ECONOMY

"The fact is," said Jenny, as she twirled a little hat on her hand,

which she had been making over, with nobody knows what of bows and

pompons, and other matters for which the women have curious

names,--"the fact is, American women and girls must learn to

economize; it isn't merely restricting one's self to American goods,

it is general economy, that is required. Now here's this hat,--costs

me only three dollars, all told; and Sophie Page bought an English one

this morning at Madam Meyer's for which she gave fifteen. And I really

don't think hers has more of an air than mine. I made this over, you

see, with things I had in the house, bought nothing but the ribbon,

and paid for altering and pressing, and there you see what a stylish

hat I have!"

"Lovely! admirable!" said Miss Featherstone. "Upon my word, Jenny, you

ought to marry a poor parson; you would be quite thrown away upon a

rich man."

"Let me see," said I. "I want to admire intelligently. That isn't the

hat you were wearing yesterday?"

"Oh no, papa! This is just done. The one I wore yesterday was my

waterfall-hat, with the green feather; this, you see, is an oriole."

"A what?"

"An oriole. Papa, how can you expect to learn about these things?"

"And that plain little black one, with the stiff crop of scarlet

feathers sticking straight up?"

"That's my jockey, papa, with a plume _en militaire_."

"And did the waterfall and the jockey cost anything?"

"They were very, very cheap, papa, all things considered. Miss

Featherstone will remember that the waterfall was a great bargain, and

I had the feather from last year; and as to the jockey, that was made

out of my last year's white one, dyed over. You know, papa, I always

take care of my things, and they last from year to year."

"I do assure you, Mr. Crowfield," said Miss Featherstone, "I never saw

such little economists as your daughters; it is perfectly wonderful

what they contrive to dress on. How they manage to do it I'm sure I

can't see. I never could, I'm convinced."

"Yes," said Jenny, "I've bought but just one new hat. I only wish you

could sit in church where we do, and see those Miss Fielders. Marianne

and I have counted six new hats apiece of those girls',--_new_, you

know, just out of the milliner's shop; and last Sunday they came out

in such lovely puffed tulle bonnets! Weren't they lovely, Marianne?

And next Sunday, I don't doubt, there'll be something else."

"Yes," said Miss Featherstone,--"their father, they say, has made a

million dollars lately on government contracts."

"For my part," said Jenny, "I think such extravagance, at such a time

as this, is shameful."

"Do you know," said I, "that I'm quite sure the Misses Fielder think

they are practicing rigorous economy?"

"Papa! Now there you are with your paradoxes! How can you say so?"

"I shouldn't be afraid to bet a pair of gloves, now," said I, "that

Miss Fielder thinks herself half ready for translation, because she

has bought only six new hats and a tulle bonnet so far in the season.

If it were not for her dear bleeding country, she would have had

thirty-six, like the Misses Sibthorpe. If we were admitted to the

secret councils of the Fielders, doubtless we should perceive what

temptations they daily resist; how perfectly rubbishy and dreadful

they suffer themselves to be, because they feel it important now, in

this crisis, to practice economy; how they abuse the Sibthorpes, who

have a new hat every time they drive out, and never think of wearing

one more than two or three times; how virtuous and self-denying they

feel when they think of the puffed tulle, for which they only gave

eighteen dollars, when Madame Caradori showed them those lovely ones,

like the Misses Sibthorpe's, for forty-five; and how they go home

descanting on virgin simplicity, and resolving that they will not

allow themselves to be swept into the vortex of extravagance, whatever

other people may do."

"Do you know," said Miss Featherstone, "I believe your papa is right?

I was calling on the oldest Miss Fielder the other day, and she told

me that she positively felt ashamed to go looking as she did, but that

she really did feel the necessity of economy. 'Perhaps we might afford

to spend more than some others,' she said; 'but it's so much better to

give the money to the Sanitary Commission!'"

"Furthermore," said I, "I am going to put forth another paradox, and

say that very likely there are some people looking on my girls, and

commenting on them for extravagance in having three hats, even though

made over, and contrived from last year's stock."

"They can't know anything about it, then," said Jenny decisively;

"for, certainly, nobody can be decent and invest less in millinery

than Marianne and I do."

"When I was a young lady," said my wife, "a well-dressed girl got her

a new bonnet in the spring, and another in the fall; that was the

extent of her purchases in this line. A second-best bonnet, left of

last year, did duty to relieve and preserve the best one. My father

was accounted well-to-do, but I had no more, and wanted no more. I

also bought myself, every spring, two pair of gloves, a dark and a

light pair, and wore them through the summer, and another two through

the winter; one or two pair of white kids, carefully cleaned, carried

me through all my parties. Hats had not been heard of, and the great

necessity which requires two or three new ones every spring and fall

had not arisen. Yet I was reckoned a well-appearing girl, who dressed

liberally. Now, a young lady who has a waterfall-hat, an oriole-hat,

and a jockey must still be troubled with anxious cares for her spring

and fall and summer and winter bonnets,--all the variety will not take

the place of them. Gloves are bought by the dozen; and as to dresses,

there seems to be no limit to the quantity of material and trimming

that may be expended upon them. When I was a young lady, seventy-five

dollars a year was considered by careful parents a liberal allowance

for a daughter's wardrobe. I had a hundred, and was reckoned rich; and

I sometimes used a part to make up the deficiencies in the allowance

of Sarah Evans, my particular friend, whose father gave her only

fifty. We all thought that a very scant allowance; yet she generally

made a very pretty and genteel appearance, with the help of occasional

presents from friends."

"How could a girl dress for fifty dollars?" said Marianne.

"She could get a white muslin and a white cambric, which, with

different sortings of ribbons, served her for all dress occasions. A

silk, in those days, took only ten yards in the making, and one dark

silk was considered a reasonable allowance to a lady's wardrobe. Once

made, it stood for something,--always worn carefully, it lasted for

years. One or two calico morning-dresses, and a merino for winter

wear, completed the list. Then, as to collars, capes, cuffs, etc., we

all did our own embroidering, and very pretty things we wore, too.

Girls looked as prettily then as they do now, when four or five

hundred dollars a year is insufficient to clothe them."

"But, mamma, you know our allowance isn't anything like that,--it is

quite a slender one, though not so small as yours was," said Marianne.

"Don't you think the customs of society make a difference? Do you

think, as things are, we could go back and dress for the sum you

did?"

"You cannot," said my wife, "without a greater sacrifice of feeling

than I wish to impose on you. Still, though I don't see how to help

it, I cannot but think that the requirements of fashion are becoming

needlessly extravagant, particularly in regard to the dress of women.

It seems to me, it is making the support of families so burdensome

that young men are discouraged from marriage. A young man, in a

moderately good business, might cheerfully undertake the world with a

wife who could make herself pretty and attractive for seventy-five

dollars a year, when he might sigh in vain for one who positively

could not get through, and be decent, on four hundred. Women, too, are

getting to be so attached to the trappings and accessories of life

that they cannot think of marriage without an amount of fortune which

few young men possess."

"You are talking in very low numbers about the dress of women," said

Miss Featherstone. "I do assure you that it is the easiest thing in

the world for a girl to make away with a thousand dollars a year, and

not have so much to show for it, either, as Marianne and Jenny."

"To be sure," said I. "Only establish certain formulas of expectation,

and it is the easiest thing in the world. For instance, in your

mother's day girls talked of a pair of gloves,--now they talk of a

pack; then it was a bonnet summer and winter,--now it is a bonnet

spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and hats like monthly roses,--a

new blossom every few weeks."

"And then," said my wife, "every device of the toilet is immediately

taken up and varied and improved on, so as to impose an almost monthly

necessity for novelty. The jackets of May are outshone by the

jackets of June; the buttons of June are antiquated in July; the

trimmings of July are _passees_ by September; side-combs, back-combs,

puffs, rats, and all sorts of such matters, are in a distracted race

of improvement; every article of feminine toilet is on the move

towards perfection. It seems to me that an infinity of money must be

spent in these trifles by those who make the least pretension to keep

in the fashion."

"Well, papa," said Jenny, "after all, it's just the way things always

have been since the world began. You know the Bible says, 'Can a maid

forget her ornaments?' It's clear she can't. You see, it's a law of

nature; and you remember all that long chapter in the Bible that we

had read in church last Sunday about the curls and veils and tinkling

ornaments and crimping-pins, and all that, of those wicked daughters

of Zion in old times. Women always have been too much given to dress,

and they always will be."

"The thing is," said Marianne, "how can any woman, I, for example,

know what is too much or too little? In mamma's day, it seems, a girl

could keep her place in society, by hard economy, and spend only fifty

dollars a year on her dress. Mamma found a hundred dollars ample. I

have more than that, and find myself quite straitened to keep myself

looking well. I don't want to live for dress, to give all my time and

thoughts to it; I don't wish to be extravagant: and yet I wish to be

lady-like--it annoys and makes me unhappy not to be fresh and neat and

nice, shabbiness and seediness are my aversion. I don't see where the

fault is. Can one individual resist the whole current of society? It

certainly is not strictly necessary for us girls to have half the

things we do. We might, I suppose, live without many of them, and, as

mamma says, look just as well, because girls did so before these

things were invented. Now I confess I flatter myself, generally, that

I am a pattern of good management and economy, because I get so much

less than other girls I associate with. I wish you could see Miss

Thorne's fall dresses that she showed me last year when she was

visiting here. She had six gowns, and no one of them could have cost

less than seventy or eighty dollars, and some of them must have been

even more expensive, and yet I don't doubt that this fall she will

feel that she must have just as many more. She runs through and wears

out these expensive things, with all their velvet and thread lace,

just as I wear my commonest ones; and at the end of the season they

are really gone,--spotted, stained, frayed, the lace all pulled to

pieces,--nothing left to save or make over. I feel as if Jenny and I

were patterns of economy when I see such things. I really don't know

what economy is. What is it?"

"There is the same difficulty in my housekeeping," said my wife. "I

think I am an economist. I mean to be one. All our expenses are on a

modest scale, and yet I can see much that really is not strictly

necessary; but if I compare myself with some of my neighbors, I feel

as if I were hardly respectable. There is no subject on which all the

world are censuring one another so much as this. Hardly any one but

thinks her neighbors extravagant in some one or more particulars, and

takes for granted that she herself is an economist."

"I'll venture to say," said I, "that there isn't a woman of my

acquaintance that does not think she is an economist."

"Papa is turned against us women, like all the rest of them," said

Jenny. "I wonder if it isn't just so with the men?"

"Yes," said Marianne, "it's the fashion to talk as if all the

extravagance of the country was perpetrated by women. For my part, I

think young men are just as extravagant. Look at the sums they spend

for cigars and meerschaums,--an expense which hasn't even the pretense

of usefulness in any way; it's a purely selfish, nonsensical

indulgence. When a girl spends money in making herself look pretty,

she contributes something to the agreeableness of society; but a man's

cigars and pipes are neither ornamental nor useful."

"Then look at their dress," said Jenny: "they are to the full as fussy

and particular about it as girls; they have as many fine, invisible

points of fashion, and their fashions change quite as often; and they

have just as many knick-knacks, with their studs and their sleeve

buttons and waistcoat buttons, their scarfs and scarf pins, their

watch chains and seals and seal rings, and nobody knows what. Then

they often waste and throw away more than women, because they are not

good judges of material, nor saving in what they buy, and have no

knowledge of how things should be cared for, altered, or mended. If

their cap is a little too tight, they cut the lining with a penknife,

or slit holes in a new shirt-collar because it does not exactly fit to

their mind. For my part, I think men are naturally twice as wasteful

as women. A pretty thing, to be sure, to have all the waste of the

country laid to us!"

"You are right, child," said I; "women are by nature, as compared with

men, the care-taking and saving part of creation,--the authors and

conservators of economy. As a general rule, man earns and woman saves

and applies. The wastefulness of woman is commonly the fault of man."

"I don't see into that," said Bob Stevens.

"In this way. Economy is the science of proportion. Whether a

particular purchase is extravagant depends mainly on the income it is

taken from. Suppose a woman has a hundred and fifty a year for her

dress, and gives fifty dollars for a bonnet, she gives a third of her

income,--it is a horrible extravagance; while for the woman whose

income is ten thousand it may be no extravagance at all. The poor

clergyman's wife, when she gives five dollars for a bonnet, may be

giving as much in proportion to her income as the woman who gives

fifty. Now the difficulty with the greater part of women is, that the

men, who make the money and hold it, give them no kind of standard by

which to measure their expenses. Most women and girls are in this

matter entirely at sea, without chart or compass. They don't know in

the least what they have to spend. Husbands and fathers often pride

themselves about not saying a word on business matters to their wives

and daughters. They don't wish them to understand them, or to inquire

into them, or to make remarks or suggestions concerning them. 'I want

you to have everything that is suitable and proper,' says Jones to his

wife, 'but don't be extravagant.'

"'But, my dear,' says Mrs. Jones, 'what is suitable and proper depends

very much on our means; if you could allow me any specific sum for

dress and housekeeping, I could tell better.'

"'Nonsense, Susan! I can't do that,--it's too much trouble. Get what

you need, and avoid foolish extravagances; that's all I ask.'

"By and by Mrs. Jones's bills are sent in, in an evil hour, when Jones

has heavy notes to meet, and then comes a domestic storm.

"'I shall just be ruined, madam, if that's the way you are going on. I

can't afford to dress you and the girls in the style you have set up:

look at this milliner's bill!'

"'I assure you,' says Mrs. Jones, 'we haven't got any more than the

Stebbinses, nor so much.'

"'Don't you know that the Stebbinses are worth five times as much as

ever I was?'

"No, Mrs. Jones did not know it: how should she, when her husband

makes it a rule never to speak of his business to her, and she has not

the remotest idea of his income?

"Thus multitudes of good, conscientious women and girls are

extravagant from pure ignorance. The male provider allows bills to be

run up in his name, and they have no earthly means of judging whether

they are spending too much or too little, except the semi-annual

hurricane which attends the coming in of these bills.

"The first essential in the practice of economy is a knowledge of

one's income, and the man who refuses to accord to his wife and

children this information has never any right to accuse them of

extravagance, because he himself deprives them of that standard of

comparison which is an indispensable requisite in economy. As early as

possible in the education of children, they should pass from that

state of irresponsible waiting to be provided for by parents, and be

trusted with the spending of some fixed allowance, that they may learn

prices and values, and have some notion of what money is actually

worth and what it will bring. The simple fact of the possession of a

fixed and definite income often suddenly transforms a giddy,

extravagant girl into a care-taking, prudent little woman. Her

allowance is her own; she begins to plan upon it,--to add, subtract,

multiply, divide, and do numberless sums in her little head. She no

longer buys everything she fancies; she deliberates, weighs, compares.

And now there is room for self-denial and generosity to come in. She

can do without this article; she can furbish up some older possession

to do duty a little longer, and give this money to some friend poorer

than she; and ten to one the girl whose bills last year were four or

five hundred finds herself bringing through this year creditably on a

hundred and fifty. To be sure, she goes without numerous things which

she used to have. From the standpoint of a fixed income she sees that

these are impossible, and no more wants them than the green cheese of

the moon. She learns to make her own taste and skill take the place of

expensive purchases. She refits her hats and bonnets, retrims her

dresses, and in a thousand busy, earnest, happy little ways sets

herself to make the most of her small income.

"So the woman who has her definite allowance for housekeeping finds at

once a hundred questions set at rest. Before it was not clear to her

why she should not 'go and do likewise' in relation to every purchase

made by her next neighbor. Now, there is a clear logic of proportion.

Certain things are evidently not to be thought of, though next

neighbors do have them; and we must resign ourselves to find some

other way of living."

"My dear," said my wife, "I think there is a peculiar temptation in a

life organized as ours is in America. There are here no settled

classes, with similar ratios of income. Mixed together in the same

society, going to the same parties, and blended in daily neighborly

intercourse, are families of the most opposite extremes in point of

fortune. In England there is a very well understood expression, that

people should not dress or live above their station; in America none

will admit that they have any particular station, or that they can

live above it. The principle of democratic equality unites in society

people of the most diverse positions and means.

"Here, for instance, is a family like Dr. Selden's: an old and highly

respected one, with an income of only two or three thousand; yet they

are people universally sought for in society, and mingle in all the

intercourse of life with merchant millionaires whose incomes are from

ten to thirty thousand. Their sons and daughters go to the same

schools, the same parties, and are thus constantly meeting upon terms

of social equality.

"Now it seems to me that our danger does not lie in the great and

evident expenses of our richer friends. We do not expect to have

pineries, graperies, equipages, horses, diamonds,--we say openly and

of course that we do not. Still, our expenses are constantly increased

by the proximity of these things, unless we understand ourselves

better than most people do. We don't, of course, expect to get a

fifteen-hundred-dollar Cashmere, like Mrs. So-and-so, but we begin to

look at hundred-dollar shawls and nibble about the hook. We don't

expect sets of diamonds, but a diamond ring, a pair of solitaire

diamond ear-rings, begin to be speculated about among the young people

as among possibilities. We don't expect to carpet our house with

Axminster and hang our windows with damask, but at least we must have

Brussels and brocatelle,--it _would not do_ not to. And so we go on

getting hundreds of things that we don't need, that have no real value

except that they soothe our self-love; and for these inferior articles

we pay a higher proportion of our income than our rich neighbor does

for his better ones. Nothing is uglier than low-priced Cashmere

shawls; and yet a young man just entering business will spend an

eighth of a year's income to put one on his wife, and when he has put

it there it only serves as a constant source of disquiet, for, now

that the door is opened and Cashmere shawls are possible, she is

consumed with envy at the superior ones constantly sported around her.

So, also, with point-lace, velvet dresses, and hundreds of things of

that sort, which belong to a certain rate of income, and are absurd

below it."

"And yet, mamma, I heard Aunt Easygo say that velvet, point-lace, and

Cashmere were the cheapest finery that could be bought, because they

lasted a lifetime."

"Aunt Easygo speaks from an income of ten thousand a year: they may be

cheap for her rate of living; but for us, for example, by no magic of

numbers can it be made to appear that it is cheaper to have the

greatest bargain in the world in Cashmere, lace, and diamonds than not

to have them at all. I never had a diamond, never wore a piece of

point-lace, never had a velvet dress, and have been perfectly happy,

and just as much respected as if I had. Who ever thought of objecting

to me for not having them? Nobody, that I ever heard."

"Certainly not, mamma," said Marianne.

"The thing I have always said to you girls is, that you were not to

expect to live like richer people, not to begin to try, not to think

or inquire about certain rates of expenditure, or take the first

step in certain directions. We have moved on all our life after a

very antiquated and old-fashioned mode. We have had our little,

old-fashioned house, our little old-fashioned ways."

"Except the parlor carpet, and what came of it, my dear," said I

mischievously.

"Yes, except the parlor carpet," said my wife, with a conscious

twinkle, "and the things that came of it; there was a concession

there, but one can't be wise always."

"_We_ talked mamma into that," said Jenny.

"But one thing is certain," said my wife,--"that, though I have had an

antiquated, plain house, and plain furniture, and plain dress, and not

the beginning of a thing such as many of my neighbors have possessed,

I have spent more money than many of them for real comforts. While I

had young children, I kept more and better servants than many women

who wore Cashmere and diamonds. I thought it better to pay extra wages

to a really good, trusty woman who lived with me from year to year,

and relieved me of some of my heaviest family cares, than to have ever

so much lace locked away in my drawers. We always were able to go into

the country to spend our summers, and to keep a good family horse and

carriage for daily driving,--by which means we afforded, as a family,

very poor patronage to the medical profession. Then we built our

house, and, while we left out a great many expensive commonplaces

that other people think they must have, we put in a profusion of

bathing accommodations such as very few people think of having. There

never was a time when we did not feel able to afford to do what was

necessary to preserve or to restore health; and for this I always drew

on the surplus fund laid up by my very unfashionable housekeeping and

dressing."

"Your mother has had," said I, "what is the great want in America,

perfect independence of mind to go her own way without regard to the

way others go. I think there is, for some reason, more false shame

among Americans about economy than among Europeans. 'I cannot afford

it' is more seldom heard among us. A young man beginning life, whose

income may be from five to eight hundred a year, thinks it elegant and

gallant to affect a careless air about money, especially among

ladies,--to hand it out freely, and put back his change without

counting it,--to wear a watch chain and studs and shirt-fronts like

those of some young millionaire. None but the most expensive tailors,

shoemakers, and hatters will do for him; and then he grumbles at the

dearness of living, and declares that he cannot get along on his

salary. The same is true of young girls, and of married men and women,

too,--the whole of them are ashamed of economy. The cares that wear

out life and health in many households are of a nature that cannot be

cast on God, or met by any promise from the Bible: it is not care for

'food convenient,' or for comfortable raiment, but care to keep up

false appearances, and to stretch a narrow income over the space that

can be covered only by a wider one.

"The poor widow in her narrow lodgings, with her monthly rent staring

her hourly in the face, and her bread and meat and candles and meal

all to be paid for on delivery or not obtained at all, may find

comfort in the good old Book, reading of that other widow whose

wasting measure of oil and last failing handful of meal were of such

account before her Father in heaven that a prophet was sent to recruit

them; and when customers do not pay, or wages are cut down, she can

enter into her chamber, and, when she hath shut her door, present to

her Father in heaven His sure promise that with the fowls of the air

she shall be fed and with the lilies of the field she shall be

clothed: but what promises are there for her who is racking her brains

on the ways and means to provide as sumptuous an entertainment of

oysters and champagne at her next party as her richer neighbor, or to

compass that great bargain which shall give her a point-lace set

almost as handsome as that of Mrs. Croesus, who has ten times her

income?"

"But, papa," said Marianne, with a twinge of that exacting sensitiveness

by which the child is characterized, "I think I am an economist,

thanks to you and mamma, so far as knowing just what my income is,

and keeping within it; but that does not satisfy me, and it seems that

isn't all of economy; the question that haunts me is, Might I not make

my little all do more and better than I do?"

"There," said I, "you have hit the broader and deeper signification of

economy, which is, in fact, the science of _comparative values_. In

its highest sense, economy is a just judgment of the comparative value

of things,--money only the means of enabling one to express that

value. This is the reason why the whole matter is so full of

difficulty,--why every one criticises his neighbor in this regard.

Human beings are so various, the necessities of each are so different,

they are made comfortable or uncomfortable by such opposite means,

that the spending of other people's incomes must of necessity often

look unwise from our standpoint. For this reason multitudes of people

who cannot be accused of exceeding their incomes often seem to others

to be spending them foolishly and extravagantly."

"But is there no standard of value?" said Marianne.

"There are certain things upon which there is a pretty general

agreement, verbally, at least, among mankind. For instance, it is

generally agreed that _health_ is an indispensable good,--that money

is well spent that secures it, and worse than ill spent that ruins

it.

"With this standard in mind, how much money is wasted even by people

who do not exceed their income! Here a man builds a house, and pays,

in the first place, ten thousand more than he need, for a location in

a fashionable part of the city, though the air will be closer and the

chances of health less; he spends three or four thousand more on a

stone front, on marble mantels imported from Italy, on plate-glass

windows, plated hinges, and a thousand nice points of finish, and has

perhaps but one bath-room for a whole household, and that so connected

with his own apartment that nobody but himself and his wife can use

it.

"Another man buys a lot in an open, airy situation, which fashion has

not made expensive, and builds without a stone front, marble mantels,

or plate-glass windows, but has a perfect system of ventilation

through his house, and bathing-rooms in every story, so that the

children and guests may all, without inconvenience, enjoy the luxury

of abundant water.

"The first spends for fashion and show, the second for health and

comfort.

"Here is a man that will buy his wife a diamond bracelet and a lace

shawl, and take her yearly to Washington to show off her beauty in

ball dresses, who yet will not let her pay wages which will command

any but the poorest and most inefficient domestic service. The woman

is worn out, her life made a desert by exhaustion consequent on a

futile attempt to keep up a showy establishment with only half the

hands needed for the purpose. Another family will give brilliant

parties, have a gay season every year at the first hotels at Newport,

and not be able to afford the wife a fire in her chamber in

midwinter, or the servants enough food to keep them from constantly

deserting. The damp, mouldy, dingy cellar-kitchen, the cold, windy,

desolate attic, devoid of any comfort, where the domestics are doomed

to pass their whole time, are witnesses to what such families consider

economy. Economy in the view of some is undisguised slipshod

slovenliness in the home circle for the sake of fine clothes to be

shown abroad; it is undisguised hard selfishness to servants and

dependants, counting their every approach to comfort a needless

waste,--grudging the Roman Catholic cook her cup of tea at dinner on

Friday, when she must not eat meat,--and murmuring that a cracked,

second-hand looking-glass must be got for the servants' room: what

business have they to want to know how they look?

"Some families will employ the cheapest physician, without regard to

his ability to kill or cure; some will treat diseases in their

incipiency with quack medicines, bought cheap, hoping thereby to fend

off the doctor's bill. Some women seem to be pursued by an evil demon

of economy, which, like an _ignis fatuus_ in a bog, delights

constantly to tumble them over into the mire of expense. They are

dismayed at the quantity of sugar in the recipe for preserves, leave

out a quarter, and the whole ferments and is spoiled. They cannot by

any means be induced at any one time to buy enough silk to make a

dress, and the dress finally, after many convulsions and alterations,

must be thrown by altogether as too scanty. They get poor needles,

poor thread, poor sugar, poor raisins, poor tea, poor coal. One

wonders, in looking at their blackened, smouldering grates in a

freezing day, what the fire is there at all for,--it certainly warms

nobody. The only thing they seem likely to be lavish in is funeral

expenses, which come in the wake of leaky shoes and imperfect

clothing. These funeral expenses at last swallow all, since nobody can

dispute an undertaker's bill. One pities these joyless beings.

Economy, instead of a rational act of the judgment, is a morbid

monomania, eating the pleasure out of life, and haunting them to the

grave.

"Some people's ideas of economy seem to run simply in the line of

eating. Their flour is of an extra brand, their meat the first cut;

the delicacies of every season, in their dearest stages, come home to

their table with an apologetic smile,--'It was scandalously dear, my

love, but I thought we must just treat ourselves.' And yet these

people cannot afford to buy books, and pictures they regard as an

unthought-of extravagance. Trudging home with fifty dollars' worth of

delicacies on his arm, Smith meets Jones, who is exulting with a bag

of crackers under one arm and a choice little bit of an oil painting

under the other, which he thinks a bargain at fifty dollars. '_I_

can't afford to buy pictures,' Smith says to his spouse, 'and I don't

know how Jones and his wife manage.' Jones and his wife will live on

bread and milk for a month, and she will turn her best gown the third

time, but they will have their picture, and they are happy. Jones's

picture remains, and Smith's fifty dollars' worth of oysters and

canned fruit to-morrow will be gone forever. Of all modes of spending

money, the swallowing of expensive dainties brings the least return.

There is one step lower than this,--the consuming of luxuries that are

injurious to the health. If all the money spent on tobacco and liquors

could be spent in books and pictures, I predict that nobody's health

would be a whit less sound, and houses would be vastly more

attractive. There is enough money spent in smoking, drinking, and

over-eating to give every family in the community a good library, to

hang everybody's parlor walls with lovely pictures, to set up in every

house a conservatory which should bloom all winter with choice

flowers, to furnish every dwelling with ample bathing and warming

accommodations, even down to the dwellings of the poor; and in the

millennium I believe this is the way things are to be.

"In these times of peril and suffering, if the inquiry arises, How

shall there be retrenchment? I answer, First and foremost, retrench

things needless, doubtful, and positively hurtful, as rum, tobacco,

and all the meerschaums of divers colors that do accompany the same.

Second, retrench all eating not necessary to health and comfort. A

French family would live in luxury on the leavings that are constantly

coming from the tables of those who call themselves in middling

circumstances. There are superstitions of the table that ought to be

broken through. Why must you always have cake in your closet? why need

you feel undone to entertain a guest with no cake on your tea-table?

Do without it a year, and ask yourselves if you or your children, or

any one else, have suffered materially in consequence.

"Why is it imperative that you should have two or three courses at

every meal? Try the experiment of having but one, and that a very good

one, and see if any great amount of suffering ensues. Why must social

intercourse so largely consist in eating? In Paris there is a very

pretty custom. Each family has one evening in the week when it stays

at home and receives friends. Tea, with a little bread and butter and

cake, served in the most informal way, is the only refreshment. The

rooms are full, busy, bright,--everything as easy and joyous as if a

monstrous supper, with piles of jelly and mountains of cake, were

waiting to give the company a nightmare at the close.

"Said a lady, pointing to a gentleman and his wife in a social circle

of this kind, 'I ought to know them well,--I have seen them every week

for twenty years.' It is certainly pleasant and confirmative of social

enjoyment for friends to eat together; but a little enjoyed in this

way answers the purpose as well as a great deal, and better, too."

"Well, papa," said Marianne, "in the matter of dress, now,--how much

ought one to spend just to look as others do?"

"I will tell you what I saw the other night, girls, in the parlor of

one of our hotels. Two middle-aged Quaker ladies came gliding in, with

calm, cheerful faces, and lustrous dove-colored silks. By their

conversation I found that they belonged to that class of women among

the Friends who devote themselves to traveling on missions of

benevolence. They had just completed a tour of all the hospitals for

wounded soldiers in the country, where they had been carrying

comforts, arranging, advising, and soothing by their cheerful, gentle

presence. They were now engaged on another mission, to the lost and

erring of their own sex; night after night, guarded by a policeman,

they had ventured after midnight into the dance-houses where girls are

being led to ruin, and with gentle words of tender, motherly counsel

sought to win them from their fatal ways,--telling them where they

might go the next day to find friends who would open to them an asylum

and aid them to seek a better life.

"As I looked upon these women, dressed with such modest purity, I

began secretly to think that the Apostle was not wrong when he spoke

of women adorning themselves with the _ornament_ of a meek and quiet

spirit; for the habitual gentleness of their expression, the calmness

and purity of the lines in their faces, the delicacy and simplicity of

their apparel, seemed of themselves a rare and peculiar beauty. I

could not help thinking that fashionable bonnets, flowing lace

sleeves, and dresses elaborately trimmed could not have improved even

their outward appearance. Doubtless their simple wardrobe needed but a

small trunk in traveling from place to place, and hindered but little

their prayers and ministrations.

"Now, it is true, all women are not called to such a life as this;

but might not all women take a leaf at least from their book? I submit

the inquiry humbly. It seems to me that there are many who go monthly

to the sacrament, and receive it with sincere devotion, and who give

thanks each time sincerely that they are thus made 'members

incorporate in the mystical body of Christ,' who have never thought of

this membership as meaning that they should share Christ's sacrifices

for lost souls, or abridge themselves of one ornament or encounter one

inconvenience for the sake of those wandering sheep for whom he died.

Certainly there is a higher economy which we need to learn,--that

which makes all things subservient to the spiritual and immortal, and

that not merely to the good of our own souls and those of our family,

but of all who are knit with us in the great bonds of human

brotherhood.

"There have been from time to time, among well-meaning Christian

people, retrenchment societies on high moral grounds, which have

failed for want of knowledge how to manage the complicated question of

necessaries and luxuries. These words have a signification in the case

of different people as varied as the varieties of human habit and

constitution. It is a department impossible to be bound by external

rules, but none the less should every high-minded Christian soul in

this matter have a law unto itself. It may safely be laid down as a

general rule, that no income, however large or however small, should

be unblessed by the divine touch of self-sacrifice. Something for the

poor, the sorrowing, the hungry, the tempted, and the weak should be

taken from _what is our own_ at the expense of some personal

sacrifice, or we suffer more morally than the brother from whom we

withdraw it. Even the Lord of all, when dwelling among men, out of

that slender private purse which he accepted for his little family of

chosen ones, had ever something reserved to give to the poor. It is

easy to say, 'It is but a drop in the bucket. I cannot remove the

great mass of misery in the world. What little I could save or give

does nothing.' It does this, if no more,--it prevents one soul, and

that soul your own, from drying and hardening into utter selfishness

and insensibility; it enables you to say, I have done something; taken

one atom from the great heap of sins and miseries and placed it on the

side of good.

"The Sisters of Charity and the Friends, each with their different

costume of plainness and self-denial, and other noble-hearted women of

no particular outward order, but kindred in spirit, have shown to

womanhood, on the battlefield and in the hospital, a more excellent

way,--a beauty and nobility before which all the common graces and

ornaments of the sex fade, appear like dim candles by the pure,

eternal stars."