THRIFT.

By CHARLES KINGSLEY.

_A Lecture for Women._

Consider that word thrift. If you will look at Dr. Johnson’s

Dictionary, or if you know your Shakspere, you will see that thrift

signified originally profits, gain, riches gotten—in a word, the marks

of a man’s thriving.

How, then, did the word thrift get to mean parsimony, frugality, the

opposite of waste? Just in the same way as economy—which, first, of

course, meant the management of a household—got to mean also the

opposite of waste.

It was found that in commerce, in husbandry, in any process, in fact,

men throve in proportion as they saved their capital, their material,

their force.

Now this is a great law which runs through life; one of those laws

of nature—call them, rather, laws of God—which apply not merely to

political economy, to commerce, and to mechanics; but to physiology, to

society; to the intellect, to the heart, of every person in this room.

The secret of thriving is thrift; saving of force; to get as much work

as possible done with the least expenditure of power, the least jar and

obstruction, the least wear and tear.

And the secret of thrift is knowledge. In proportion as you know the

laws and nature of a subject, you will be able to work at it easily,

surely, rapidly, successfully; instead of wasting your money or

your energies in mistaken schemes, irregular efforts, which end in

disappointment and exhaustion.

The secret of thrift, I say, is knowledge. The more you know, the more

you can save yourself and that which belongs to you; and can do more

work with less effort.

A knowledge of the laws of commercial credit, we all know, saves

capital, enabling a less capital to do the work of a greater. Knowledge

of the electric telegraph saves time; knowledge of writing saves human

speech and locomotion; knowledge of domestic economy saves income;

knowledge of sanitary laws saves health and life; knowledge of the laws

of the intellect saves wear and tear of brain; and knowledge of the

laws of the spirit—what does it not save?

A well-educated moral sense, a well-regulated character, saves from

idleness and ennui, alternating with sentimentality and excitement,

those tender emotions, those deeper passions, those nobler aspirations

of humanity, which are the heritage of the woman far more than of the

man; and which are potent in her, for evil or for good, in proportion

as they are left to run wild and undisciplined, or are trained and

developed into graceful, harmonious, self-restraining strength,

beautiful in themselves, and a blessing to all who come under their

influence.

What, therefore, I recommend to ladies in this lecture is thrift;

thrift of themselves and of their own powers: and knowledge as the

parent of thrift.

“To fit women for the more enlightened performance of their special

duties;” to help them towards learning how to do better what we doubt

not they are already doing well; is, I honestly believe, the only

object of the promoters of this scheme.

Let us see now how some of these special duties can be better performed

by help of a little enlightenment as to the laws which regulate them.

Now, no man will deny—certainly no man who is past forty-five, and

whose digestion is beginning to quail before the lumps of beef and

mutton which are the boast of a well-regulated kitchen, and to prefer,

with Justice Shallow, and, I presume, Sir John Falstaff also, “any

pretty little tiny kickshaws”—no man, I say, who has reached that age,

but will feel it a practical comfort to him to know that the young

ladies of his family are at all events good cooks; and understand, as

the French do, thrift in the matter of food.

Neither will any parent who wishes, naturally enough, that his

daughters should cost him as little as possible; and wishes, naturally

enough also, that they should be as well dressed as possible, deny

that it would be a good thing for them to be practical milliners and

mantua-makers; and, by making their own clothes gracefully and well,

exercise thrift in clothing.

But, beside this thrift in clothing, I am not alone, I believe,

in wishing for some thrift in the energy which produces it. Labor

misapplied, you will agree, is labor wasted; and as dress, I presume,

is intended to adorn the person of the wearer, the making a dress which

only disfigures her may be considered as a plain case of waste. It

would be impertinent in me to go into any details: but it is impossible

to walk about the streets now without passing young people who must be

under a deep delusion as to the success of their own toilette. Instead

of graceful and noble simplicity of form, instead of combinations

of color at once rich and delicate, because in accordance with the

chromatic laws of nature, one meets with phenomena more and more

painful to the eye, and startling to common sense, till one would be

hardly more astonished, and certainly hardly more shocked, if in a

year or two one should pass some one going about like a Chinese lady,

with pinched feet, or like a savage of the Amazons, with a wooden bung

through her lower lip. It is easy to complain of these monstrosities:

but impossible to cure them, it seems to me, without an education of

the taste, an education in those laws of nature which produce beauty in

form and beauty in color. For that cause of these failures lies in want

of education is patent. They are most common in—I had almost said they

are confined to—those classes of well-to-do persons who are the least

educated; who have no standard of taste of their own; and who do not

acquire any from cultivated friends and relations: who, in consequence,

dress themselves blindly according to what they conceive to be Paris

fashions, conveyed at third-hand through an equally uneducated

dressmaker; in innocent ignorance of the fact—for fact I believe it to

be—that Paris fashions are invented now not in the least for the sake

of beauty, but for the sake of producing, through variety, increased

expenditure, and thereby increased employment; according to the strange

system which now prevails in France of compelling, if not prosperity,

at least the signs of it; and like schoolboys before a holiday, nailing

up the head of the weather glass to insure fine weather.

Let the ladies educate themselves in those laws of beauty which are as

eternal as any other of nature’s laws; which may be seen fulfilled,

as Mr. Ruskin tells us, so eloquently in every flower and every leaf,

in sweeping down and rippling wave: and they will be able to invent

graceful and economical dresses for themselves, without importing

tawdry and expensive ugliness from France.

Let me now go a step further, and ask you to consider this.—There are

now a vast number, and an increasing number, of young women who, from

various circumstances which we all know, must in after life be either

the mistresses of their own fortunes, or the earners of their own

bread. And to do that wisely and well, they must be more or less women

of business; and to be women of business, they must know something of

the meaning of the words capital, profit, price, value, labor, wages,

and of the relations between those two last. In a word, they must know

a little political economy. Nay, I sometimes think that the mistress

of every household might find, not only thrift of money, but thrift of

brain; freedom from mistakes, anxieties, worries of many kinds, all

of which eat out the health as well as the heart, by a little sound

knowledge of the principles of political economy.

When we consider that every mistress of a household is continually

buying, if not selling; that she is continually hiring and employing

labor in the form of servants; and very often, into the bargain,

keeping her husband’s accounts: I cannot but think that her hard-worked

brain might be clearer, and her hard-tried desire to do her duty by

every subject in her little kingdom, might be more easily satisfied,

had she read something of what Mr. John Stuart Mill has written,

especially on the duties of employer and employed. A capitalist, a

commercialist, an employer of labor, and an accountant—every mistress

of a household is all these, whether she likes it or not; and it would

be surely well for her, in so very complicated a state of society as

this, not to trust merely to that mother-wit, that intuitive sagacity

and innate power of ruling her fellow-creatures, which carries women so

nobly through their work in simpler and less civilized societies.

And here I stop to answer those who may say—as I have heard it

said—that a woman’s intellect is not fit for business; that when a

woman takes to business, she is apt to do it ill, and unpleasantly

likewise: to be more suspicious, more irritable, more grasping, more

unreasonable, than regular men of business would be: that—as I have

heard it put—“a woman does not fight fair.” The answer is simple. That

a woman’s intellect is eminently fitted for business is proved by

the enormous amount of business she gets through without any special

training for it: but those faults in a woman of which some men complain

are simply the results of her not having had a special training. She

does not know the laws of business. She does not know the rules of

the game she is playing; and therefore she is playing it in the dark,

in fear and suspicion, apt to judge of questions on personal grounds,

often offending those with whom she has to do, and oftener still making

herself miserable over matters of law or of business, on which a little

sound knowledge would set her head and her heart at rest.

When I have seen widows, having the care of children, of a great

household, of great estate, of a great business, struggling heroically,

and yet often mistakenly; blamed severely for selfishness and ambition,

while they were really sacrificing themselves with the divine instinct

of a mother for their children’s interest: I have stood by with mingled

admiration and pity, and said to myself—“How nobly she is doing the

work without teaching! How much more nobly would she have done it had

she been taught! She is now doing the work at the most enormous waste

of energy and of virtue: had she had knowledge, thrift would have

followed it; she would have done more work with far less trouble. She

will probably kill herself if she goes on: sound knowledge would have

saved her health, saved her heart, saved her friends, and helped the

very loved ones for whom she labors, not always with success.”

A little political economy, therefore, will at least do no harm to a

woman; especially if she have to take care of herself in after life;

neither, I think, will she be much harmed by some sound knowledge of

another subject,—“Natural philosophy, in its various branches, such as

the chemistry of common life, light, heat, electricity, etc., etc.”

A little knowledge of the laws of light, for instance, would teach many

women that by shutting themselves up day after day, week after week,

in darkened rooms, they are as certainly committing a waste of health,

destroying their vital energy, and diseasing their brains, as if they

were taking so much poison the whole time.

For let me ask you, ladies, with all courtesy, but with all

earnestness—Are you aware of certain facts, of which every excellent

medical man is too well aware? Are you aware that more human beings are

killed every year by unnecessary and preventable diseases than were

killed at Waterloo or at Sadowa? Are you aware that the great majority

of those victims are children? Are you aware that the diseases which

carry them off are for the most part such as ought to be specially

under the control of the women who love them, pet them, educate

them, and would in many cases, if need be, lay down their lives for

them? Are you aware, again, of the vast amount of disease which, so

both wise mothers and wise doctors assure me, is engendered in the

sleeping-room from simple ignorance of the laws of ventilation, and

in the school-room likewise, from simple ignorance of the laws of

physiology? from an ignorance of which I shall mention no other case

here save one—that too often from ignorance of signs of approaching

disease, a child is punished for what is called idleness, listlessness,

wilfulness, sulkiness; and punished, too, in the unwisest way—by an

increase of tasks and confinement to the house, thus overtasking still

more a brain already overtasked, and depressing still more, by robbing

it of oxygen and of exercise, a system already depressed? Are you

aware, I ask again, of all this? I speak earnestly upon this point,

because I speak with experience. As a single instance: a medical man,

a friend of mine, passing by his own school-room, heard one of his

own little girls screaming and crying, and went in. The governess,

an excellent woman, but wholly ignorant of the laws of physiology,

complained that the child of late had become obstinate and would not

learn; and that therefore she must punish her by keeping her indoors

over the unlearned lessons. The father, who knew that the child was

usually very good, looked at her carefully for a little while; sent her

out of the schoolroom; and then said, “That child must not open a book

for a month.” “If I had not acted so,” he said to me, “I should have

had that child dead of brain disease within a year.”

Now, in the face of such facts as these, is it too much to ask of

mothers, sisters, aunts, nurses, governesses—all who may be occupied

in the care of children, especially of girls—that they should study

thrift of human health and human life, by studying somewhat the laws

of life and health? There are books—I may say a whole literature

of books—written by scientific doctors on these matters, which

are in my mind far more important to the schoolroom than half the

trashy accomplishments, so-called, which are expected to be known by

governesses. But are they bought? Are they even to be bought, from

most country booksellers? Ah, for a little knowledge of the laws to

the neglect of which is owing so much fearful disease, which if it

does not produce immediate death, too often leaves the constitution

impaired for years to come. Ah the waste of health and strength in the

young; the waste, too, of anxiety and misery in those who love and tend

them. How much of it might be saved by a little rational education in

those laws of nature which are the will of God about the welfare of our

bodies, and which, therefore, we are as much bound to know and to obey

as we are bound to know and obey the spiritual laws whereon depends the

welfare of our souls.

Pardon me, ladies, if I have given a moment’s pain to any one here: but

I appeal to every medical man in the room whether I have not spoken

the truth; and having such an opportunity as this, I felt that I must

speak for the sake of children, and of women likewise, or else for ever

hereafter hold my peace.

Let me pass on from this painful subject—for painful it has been to me

for many years—to a question of intellectual thrift—by which I mean

just now thrift of words; thrift of truth; restraint of the tongue;

accuracy and modesty in statement.

Mothers complain to me that girls are apt to be—not intentionally

untruthful—but exaggerative, prejudiced, incorrect, in repeating a

conversation or describing an event; and that from this fault arise,

as is to be expected, misunderstandings, quarrels, rumors, slanders,

scandals, and what not.

Now, for this waste of words there is but one cure; and if I be told

that it is a natural fault of women; that they cannot take the calm

judicial view of matters which men boast, and often boast most wrongly,

that they can take; that under the influence of hope, fear, delicate

antipathy, honest moral indignation, they will let their eyes and ears

be governed by their feelings; and see and hear only what they wish to

see and hear: I answer, that it is not for me as a man to start such a

theory; but that if it be true, it is an additional argument for some

education which will correct this supposed natural defect. And I say

deliberately that there is but one sort of education which will correct

it, one which will teach young women to observe facts accurately, judge

them calmly and describe them carefully, without adding or distorting:

and that is, some training in natural science.

I beg you not to be startled: but if you are, then test the truth of

my theory by playing to-night at the game called “Russian Scandal;” in

which a story, repeated in secret by one player to the other, comes

out at the end of the game, owing to the inaccurate and—forgive me if

I say it—uneducated brains through which it has passed, utterly unlike

its original; not only ludicrously maimed and distorted, but often

with the most fantastic addition of events, details, names, dates,

places, which each player will aver he received from the player before

him. I am afraid that too much of the average gossip of every city,

town and village is little more than a game of “Russian Scandal;” with

this difference, that while one is but a game, the other is but too

mischievous earnest.

But now, if among your party there shall be an average lawyer, medical

man, or man of science, you will find that he, and perhaps he alone,

will be able to retail accurately the story which has been told him.

And why? Simply because his mind has been trained to deal with facts;

to ascertain exactly what he does see or hear, and to imprint its

leading features strongly and clearly on his memory.

I could say much on this point: allow me at least to say this: I verily

believe that any young lady who would employ some of her leisure time

in collecting wild flowers, carefully examining them, verifying them,

and arranging them; or who would in her summer trip to the sea-coast

do the same by the common objects of the shore, instead of wasting

her holiday, as one sees hundreds doing, in lounging on benches on

the esplanade, reading worthless novels, and criticising dresses—that

such a young lady, I say, would not only open her own mind to a world

of wonder, beauty, and wisdom, which, if it did not make her a more

reverent and pious soul, she can not be the woman which I take her for

granted she is; but would save herself from the habit—I had almost said

the necessity—of gossip; because she would have things to think of and

not merely persons; facts instead of fancies; while she would acquire

something of accuracy, of patience, of methodical observation and

judgment, which would stand her in good stead in the events of daily

life and increase her power of bridling her tongue and her imagination.

“God is in heaven, and thou upon earth; therefore let thy words be

few;” is the lesson which those are learning all day long who study the

works of God with reverent accuracy, lest by misrepresenting them they

should be tempted to say that God has done that which He has not; and

in that wholesome discipline I long that women as well as men should

share.

And now I come to a thrift of the highest kind, as contrasted with a

waste the most deplorable and ruinous of all; thrift of those faculties

which connect us with the unseen and spiritual world; with humanity,

with Christ, with God; thrift of the immortal spirit. I am not going

now to give you a sermon on duty. You hear such, I doubt not, in church

every Sunday, far better than I can preach to you. I am going to speak

rather of thrift of the heart, thrift of the emotions. How they are

wasted in these days in reading what are called sensation novels, all

know but too well; how good literature—all that the best hearts and

intellects among our forefathers have bequeathed to us—is neglected for

light fiction, the reading of which is, as a lady well said, “the worst

form of intemperance—dram-drinking and opium-eating, intellectual and

moral.”

I know that the young will delight—they have delighted in all ages,

and will to the end of time—in fictions which deal with that “oldest

tale which is forever new.” Novels will be read: but that is all the

more reason why women should be trained, by the perusal of a higher,

broader, deeper literature, to distinguish the good novel from the bad,

the moral from the immoral, the noble from the base, the true work of

art from the sham which hides its shallowness and vulgarity under a

tangled plot and melodramatic situations. She should learn—and that she

can only learn by cultivation—to discern with joy, and drink in with

reverence, the good, the beautiful, and the true; and to turn with the

fine scorn of a pure and strong womanhood from the bad, the ugly, and

the false.

And if any parent should be inclined to reply—“Why lay so much stress

upon educating a girl in good literature? Is it not far more important

to make our daughters read religious books?” I answer—of course it is.

I take for granted that that is done in a Christian land. But I beg you

to recollect that there are books and books; and that in these days

of a free press it is impossible, in the long run, to prevent girls

reading books of very different shades of opinion, and very different

religious worth. It may be, therefore, of the very highest importance

to a girl to have her intellect, her taste, her emotions, her moral

sense, in a word, her whole womanhood, so cultivated and regulated

that she shall herself be able to discern the true from the false,

the orthodox from the unorthodox, the truly devout from the merely

sentimental, the gospel from its counterfeits.

I should have thought that there never had been since the Reformation,

a crisis at which young women required more careful cultivation on

these matters; if at least they are to be saved from making themselves

and their families miserable; and from ending—as I have known too many

end—with broken hearts, broken brains, broken health, and an early

grave.

Take warning by what you see abroad. In every country where the

women are uneducated, unoccupied; where their only literature is

French novels or translations of them—in every one of those countries

the women, even to the highest, are the slaves of superstition,

and the puppets of priests. In proportion as, in certain other

countries—notably, I will say, in Scotland—the women are highly

educated, family life and family secrets are sacred, and the woman owns

allegiance and devotion to no confessor or director, but to her own

husband or to her own family.

I say plainly, that if any parents wish their daughters to succumb

at last to some quackery or superstition, whether calling itself

scientific, or calling itself religious—and there are too many of both

just now—they can not more certainly effect their purpose than by

allowing her to grow up ignorant, frivolous, luxurious, vain; with her

emotions excited, but not satisfied, by the reading of foolish and even

immoral novels.

In such a case the more delicate and graceful the organization, the

more noble and earnest the nature, which has been neglected, the more

certain it is—I know too well what I am saying—to go astray.

The time of depression, disappointment, vacuity, all but despair, must

come. The immortal spirit, finding no healthy satisfaction for its

highest aspirations, is but too likely to betake itself to an unhealthy

and exciting superstition. Ashamed of its own long self-indulgence, it

is but too likely to flee from itself into a morbid asceticism. Not

having been taught its God-given and natural duties in the world, it

is but too likely to betake itself, from the mere craving for action,

to self-invented and unnatural duties out of the world. Ignorant of

true science, yet craving to understand the wonders of nature and of

spirit, it is but too likely to betake itself to non-science—nonsense

as it is usually called—whether of spirit-rapping and mesmerism, or

miraculous relics and winking pictures. Longing for guidance and

teaching, and never having been taught to guide and teach itself, it

is but too likely to deliver itself up in self-despair to the guidance

and teaching of those who, whether they be quacks or fanatics, look on

uneducated women as their natural prey.

One word more, and I have done. Let me ask women to educate themselves,

not for their own sakes merely, but for the sake of others. For whether

they will or not, they must educate others. I do not speak merely of

those who may be engaged in the work of direct teaching; that they

ought to be well taught themselves, who can doubt? I speak of those—and

in so doing I speak of every woman, young and old—who exercises as

wife, as mother, as aunt, as sister, or as friend, an influence,

indirect it may be, and unconscious, but still potent and practical, on

the minds and characters of those about them, especially of men. How

potent and practical that influence is, those know best who know most

of the world and most of human nature. There are those who consider—and

I agree with them—that the education of boys under twelve years ought

to be entrusted as much as possible to women. Let me ask—of what period

of youth and manhood does not the same hold true? I pity the ignorance

and conceit of the man who fancies that he has nothing left to learn

from cultivated women.

Surely that is woman’s calling—to teach man: and to teach him what? To

teach him, after all, that his calling is the same as hers, if he will

but see the things which belong to his peace. To temper his fiercer,

coarser, more self-assertive nature, by the contact of her gentleness,

purity, self-sacrifice. To make him see that not by blare of trumpets,

not by noise, wrath, greed, ambition, intrigue, puffery, is good and

lasting work to be done on earth: but by wise self-distrust, by silent

labor, by lofty self-control, by that charity which hopeth all things,

believeth all things, endureth all things; by such an example, in

short, as women now in tens of thousands set to those around them;

such as they will show more and more, the more their whole womanhood

is educated to employ its powers without waste and without haste in

harmonious unity. Let the woman begin in girlhood, if such be her happy

lot—to quote the words of a great poet, a great philosopher, and a

great Churchman, William Wordsworth—let her begin, I say—

“With all things round about her drawn

From May-time and the cheerful dawn;

A dancing shape, an image gay,

To haunt, to startle, and waylay.”