‘Very well,’ continued the physician, ‘I will just do the sum.’ He found that sixpence a day laid by for sixty years amounted, with compound interest, to three thousand two hundred and twenty-six pounds; and he said to the old carpenter: ‘My good man, instead of being a pauper, you might have been the possessor of three thousand two hundred and twenty-six pounds at this moment; in other words, you might have had one hundred and fifty pounds a year, or some three pounds a week, not by working an hour longer or doing anything differently, except by putting by the money that you have been spending day by day these sixty years on ale.’ The physician’s conclusion, however, should perhaps be modified by the consideration that if this man had ceased spending sixpence on beer, he might have required to spend a portion of that sixpence on an increased supply of food. But notwithstanding this, the physician’s argument is in the main a sound one. It is not ‘ologies’ that the working-classes require to be taught so much, as the right use of money and the good things that can be purchased with it. It often astonishes the rich to see the wasteful expenditure of the poor; but an explanation will be found in the caution which Dr Johnson gives to men who fancy that poor girls must necessarily make the most economical wives. ‘A woman of fortune,’ he says, ‘being used to the handling of money, spends it judiciously; but a woman who gets the command of money for the first time upon her marriage, has such a gust in spending, that she throws it away with great profusion.’ That was excellent advice also which Dr Johnson gave to Boswell, when the latter inherited his paternal estates. ‘You, dear sir, have now a new station, and have therefore new cares and new employments. Life, as Cowley seems to say, ought to resemble a well-ordered poem; of which one rule generally received is, that the exordium should be simple and should promise little. Begin your new course of life with the least show and the least expense possible; you may at pleasure increase both, but you cannot easily diminish them. Do not think your estate your own while any man can call upon you for money which you cannot pay; therefore begin with timorous parsimony. Let it be your first care not to be in any man’s debt.’ People beginning to keep house should be careful not to pitch their scale of expenditure higher than they can hope to continue it, and they should remember that, as Lord Bacon said, ‘it is less dishonourable to abridge petty charges than to stoop to petty gettings.’