not to increase the field of personal activity, but, on the contrary, to restrict it. The natural tendency is towards ease rather than action. But as soon as men find out that ease begets indifference and indolence amounting to atrophy, and leading at last to a cessation of the ordinary powers of enjoyment, and that action is a spur to the faculties, making them more alive, more sensitive, and more susceptible to enthusiasm and appreciation, they will be on their guard against the snares and wiles that beset the path of everyone who makes a special business of smoothing away all the roughness in his domestic and social surroundings. Spending money to save oneself trouble often produces trouble and worry of a different and very likely more vexatious kind, and at the same time reduces by that much the good effects on the character produced by a certain amount of bracing discipline and general tightening of the reins of conduct. Precisely in the same way as reducing hygienic or physical exercise diminishes muscular efficiency. The recurring sense of accomplishment, however trivial and apparently insignificant that accomplishment may be, is invigorating to the nature and of enduring value. As Carlyle says in one of his letters to his future wife: “Let us not despond in the life of honourable toil which lies before us. Do you not think that when you on one side of our household shall have faithfully gone through your housewife’s duties, and I on the other shall have written my allotted pages, we shall meet over our frugal meal with far happier and prouder hearts than thousands that are not blessed with any duty and whose agony is the bitterest of all, ‘the agony of a too easy bed’?” It is too much to ask that everyone should at once recognise what sort of expenditure will really be repaying and fill their lives with genuine happiness and what is only empty, disappointing, and superfluous. But they are wrong when they suppose, as they so often do, that they are suffering from want of money; and they are wrong in believing that more money will cure their discontent. The problem for them is more than half solved once they come to realise that they are showing themselves to be incapable of the responsibility they already possess, and that more money would only mean an increase of responsibilities without any fresh acquisition of knowledge as to how to discharge them. All around them they observe an implicit obedience in small matters as well as great to what we may call the law of gain. They join in obeying this law, which is nothing more than an artificial convention of an ill-organised society.