“It may be all very well for those who have investments to take time to extricate their capital from his grasp,” said Mrs. Sneyd; “but as for the builders and gardeners he employs, I think they would be wiser if they carried their labour where they might depend on a more lasting demand for it. Anybody may see that if he spends more every year in undoing what he did the year before, his substance must soon come to an end, and his labourers become his creditors. If I were they, I would rather go and build barns that are paid for by the preservation of the corn that is in them, and till fields that will maintain the labour of tillage, and set more to work next year, than turn round a fine house from south to west, and from west to south, and change shrubberies into lawns, and lawns into flower-gardens, knowing that such waste must come to an end.” “But some do not believe that it is waste, mother. They see the money that pays them still in existence, still going the round of the market; and they talk (as some people in England do about royal palaces, and spendthrift noblemen’s establishments) of the blessing of a liberal expenditure, and the patriotism of employing so much labour.” "Which would be all very well if the labourers lived upon the sight of the money they are paid with. But, as long as that money is changed many times over for bread and clothing, which all disappears in the process, it is difficult to make out that anything is gained but the pleasure,—which may be justifiable or not, according to the circumstances of the employers. In the end, the money remains as it was before, and instead of so much food and clothing, there is a royal palace. If you do not like your palace, and pull it down and rebuild it, the money exists as before, and for a double quantity of food and clothing, you still have a palace." “The wrong notion you speak of arises partly,” said Dr. Sneyd, “from a confusion between one sort of unproductive expenditure and another. People hear of its being a fine thing to employ a crowd of labourers in making a new line of road, or building a bridge, and they immediately suppose it must be a patriotic thing to employ a crowd of labourers in building any thing.” “I think they might perceive that, though corn does not grow on a high road, nor bridges yield manufactures, the value of corn lands may be doubled by opening a way to a new market, and that an unused water power may begin to yield wealth from the moment that there is a bridge over which buyers may come for it. It is a misfortune to Briery Creek that Temple is more of a selfish palace-fancier than a patriotic bridge and road maker.”