WEALTH IN ECONOMY.
Economy is half the battle of life.--SPURGEON.
Economy is the parent of integrity, of liberty and ease, and the
beauteous sister of temperance, of cheerfulness and health.--DR. JOHNSON.
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one's
self?
As much wisdom can be expended on a private economy as on an
empire.--EMERSON.
Riches amassed in haste will diminish; but those collected by hand and
little by little will multiply.--GOETHE.
No gain is so certain as that which proceeds from the economical use of
what you have.--LATIN PROVERB.
Beware of little extravagances: a small leak will sink a big
ship.--FRANKLIN.
Better go to bed supperless than rise with debts.--GERMAN PROVERB.
Debt is like any other trap, easy enough to get into, but hard enough to
get out of.--H. W. SHAW.
Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some eighteen
pence a day; but for phantasy, planets and solar systems will not
suffice.--MACAULAY.
Economy, the poor man's mint.--TUPPER.
I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse; borrowing only
lingers and lingers it out; but the disease is incurable.--SHAKESPEARE.
Whatever be your talents, whatever be your prospects, never speculate
away on the chance of a palace that which you may need as a provision
against the workhouse.--BULWER.
Not for to hide it in a hedge,
Nor for a train attendant,
But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent.
BURNS.
"We shan't get much here," whispered a lady to her companion, as John
Murray blew out one of the two candles by whose light he had been writing
when they asked him to contribute to some benevolent object. He listened
to their story and gave one hundred dollars. "Mr. Murray, I am very
agreeably surprised," said the lady quoted; "I did not expect to get a
cent from you." The old Quaker asked the reason for her opinion; and,
when told, said, "That, ladies, is the reason I am able to let you have
the hundred dollars. It is by practicing economy that I save up money
with which to do charitable actions. One candle is enough to talk by."
* * * * * *
[Illustration: ALEXANDER HAMILTON]
"The Moses of Colonial Finance."
"Poverty is a condition which no man should accept, unless it is forced
upon him as an inexorable necessity or as the alternative of dishonor."
"Comfort and independence abide with those who can postpone their
desires."
* * * * * *
Emerson relates the following anecdote: "An opulent merchant in Boston
was called on by a friend in behalf of a charity. At that time he was
admonishing his clerk for using whole wafers instead of halves; his
friend thought the circumstance unpropitious; but to his surprise, on
listening to the appeal, the merchant subscribed five hundred dollars.
The applicant expressed his astonishment that any person who was so
particular about half a wafer should present five hundred dollars to a
charity; but the merchant said, "It is by saving half wafers, and
attending to such little things, that I have now something to give."
"How did you acquire your great fortune?" asked a friend of Lampis, the
shipowner. "My great fortune, easily," was the reply, "my small one, by
dint of exertion."
Four years from the time Marshall Field left the rocky New England farm
to seek his fortune in Chicago he was admitted as a partner in the firm
of Coaley, Farwell & Co. The only reason the modest young man gave, to
explain his promotion when he had neither backing, wealth, nor influence,
was that he saved his money.
If a man will begin at the age of twenty and lay by twenty-six cents
every working day, investing at seven per cent. compound interest, he
will have thirty-two thousand dollars when he is seventy years old.
Twenty cents a day is no unusual expenditure for beer or cigars, yet in
fifty years it would easily amount to twenty thousand dollars. Even a
saving of one dollar a week from the date of one's majority would give
him one thousand dollars for each of the last ten of the allotted years
of life. "What maintains one vice would bring up two children."
Such rigid economy, such high courage, enables one to surprise the world
with gifts even if he is poor. In fact, the poor and the middle classes
give most in the aggregate to missions and hospitals and to the poor.
Only frugality enables them to outdo the rich on their own ground.
But miserliness or avariciousness is a different thing from economy. The
miserly is the miserable man, who hoards money from a love of it. A
miser who spends a cent upon himself where another would spend a quarter
does it from parsimony, which is a subordinate characteristic of avarice.
Of this the following is an illustration: "True, I should like some soup,
but I have no appetite for the meat," said the dying Ostervalde; "what is
to become of that? It will be a sad waste." And so the rich Paris
banker would not let his servant buy meat for broth.
A writer on political economy tells of the mishaps resulting from a
broken latch on a farmyard gate. Every one going through would shut the
gate, but as the latch would not hold it, it would swing open with every
breeze. One day a pig ran out into the woods. Every one on the farm
went to help get him back. A gardener jumped over a ditch to stop the
pig, and sprained his ankle so badly as to be confined to his bed for two
weeks. When the cook returned, she found that her linen, left to dry at
the fire, was all badly scorched. The dairymaid in her excitement left
the cows untied, and one of them broke the leg of a colt. The gardener
lost several hours of valuable time. Yet a new latch would not have cost
five cents.
Guy, the London bookseller, and afterward the founder of the great
hospital, was a great miser, living in the back part of his shop, eating
upon an old bench, and using his counter for a table, with a newspaper
for a cloth. He did not marry. One day he was visited by "Vulture"
Hopkins, another well-known miser. "What is your business?" asked Guy,
lighting a candle. "To discuss your methods of saving money," was the
reply, alluding to the niggardly economy for which Guy was famous. On
learning Hopkins's business he blew out the light, saying, "We can do
that in the dark." "Sir, you are my master in the art," said the
"Vulture;" "I need ask no further. I see where your secret lies."
Yet that kind of economy which verges on the niggardly is better than the
extravagance that laughs at it. Either, when carried to excess, is not
only apt to cause misery, but to ruin the character.
"Lay by something for a rainy day," said a gentleman to an Irishman in
his service. Not long afterwards he asked Patrick how much he had added
to his store. "Faith, nothing at all," was the reply; "I did as you bid
me, but it rained very hard yesterday, and it all went--in drink."
"Wealth, a monster gorged
'Mid starving populations."
But nowhere and at no period were these contrasts more startling than in
Imperial Rome. There a whole population might be trembling lest they
should be starved by the delay of an Alexandrian corn-ship, while the
upper classes were squandering fortunes at a single banquet, drinking out
of myrrhine and jeweled vases worth hundreds of pounds, and feasting on
the brains of peacocks and the tongues of nightingales. As a
consequence, disease was rife, men were short-lived. At this time the
dress of Roman ladies displayed an unheard-of splendor. The elder Pliny
tells us that he himself saw Lollia Paulina dressed for a betrothal feast
in a robe entirely covered with pearls and emeralds, which had cost
40,000,000 sesterces, and which was known to be less costly than some of
her other dresses. Gluttony, caprice, extravagance, ostentation,
impurity, rioted in the heart of a society which knew of no other means
by which to break the monotony of its weariness or alleviate the anguish
of its despair.
The expense ridiculously bestowed on the Roman feasts passes all belief.
Suetonius mentions a supper given to Vitellius by his brother, in which,
among other articles, there were two thousand of the choicest fishes,
seven thousand of the most delicate birds, and one dish, from its size
and capacity, named the aegis or shield of Minerva. It was filled
chiefly with the liver of the scari, a delicate species of fish, the
brains of pheasants and peacocks, and the tongues of parrots, considered
desirable chiefly because of their great cost.
"I hope that there will not be another sale," exclaimed Horace Walpole,
"for I have not an inch of room nor a farthing left." A woman once
bought an old door-plate with "Thompson" on it because she thought it
might come in handy some time. The habit of buying what you don't need
because it is cheap encourages extravagance. "Many have been ruined by
buying good pennyworths."
"Where there is no prudence," said Dr. Johnson, "there is no virtue."
The eccentric John Randolph once sprang from his seat in the House of
Representatives, and exclaimed in his piercing voice, "Mr. Speaker, I
have found it." And then, in the stillness which followed this strange
outburst, he added, "I have found the Philosopher's Stone: it is _Pay as
you go_."
Many a young man seems to think that when he sees his name on a sign he
is on the highway to fortune, and he begins to live on a scale as though
there was no possible chance of failure; as though he were already beyond
the danger point. Unfortunately Congress can pass no law that will
remedy the vice of living beyond one's means.
"The prosperity of fools shall destroy them." "However easy it may be to
make money," said Barnum, "it is the most difficult thing in the world to
keep it." Money often makes the mare--run away with you.
Very few men know how to use money properly. They can earn it, lavish
it, hoard it, waste it, but to deal with it _wisely_, as a means to an
end, is an education difficult of acquirement.
After a large stained-glass window had been constructed an artist picked
up the discarded fragments and made one of the most exquisite windows in
Europe for another cathedral. So one boy will pick up a splendid
education out of the odds and ends of time which others carelessly throw
away, or gain a fortune by saving what others waste.
It has become a part of the new political economy to argue that a debt on
a church or a house or a firm is a desirable thing to develop character.
When the young man starts out in life with the old-fashioned idea strong
in his mind that debt is bondage and a disgrace, that a mortgage is to be
shunned like the cholera, and that to owe a dollar that you cannot pay,
unless overtaken by misfortune, is nothing more or less than stealing,
then he is bound in so much at least to succeed, and save his old age
from being a burden upon his friends or the state.
To do your best you must own every bit of yourself. If you are in debt,
part of you belongs to your creditors. Nothing but actual sin is so
paralyzing to a young man's energies as debt.
The "loose change" which many young men throw away carelessly, or worse,
would often form the basis of a fortune and independence. The earnings
of the people of the United States, rich and poor, old and young, male
and female, amount to an average of less than fifty cents a day. But it
is by economizing such savings that one must get his start in business.
The man without a penny is practically helpless, from a business point of
view, except so far as he can immediately utilize his powers of body and
mind. Besides, when a man or woman is driven to the wall, the chance of
goodness surviving self-respect and the loss of public esteem is
frightfully diminished.
"Money goes as it comes." "A child and a fool imagine that twenty years
and twenty shillings can never be spent."
Live between extravagance and meanness. Don't save money and starve your
mind. "The very secret and essence of thrift consists in getting things
into higher values. Spend upward, that is, for the higher faculties.
Spend for the mind rather than for the body, for culture rather than for
amusement. Some young men are too stingy to buy the daily papers, and
are very ignorant and narrow." "There is that withholdeth more than is
meet, but it tendeth to poverty." "Don't squeeze out of your life and
comfort and family what you save."
Liberal, not lavish, is Nature's hand. Even God, it is said, cannot
afford to be extravagant. When He increased the loaves and fishes, He
commanded to gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost.
"Nature uses a grinding economy," says Emerson, "working up all that is
wasted to-day into to-morrow's creation; not a superfluous grain of sand
for all the ostentation she makes of expense and public works. She flung
us out in her plenty, but we cannot shed a hair or a paring of a nail but
instantly she snatches at the shred and appropriates it to her general
stock." Last summer's flowers and foliage decayed in autumn only to
enrich the earth this year for other forms of beauty. Nature will not
even wait for our friends to see us, unless we die at home. The moment
the breath has left the body she begins to take us to pieces, that the
parts may be used again for other creations. Mark the following
contrast:--
1772. 1822.
Man, to the plow; Man, tally-ho;
Wife, to the cow; Wife, piano;
Girl, to the sow; Miss, silk and satin;
Boy, to the mow; Boy, Greek and Latin;
And your rents will be netted. And you'll all be gazetted.
_Hone's Works._ _The Times._
More than a lifetime has elapsed since the above was published, but
instead of returning to the style of 1772, our farmers have out-Heroded
Herod in the direction of the fashion, of 1822, and many a farmhouse,
like the home of Artemas [Transcriber's note: Artemus?] Ward, may be
known by the cupola and the mortgage with which it is decorated.
It is by the mysterious power of economy, it has been said, that the loaf
is multiplied, that using does not waste, that little becomes much, that
scattered fragments grow to unity, and that out of nothing or next to
nothing comes the miracle of something. It is not merely saving, still
less, parsimony. It is foresight and arrangement, insight and
combination, causing inert things to labor, useless things to serve our
necessities, perishing things to renew their vigor, and all things to
exert themselves for human comfort.
English working men and women work very hard, seldom take a holiday, and
though they get nearly double the wages of the same classes in France,
yet save very little. The millions earned by them slip out of their
hands almost as soon as obtained to satisfy the pleasures of the moment.
In France every housekeeper is taught the art of making much out of
little. "I am simply astonished," writes an American lady stopping in
France, "at the number of good wholesome dishes which my friend here
makes for her table from things, which at home, I always throw away.
Dainty little dishes from scraps of cold meat, from hard crusts of bread,
delicately prepared and seasoned, from almost everything and nothing.
And yet there is no feeling of stinginess or want."
"I wish I could write all across the sky, in letters of gold," says Rev.
William Marsh, "the one word, savings-bank."
Boston savings-banks have $130,000,000 on deposit, mostly saved in
driblets. Josiah Quincy used to say that the servant girls built most of
the palaces on Beacon Street.
"So apportion your wants that your means may exceed them," says Bulwer.
"With one hundred pounds a year I may need no man's help; I may at least
have 'my crust of bread and liberty.' But with five thousand pounds a
year I may dread a ring at my bell; I may have my tyrannical master in
servants whose wages I cannot pay; my exile may be at the fiat of the
first long-suffering man who enters a judgment against me; for the flesh
that lies nearest my heart some Shylock may be dusting his scales and
whetting his knife. Every man is needy who spends more than he has; no
man is needy who spends less. I may so ill manage, that with five
thousand pounds a year I purchase the worst evils of poverty,--terror and
shame; I may so well manage my money, that with one hundred pounds a year
I purchase the best blessings of wealth,--safety and respect."
Edmund Burke, speaking on Economic Reform, quoted from Cicero: "Magnum
vectigal est parsimonia," accenting the second word on the first
syllable. Lord North whispered a correction, when Burke turned the
mistake to advantage. "The noble lord hints that I have erred in the
quantity of a principal word in my quotation; I rejoice at it, sir,
because it gives me an opportunity of repeating the inestimable
adage,--'Magnum vectigal est parsimonia.'" The sentiment, meaning
"Thrift is a good income," is well worthy of emphatic repetition by us
all.
Washington examined the minutest expenditures of his family, even when
President of the United States. He understood that without economy none
can be rich, and with it none need be poor.
"I make a point of paying my own bills," said Wellington.
John Jacob Astor said that the first thousand dollars cost him more
effort than all of his millions. Boys who are careless with their dimes
and quarters, just because they have so few, never get this first
thousand, and without it no fortune is possible.
To find out uses for the persons or things which are now wasted in life
is to be the glorious work of the men of the next generation, and that
which will contribute most to their enrichment.
Economizing "in spots" or by freaks is no economy at all. It must be
done by management.
Learn early in life to say "I can't afford it." It is an indication of
power and courage and manliness. Dr. Franklin said, "It is not our own
eyes, but other people's, that ruin us." "Fashion wears out more apparel
than the man," says Shakespeare.
"Of what a hideous progeny of ill is debt the father," said Douglas
Jerrold. "What meanness, what invasions of self-respect, what cares,
what double-dealing! How in due season it will carve the frank, open
face into wrinkles; how like a knife it will stab the honest heart. And
then its transformations,--how it has been known to change a goodly face
into a mask of brass; how with the evil custom of debt has the true man
become a callous trickster! A freedom from debt, and what nourishing
sweetness may be found in cold water; what toothsomeness in a dry crust;
what ambrosial nourishment in a hard egg! Be sure of it, he who dines
out of debt, though his meal be a biscuit and an onion, dines in 'The
Apollo.' And then, for raiment, what warmth in a threadbare coat, if the
tailor's receipt be in your pocket! What Tyrian purple in the faded
waistcoat, the vest not owed for; how glossy the well-worn hat, if it
covers not the aching head of a debtor! Next, the home sweets, the
outdoor recreation of the free man. The street door falls not a knell in
his heart, the foot on the staircase, though he lives on the third pair,
sends no spasm through his anatomy; at the rap of his door he can crow
'come in,' and his pulse still beats healthfully. See him abroad! How
he returns look for look with any passenger. Poverty is a bitter
draught, yet may, and sometimes can with advantage, be gulped down.
Though the drinker makes wry faces, there may, after all, be a wholesome
goodness in the cup. But debt, however courteously it may be offered, is
the Cup of Siren; and the wine, spiced and delicious though it be, is
poison. My son, if poor, see Hyson in the running spring; see thy mouth
water at a last week's roll; think a threadbare coat the only wear; and
acknowledge a whitewashed garret the fittest housing-place for a
gentleman; do this, and flee debt. So shall thy heart be at rest, and
the sheriff confounded."
"Whoever has sixpence is sovereign over all men to the extent of that
sixpence," says Carlyle; "commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to
teach him, kings to mount guard over him,--to the extent of that
sixpence."
If a man owes you a dollar, he is almost sure to owe you a grudge, too.
If you owe another money, you will be apt to regard him with uncharitable
eyes. Why not economize before getting into debt instead of pinching
afterwards?
Communities which live wholly from hand to mouth never make much progress
in the useful arts. Savings mean power. _Comfort and independence abide
with those who can postpone their desires._
"Hunger, rags, cold, hard work, contempt, suspicion, unjust reproach, are
disagreeable," says Horace Greeley, "but debt is infinitely worse than
them all."
Many a ruined man dates his downfall from the day when he began borrowing
money. Debt demoralized Daniel Webster, and Theodore Hook, and Sheridan,
and Fox, and Pitt. Mirabeau's life was made wretched by duns.
"Annual income," says Micawber, "twenty pounds; annual expenditure,
nineteen six, result--happiness. Annual income, twenty pounds; annual
expenditure, twenty pounds ought and six, result--misery."
"We are ruined," says Colton, "not by what we really want, but by what we
think we do. Therefore never go abroad in search of your wants; if they
be real wants, they will come home in search of you; for he that buys
what he does not want will soon want what he cannot buy."
The honorable course is to give every man his due. It is better to
starve than not to do this. It is better to do a small business on a
cash basis than a large one on credit. _Owe no man anything_, wrote St.
Paul. It is a good motto to place in every purse, in every
counting-room, in every church, in every home.
Economy is of itself a great revenue.--CICERO.