CHAPTER-9
“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.”
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 splendour. 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:—
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 labour, useless things to serve our necessities, perishing things to renew their vigour, 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 Theodoure 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.”
