Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness: Being a Series of Lectures to Youth of Both Sexes, on Character, Principles, Associates, Amusements, Religion, and MarriageAustin, John Mather
Philosophy
Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness: Being a Series of Lectures to Youth of Both Sexes, on Character, Principles, Associates, Amusements, Religion, and Marriage
Austin, John Mather
Conduct of life
"Through every grade of society this vice of inordinate expenditure
insinuates itself. The single man 'hired out' in the country at ten
to fifteen dollars per month, who contrives to dissolve his year's
earnings in frolics and fine clothes; the clerk who has three to
five hundred dollars a year, and melts down twenty to fifty of it
into liquor and cigars, are paralleled by the young merchant who
fills a spacious house with costly furniture, gives dinners, and
drives a fast horse, on the strength of the profits he expects to
realize when his goods are all sold and his notes all paid. Let a
man have a genius for spending, and whether his income is a dollar a
day or a dollar a minute, it is equally certain to prove inadequate.
If dining, wining, and party-giving won't help him through with it,
building, gaming, and speculation will be sure to. The bottomless
pocket will never fill, no matter how bounteous the stream pouring
into it. The man who (being single) does not save money on six
dollars a week, will not be apt to on sixty; and he who does not lay
up something in his first year of independent exertion, will be
pretty likely to wear a poor man's hair into his grave.
"No man who has the natural use of his faculties and his muscles,
has any right to tax others with the cost of his support, as this
class of non-financial gentlemen habitually do. It is their common
mistake to fancy that if a debt is only paid at last, the obligation
of the debtor is fulfilled; but the fact is not so. A man who sells
his property for another's promise to pay next week or next month,
and is compelled to wear out a pair of boots in running after his
due, which he finally gets after a year or two, is never really
paid. Very often, he has lost half the face of his demand, by not
having the money when he needed it, beside the cost and vexation of
running after it. There is just one way to pay an obligation in
full, and that is to pay it when due. He who keeps up a running
fight with bills and loans through life, is continually living on
other men's means, is a serious burden and a detriment to those who
deal with him, although his estate should finally pay every dollar
of his legal obligations.
"Inordinate expenditure is the cause of a great share of the crime
and consequent misery which devastate the world. The clerk who
spends more than he earns, is fast qualifying himself for a gambler
and a thief; the trader or mechanic who overruns his income, is very
certain to become in time a trickster and a cheat. Wherever you see
a man spending faster than he earns, there look out for villainy to
be developed, though it be the farthest thing possible from his
present thought.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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