Before the pace of living started on its now annually accelerated speed, a man could forecast with reasonable certainty what income would enable him to maintain his relative position in his stratum of society for the fifteen or twenty years of life that might be left to him when he retired. Now, apart from other factors, an invention one year means a luxury on the market in another two or three, and that luxury becomes a necessity, like the automobile, in another three or four. In a recent study of the income and expenses of nearly a hundred families of the members of the faculty of the University of California it is shown that the average savings per family including life insurance are $360. The annual cost of medical service alone among them is $325. A New York professional man who considered this article, when read to him, unduly pessimistic, admitted that although he lives on a scale indicated by his rent of $2500 a year he is unable to save anything. The surprising extent to which the hope and even the thought of providing for old age has gone from the mind of the moderately well-to-do was still further shown by this man’s comment that life insurance was the equivalent of savings. Life insurance is excellent and essential, but only in its more expensive forms does it permit the insurer himself to enjoy the benefits of it, and straight life policies are not complete protection for one’s own old age. Even if one insures against accident, sickness, and death, there are many emergencies in life which can be met only from one’s own saved money. Is it any wonder that there has been a rush in the last decade for common stocks and speculation when the newspapers continually tell of[Pg 47] stupendous profits (and advance in “values” of nearly two and a half billions in one month alone), when business leaders decry thrift, and the cost of living gives us a kick from behind? Even the President of the United States and the Secretary of the Treasury encourage the people to speculate, and in the New York Times I read that the Mellon family made $300,000,000 in a year. I know many men who have large salaries and many who have accumulated fortunes but I do not know a single one who has accumulated more than the merest competency except from gift, inheritance, or advances in stocks. For some years the stock market may have been an ever-present help in time of need to many, but stocks cannot continue to the end of our lives to climb an endless escalator; and as one looks forward to an eternal making of money to buy an endless succession of new things, or even merely of new “models,” one wonders whether the “highest standard ever attained” is really worth all it costs and whether if Wordsworth could to-day see the richest nation in the world he would not be more than ever convinced that “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” Yet still the high-powered sales forces urge “buy, buy, buy and make yourselves and everybody prosperous