Poor people cannot save, and ought not to try. Spending is not only a first necessity but a first duty. Nine people out of ten have not enough money to spend on themselves and their families; and to preach saving to them is not only foolish but wicked. Schoolmistresses are already complaining that the encouragement held out by Building Societies to poor parents to buy their own houses has led to the underfeeding of their children. Fortunately most of the poor neither save nor try to. All the spare money invested in the Savings Banks and Building Societies and Co-operative Societies and Savings Certificates, though it sounds very imposing when it is totalled up into hundreds of millions, and all credited to the working classes, is such a mere fleabite compared to the total sums invested that its poor owners would gain greatly by throwing it into the common stock if the capital owned by the rich were thrown in at the same time. The great bulk of British capital, the capital that matters, is the spare money of those who have more than enough to live on. It saves itself without any privation to the owner. The only question is, what is to be done with it? The answer is, keep it for a rainy day: you may want it yet. This is simple; but suppose it will not keep! Of course Treasury notes will keep; and Bank notes will keep; and metal coins will keep: and cheque books will keep; and entries of sums of money in the ledgers in the bank will keep safely enough. But these things are only legal claims to the goods we need, chiefly food. Food, we know, will not keep. And what good will spare money be to us when the food it represents has gone rotten? The Intelligent Woman, when she realizes that money really means the things that money can buy, and that the most important of these things are perishable, will see that spare money cannot be saved: it must be spent at once. It is only the Very Simple Woman who puts her spare money into an old stocking and hides it under a loose board in the floor. She thinks that money is always money. But she is quite wrong in this. It is true that gold coins will always be worth the metal they are made of; but in Europe at present gold coins are not to be had: there is nothing but paper money; and within the last few years we have seen English paper money fall in value until a shilling would buy no more than could be bought for sixpence before the war, whilst on the Continent a thousand pounds would not buy a postage stamp, and notes for fifty thousand pounds would hardly pay a tram fare. People who thought themselves and their children provided for for life were reduced to destitution all over Europe; and even in England women left comfortably-off by insurances made by their fathers found themselves barely able to get along by the hardest pinching. That was what came of putting their trust in money.