ECONOMY

WHAT is economy? Not meanness; not avarice. It is not a grasping, grinding, mercenary spirit, which hoards and keeps and neither enjoys nor gives, and while it does not waste, it does not even use. This is a love of gain, for its own sake, which sees no other use for gold than to be kept. This is a passion that makes fools of its possessors, and profits nobody. A slack hand is better than a miserly hand. Both are bad. A diligent hand, a prudent economy, makes the best possible use of what it has—turns everything to best account— eats, drinks, wears, and gives away all that is necessary, all the circumstances really demand or will allow, and saves the rest.

Economy is the parent of integrity, of liberty, and of ease, and the sister of temperance, of cheerfulness and of health; and profuseness is a cruel and crafty demon, that generally involves her followers in dependence and debts, that is, fetters them with “irons that enter their souls.” Economy is one of three sisters, of whom the other and less reputable two are avarice and prodigality.  She alone keeps the safe and straight path, while avarice sneers at her as profuse, and prodigality scorns at her as penurious. To the poor she is indispensable; to those of moderate means she is found the representative of wisdom; and although some moralist has said that, at the hearth of the opulent, economy takes the form of a vice, she is perhaps as great a virtue there as elsewhere. Her very name signifies the law or rule of a house, and her presence is as much required in the palace as in the cottage.  The prince who despises her and outruns his means is at once slave and knave. The honest man who lives within his income, and owes no man anything, is your only true king. It is he alone who makes the golden discovery that economy is the mother of liberality. In the olden time there were sumptuary laws which, while they attached a penalty to extravagance, set a fine on the man who let a year pass by without asking a friend to dinner.

True economy is something better than stinginess. Economy, joined to industry and sobriety is a better outfit for business than a dowry. Take care to be an economist in prosperity; and there is no fear of your having to be one in adversity. Do not be extravagant. The man who will live above his present circumstances, is in danger of living in a little time much beneath them. If you buy what you have no occasion for, you will soon have to sell what you can not spare. There is no exception to the rule of three. As your income is to your expenditure, so will the amount of your debts be to the cash in your pocket. He is poor whose expenses exceed his income. Money and time have both their value. He who makes a bad use of one will never make a good use of the other.

Economizing one’s means with the mere object of hoarding is a very mean thing; but economizing for the purpose of being independent is one of the soundest indications of manly character; and when practiced with the object of providing for those who are dependent upon us, it assumes quite a noble aspect. A good father gave his son this advice: “While I wish you to be comfortable in every respect, I can not too strongly inculcate economy. It is a necessary virtue to all; and however the shallow part of mankind may despise it, it certainly leads to independence, which is a grand object to every man of a high spirit. The following lines of Burns contain the right idea:

“Not for to hide it in ahedge,
Nor for a train attendant.
But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent.”

Every man ought so to contrive as to live within his means. This practice is of the very essence of honesty. For if a man do not manage honestly to live within his own means, he must necessarily be living dishonestly upon the means of somebody else. Those who are careless about personal expenditure, and consider merely their own gratification, without regard for the comfort of others, generally find out the real uses of money when it is too late. Though by nature generous, these thriftless persons are often driven in the end to do very shabby things. They dawdle with their money as with their time; draw bills upon the future; anticipate their earnings; and are thus under the necessity of dragging after them a load of debts and obligations which seriously affect their action as free and independent men. The loose cash which many persons throw away uselessly, and worse, would often form a basis of fortune and independence for life. These wasters are their own worst enemies, though generally found among the ranks of those who rail at the injustice of “the world.” But if a man will not be his own friend, how can he expect that others will? Orderly men of moderate means have always something left in their pockets to help others; whereas your prodigal and careless fellows who spend all never find an opportunity for helping any body.  It is poor economy, however to be a scrub. Narrow-mindedness in living and in dealing is generally short-sighted, and leads to failure. The penny soul, it is said, never came to two-pence. Generosity and liberality, like honesty, prove the best policy after all. Though Jenkinson, in the “Vicar of Wakefield,” cheated his kind hearted neighbor Flamborough in one way or another every year, “Flamborough,” he says, “has been regularly growing in riches, while I have come to poverty and a jail.” And practical life abounds in cases of brilliant results from a course of generous and honest policy.

We don’t like stinginess, we don’t like economy, when it comes down to rags and starvation. We have no sympathy with the notion that the poor man should hitch himself to a post and stand still, while the rest of the world moves forward. It is no man’s duty to deny himself every amusement, every recreation, every comfort, that he may get rich. It is no man’s duty to make an iceberg of himself, to shut his eyes and ears to the sufferings of his fellows, and to deny himself the enjoyment that results from generous actions, merely that he may hoard wealth for his heirs to quarrel about. But there is an economy which is every man’s duty, and which is especially commendable in the man who struggles with poverty—an economy which is consistent with happiness, and which must be practiced if the poor man would secure independence. It is almost every man’s privilege, and it becomes his duty, to live within his means; not to, but within them. Wealth does not make the man, we admit, and should never be taken into the account in our judgment of men; but competence should always be secured, when it can be, by the practice of economy and self-denial only to a tolerable extent. It should be secured, not so much for others to look upon, or to raise us in the estimation of others, as to secure the consciousness of independence, and the constant satisfaction which is derived from its acquirement and possession.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. What the world calls avarice is oftentimes no more than compulsory economy: and even a willful penuriousness is better than a wasteful extravagance. A just man, being reproached with parsimony, said that he would rather enrich his enemies after his death than borrow of his friends in his lifetime. A man is not so likely to deserve or win the blessing of his children by giving them much as by teaching them how to live on little. Economy in our affairs has the same effect upon our fortunes that good breeding has on our conversation. He that hath no money needeth no purse. Be rather bountiful, than expensive. If your means suit not your ends, pursue those ends which suit your means. Feel a noble pride in living within your means, then you will not be hustled off to a hospital in your last sickness.

The first part of economy is to do your peculiar work; the second to do it by system. “It has been computed,” says Dr. Franklin, “by some political arithmetician, that if every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful, that labor would be sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life, want and misery would be banished out of the world, and the rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and pleasure.” Franklin once made to a young man the following offer: “Make a full estimate of all you owe, and of all that is owing you.  Reduce the same to a note. As fast as you can collect pay over to those you owe: —if you can not collect, renew your note every year and get the best security you can. Go to business diligently; be very economical in all things; discard all pride; be industrious; waste no idle moments; be faithful in your duty to God, by regular and hearty prayer morning and evering; attend to church and meeting regularly every Sunday; and do unto all men as you would they should do unto you. If you are too needy in circumstances to give to the poor, do whatever else may be in your power for them cheerfully, but if you can, always help the worthy poor and unfortunate. Pursue this course diligently and sincerely for seven years, and if you are not happy, comfortable and independent in your circumstances, come to me and I will pay your debts.

We are ruined, 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 can not buy. It is foolish to lay out money in purchase of repentance.

Lawrence, the millionaire merchant of Boston, said, I made fifteen hundred dollars the first year, and more than four thousand the second   Probably had I made four thousand the first year, I should have failed the second or third year.  I practiced a system of rigid economy, and never allowed myself to spend a fourpence for unnecessary objects until I had acquired it.  Silas Wright, with his estate of four thousand dollars, was really wealthier than many others are with one hundred thousand dollars. He owed no man anything; he met his obligations with the utmost promptness, and never indulged in any luxury he could not pay for. He was a model of republican simplicity. It should also be understood that he was not mean in saving money. There was something glorious in witnessing a great states man like Silas Wright never asking a pecuniary favor, or even accepting one, yet possessing only an income that could support him and his wife in frugality. When he was elected Governor of the great State of New York, he was known to be too poor to furnish his house. His rich friends got together, and, without his knowledge, made up a subscription, which was tendered to him as a gift, in order to furnish his mansion. This he respectfully but kindly declined, saying, with a true Roman grandeur, that he could not consent to receive such a favor from any one — even from his most esteemed friends; he was elected by the people to he Governor of the State of New York, and he considered it his imperative duty to live on whatever income the people had appended to that office; and he did live on that income while he was Governor, in good style, but with no ostentation. Such an example on the part of so eminent a man as he was, is one of those precious legacies that the young men of the present day should bear in mind—as no true greatness can ever be achieved so long as they are the pecuniary slaves of even their nearest friends. When a public man receives favors that he can not repay, he loses that sturdy independence so essential to usefulness and an enduring popularity. Live within your income, is more important to or who aims to be an influential and useful statesman, than any other maxim.

Simple industry and thrift will go far toward making any person of ordinary working faculty comparatively independent in his means. Almost every working man may be so, provided he will carefully husband his resources and watch the little outlets of useless expenditure. A penny is a very small matter, yet the comfort of thousands of families depends upon the proper saving and spending of pennies. If a man allows the little pennies, the result of his hard work, to slip out of his fingers—some to the beer-shop, some this way and some that—he will find that his life is little raised above one of mere animal drudgery. On the other hand, if he take care of the pennies,—putting some weekly into a benefit society or an insurance fund, others into a savings-bank, and confiding the rest to his wife to be carefully laid out, with a view to the comfortable maintenance and education of his family,—he will soon find that his attention to small matters will abundantly repay him, in increasing means, growing comfort at home and a mind comparatively free from fears as to the future. If a working man have high ambition and possess richness in spirit,—a kind of wealth which far transcends all mere worldly possessions,— he may not only help himself but be a profitable helper of others is his path through life.

What is frugality in the rich, may be extravagance in the poor: and on the contrary what is mere frugality in the poor, may be parsimony in the rich. Frugality is not incompatible with charity; for though sparing to self, it may be liberal to others, but parsimony denies both self and others.

When one is blessed with good sense, and fair opportunities, this spirit of economy is one of the most beneficial of all secular gifts, and takes high rank among the minor virtues. It is by this mysterious power 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!  Economy is not merely saving, still less, parsimony. It is foresight and arrangement. It is insight and combination. It is a subtile philosophy of things by which new uses, new compositions are discovered. It causes 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. Economy is generalship in little things. We know men who live better on a thousand dollars a year than others upon five thousand. We know very poor persons who bear about with them in everything a sense of fitness and nice arrangement, which make their life artistic. There are day-laborers who go home to more real comfort of neatness, arrangement, and prosperity, in their single snug room, than is found in the lordly dwellings of many millionaires. And blessings he on their good angels of economy, which wastes nothing, and yet is not sordid in saving; that lavishes nothing, and is not parsimonious in giving; that spreads out a little with the blessings of taste upon it, which, if it does not multiply the provision, more than makes it up in the pleasure given. Let no man despise economy.

When Christ had miraculously fed thousands with five loaves, he said to his disciples, “Gather up the fragments that remain, so that nothing be lost.” How strange this command, after such a display of power! They were to fill their baskets with broken bits of bread, though he whom they followed could make enough for thousands by the touch or the mere volition of his creative energy. The lesson is manifest. Economy is a Christian duty. We are not to expect miracles while we can succeed by a faithful use of means; we are to save even the fragments, because God has made them.

What an economist is Nature, so made by God! She economizes even the light that she so immensely possesses; catches it on the moon as a candle, after the sun has gone down, as we say, when he is but rising on other lands, and sends it inconceivably far to us from the stars. She economizes heat, equalizing it for the life and health of the whole world, by currents in the air and ocean of the electric fluid. She economizes water, to answer a thousand successive, important purposes, in a thousand different places, with the same drop. How nicely and carefully she sifts out its minutest portions from the briny sea, to cleanse the air and revive the plants at this season, to fill the springs, and paint the sky, and support all human life! How, with her elemental agencies, she crumbles and bears down the barren rock from the mountains and the hills, to fertilize for boundless crops the valley and the grain! How she makes the ashes even of the dead spring into grass, and blossom into flowers! How, applying the same economy to crude mineral, from the very gravel in the ground she distils a curious, delicate wash to protect the tender stalks of the growing grain: though you may not think what perhaps cuts your hand to bleeding in this varnish of flint.

How she saves every hair, particle, nail paring; and exhalation to turn it to some account. How she converts ice, and the snow that manures the poor man’s ground, into harvests of corn and wheat! How she nourishes her vegetable offspring, so that her animal may not hunger! The roots of a shrub, thirsty for a supply that had been drawn aside by an artificial channel, have been known, in their resolution not to be defrauded, to find their way to the aqueduct under ground, and bore a hole through its soft wooden plug, that every fibre might drink its fill, as was divinely intended. To one who looks with a careless view on nature, it seems as if everything with her was in extravagant excess. We quote the line about “many a flower born to blush unseen,” and we talk of the floods that are poured away to no purpose. But a closer inspection corrects this error, and shows how frugal her utility, and perfect her order, enough, but “no room to insert a particle,” however art may re-arrange her forms to educate and give scope to human powers.