it not ridiculous for the poor man, by aping the
habits of the rich, to spurn some of the greatest blessings attaching to
our life? Thus, as Dr. Johnson says:
"POVERTY, IN LARGE CITIES
is often concealed in splendor and often in extravagance." The tendency
of people in comfortable circumstances to move out of a pleasant cottage
into a brick house with two inches of marble-front is a sorrowful one.
We can progress only through this same sad tendency, but how many happy
homes are thus ruined! It requires much brains to count the ultimate
cost. There is hardly an article of furniture in the old home which does
not look out of place in the new. There is additional work to be done
which had been entirely overlooked. The servant is a grievious expense.
We do not get the result of her work--only the profit. If she earn the
one hundred and fifty million dollars we get only the fifteen million
dollars. She must be "kept"--must add her clothes to the wash, her meat
to the dish, her bed-room to the house. She breaks with a smile. She
scatters as the sower who goeth forth to sow. From every conceivable
cranny creep forth disbursements--the expenses of the rich man creeping
like tigers upon his poor but vainer neighbor. O, pshaw! why will men
and women do it? If those two fine spirits, Prudence and Economy look
down upon us, such houses must attract attention only by seeming to mark
out upon the earth they cover the writing at Belshazzar's feast--