The poorest and most unlucky dog in the world either has or had some
small portion of money. No matter how small, how hardly, or how
precariously earned, he has seen, from time to time, a glimpse of the
colour of his own cash, and rejoiced accordingly as that colour was
brown, white, or yellow. It follows, therefore, that even the poorest
and most unlucky dog in the world has experienced monetary sensations.
It may appear paradoxical, but it is no less true, that it is the very
rich, born to riches, the heirs to great properties, or no end of
consolidated stock, who have never enjoyed or feared the sensation to
which we allude. To them, money is a thing of course; it pours in upon
them with the regularity of the succeeding seasons. Rent-day comes of
itself, and there is the money; dividend-day is as sure as Christmas,
and there lie the receipts. These are the people who know nothing of
the commodity with which they are so well endowed, or, at most, their
knowledge is but skin-deep. They take and spend, just as they sit or
walk. Both seem natural processes; they have performed them since they
were born. Their money is a bit of themselves--an extra and uncommonly
convenient limb with which they are endowed. It is only when some
sudden catastrophe bursts upon and cuts off the supplies, that this
class of ladies and gentlemen experience, like the shock of a thousand
freezing shower-baths, their first 'monetary sensation.'
But the men and women who work either with head or hands--who fight
their way--who plan to gain and plan to spend, so that the latter
shall counterbalance the former--who lie sleepless in their beds,
intent on how to make both ends meet--who are lucky and unlucky--who
travel the ups and the downs of life, here grasping fortunes, there
turning out the linings of penniless pockets: these are the people
whose whole lives are one long succession of monetary sensations.
Among them mainly is cultivated the art of looking at two sides of a
shilling. They know how to value half-crowns and sovereigns in calling
up the long arrear of hard-worked hours, which are, as it were, the
small-change of quarters' salaries and weeks' wages. How many strokes
of the steady-going pen are encircled in those bright yellow
disks--how many thumps of the ponderous hammer has it taken to produce
this handful of silver. Or on a larger scale--as the successful
speculator sweeps to himself the mass of notes and bills, all as good
as gold, for which he has set every penny of his worldly means upon
the stake, and feels with a thrill which makes him clutch the precious
paper, that had things not turned out as, thank Heaven! they have,
that then, and then!----He has had a tolerably vigorous monetary
sensation.
But the whole of the money-getting classes, and, to some extent, the
classes who merely spend what others got and gave them, can look very
well back upon a series of monetary sensations which have marked
epochs in their lives. Our remembrances of that kind are, of course,
most deeply engraved, and most clearly recollected, in the cases in
which we are working for ourselves, and have ourselves achieved steps
and triumphed over difficulties in life--each step and triumph marked
by a lengthening of the purse. But there are early monetary
impressions common to almost all the juvenile world, rich and poor--to
the children of the duke or of the mechanic, to the boy who has
obtained the price of a pony or a watch, and the boy who has been made
a present of what will buy him a twopenny story-book, or a twopenny
bun. Boys and girls commonly have poses--to adopt a phrase not known
south of the Tweed, where it must be explained, that to have a pose,
is to possess a little private and secret, or quasi-secret, hoard of
treasure. This pose frequently imparts the first monetary sensation.
It instils the first distinct idea of the value of money; it gives the
first notion of the accumulation of precious things; and the little
proprietor or proprietrix comes to rattle the box with the narrow slit
as a sort of sly enjoyment. To break into a pose would be quite
profane and irreverent. Pose-boxes do not open, and so far read a
philosophic lesson to the proprietors. Always save, always add, always
hold as a sort of sacred deposit, the mysteriously precious
pose-boxes. Occasionally, again, a child gets a present of a
sovereign, or an old-fashioned guinea, which it would be dreadful
sacrilege to change. Every one will remember how Sophy and Livy
Primrose 'never went without money themselves, as my wife always let
them have a guinea each to keep in their pockets, but with strict
injunctions never to change it.' There are hundreds of thousands of
Sophies and Livies possessed of the same sacred store, or having given
it to their parents 'to keep,' over whose minds the remembrance of the
secret hoard every now and then sends flashing across the mind
of the child a sense of importance, or richness, or a general
self-complacency which varies with the individuality. Boys and girls
in the next stages of their growth care little and think little about
money, except as a means of obtaining some trifling passing
indulgence. The childish reverence for the pose has passed. The
unopenable box has been long since opened, and the unchangeable guinea
long since changed. We allude here, of course, to the children of the
well-to-do. With the children of the poor, the case is different.
They never lose the faculty of monetary sensation. Money is too
valuable to them, because as soon as the mere childish period is past,
and sometimes before it, money to the young poor is always
translatable into good food and new clothes. There is nothing more
sadly frequent in the squalid lanes and alleys of London, than to see
a little creature, boy or girl, toddle with a chance-penny, not into
the toy-shop or the sweet-shop, but into the cook-shop, and there
spend the treasure in food, taking care, with melancholy precocity, to
have the full weight, and only a due proportion of gristle or fat.
Further on in life, when a poor boy earns a chance-sixpence or a
shilling, there is so much added to the store laying up for the new
jacket, the new cap, or the new boots; or, not unfrequently, there is
so much gained for the family exigencies of Saturday night. Here there
are monetary sensations in abundance. The life of such people is full
of them. The annuitant or the proprietor who listlessly, and without
one additional throb of his pulse, drops hundreds into his purse, has
not the ghost of an idea of the thrill of pleasure--invoking, perhaps,
a score of delightful associations--with which the boy who holds his
horse receives the sixpence, which is tossed him as the capitalist in
his normal condition rides coolly and unmovedly away. To experience
monetary sensations, you must earn the money first, and have a score
of urgent purposes disputing for its application.
But perhaps one of the most vivid monetary sensations which a man
experiences, is when he is paid the first instalment of the price of
his labours. In an instant, he seems to rise and take a footing in the
world. He has struck the first blow in his Battle of Life, and
prostrated his antagonist, for whom, however, as soon as he has taken
him captive, he conceives a particular affection. The glow of assured
independence is a proud and manly feeling. The money is not _given_.
That is the overmastering sensation. It is fairly earned. The
recipient swells with honest pride as he thinks he is now a man
working his way, and strides off a couple of inches higher than he
came. This elevation of sentiment of course gradually dies away. The
monetary sensation of the first-earned payment is not supported, but
it is not forgotten, and insensibly, perhaps, to the recipient, it has
at once heightened and deepened the moral qualities and tendencies of
his spiritual being. From time to time, as remuneration ascends, a
shade, as it were, of the first impression is recalled, particularly
when the recipient perceives that at last--that great change in a
young man's life--his 'settlement' may be accomplished. Here is
another sensational era in his monetary experiences--the realisation
of the grand fact that the struggle, always promising, is at length
successful, and that he is now enlisted in the regular army of
society. The elder Stephenson, when an occasional wage of a shilling
per day was raised to a permanent two, flung up his hat, and
exclaimed: 'Thank God! I'm a made man for life!' Here was a fine
monetary sensation.
But there are also monetary sensations of quite a different species
from those to which we have alluded. The sun shines on both sides of
the hedge, and blank and dreary, if not dismaying and crushing, is the
first trial of monetary difficulty. People, long struggling, get
blunted to the _res angustæ_, precisely as people fast prospering do
to the steady tide of wealth. The man who leaps heart-struck from his
seat, as for the first time he contemplates a quarter's rent due and
unprovided for, or the foolish fellow who groans in spirit over a
protested bill returned upon the hand which he 'set' to it, merely for
the convenience of acquaintance, and who has never thought of stamped
paper since--such are two of the negative monetary associations which
checker life; of course, their number is legion. The man who found his
fairy gold transmuted into oak leaves, experienced a decided monetary
sensation; but not more so than fell to the lot of many a speculator,
who had bought to his last available penny in the Mississippi or the
South-sea Bubbles; or, to come to more recent days, in the stock of
fly-away English projected railways. To the mass of monetary
sensations of the kind, we fear, must be added at the present day
those produced by betting-offices. In these swindling dens, it is by
no means uncommon to see children, whose heads hardly come above the
counter, staking their shillings; even servant-maids haunt the
'office;' working-men abound, and clerks and shop-boys are great
customers. Among these people, there ought to be a good crop of
monetary sensations. In success, the little man-boy sees a grand
vision of cheap cigars, and copper and paste jewellery; for the urchin
early initiated in practical London-life, thinks of such things, and
worse, when the country lad of the same age would dream of nothing
beyond kites, fishing-tackle, or perhaps a gun. Molly, the housemaid,
has her prospects of unbounded 'loves of dresses' and 'ducks of
bonnets;' and the clerk and the shopman very possibly count upon their
racing gains as the fruitful origin of 'sprees' and 'larks'
innumerable. On the other hand, how has the money staked been
acquired? The pawnbroker's shop and the till will very frequently
figure in the answer. Pilfered half-crowns, or perhaps sovereigns,
kept back from collected accounts; or, in domestic service, pledged
spoons and forks, are frequently at the bottom of the betting
transactions of these 'noble sportsmen.' Then comes the period of
anticipation, and hope and fear. Bright visions of luck, on one hand;
a black and down-sloping avenue, stopping at the jail door, on the
other. Luck--and the stolen property can be replaced, with a handsome
profit; the reverse--and the police-office, the magistrate, and the
sessions, float before the tortured imagination of the 'sportsman.'
Here, then, are some of the saddest, and--whether the result in any
case be winning or losing--the most wearing and degrading of monetary
sensations.
We turn, however, to a concluding and a more cheering experience
connected with money, and which may be regarded as a sequel to the
sensation of the first earnings. We allude to the first interest, to
the receipt of the first sum which properly belongs to the recipient,
and yet for which he has not immediately and directly toiled. Here
another great step has been achieved. To earn money, was the first
triumph; to make money earn money, is the second. There is something
more significantly pleasing in the sensation with which the young
up-struggler of the world receives his first instalment of interest,
and yet remembers that all his original investment is still entire,
than in all the lazy satisfaction with which a great stockholder--born
perhaps to stockholding--gathers in his mighty dividends. For the
first time, the former begins to feel a taste, just a taste, of the
sweets of property, of the fruits of realisation, and of the double
profits which labour, judiciously managed, will at length bestow. It
is getting money for which he has worked and yet not worked, it is
picking up the returning bread thrown upon the waters; and it is the
first experienced sensation of a stable and assured position, of
standing upon one's own feet, independent more or less absolutely of
the caprices of fortune and the liking of employers. The first
received amount of interest, however small it may be, assuredly calls
up one of the not easily-forgotten eras of a man's life. There is
nothing selfish or miserly in the fact. On the contrary, it is founded
upon pure and natural feelings and impulses. The most generous man in
the world likes to prosper, and the first received sum which his own
money has bred, is a palpable proof that he is prospering. From his
childish pose, he can recall the mental results attendant upon each
step of his worldly career, and look back with interest and curiosity
over what, in the course of his life, may have been his 'Monetary
Sensations.'