There is an odd sort of innate privacy about money matters. Children are taught that it is ill-bred to open other peoples' pocketbooks or checkbooks, or to ask them what their possessions cost. As they grow up they find that business affairs are considered confidential, and that no honourable person investigates another's money affairs without some authority. It is desirable that these rules of honour should be preserved, and one simple way to help in this is to arrange that each member of the family has an allowance, if it is only five cents a week--an allowance for which he is responsible to himself alone. These allowances should go down in the family accounts as "Allowances," the details belong to the individual. The members of families in which this arrangement is made should conscientiously keep their private expenses within the amount agreed upon, for allowances not only teach the right of individual privacy, they teach that old and difficult lesson that "you can't eat your cake and have it too";--that one can't have marbles and candy the same week. An allowance also supplies each person with something to give away, which is really his to give. He may not have earned it by work, but he has earned it by going without something he would have liked to spend it for. There is yet another purpose which allowances serve. They help to prevent the failure of a plan of expenditure. For they keep a strict and careful plan from becoming a galling chain. They prevent the absorption of personal privacy and freedom by the regulations of the family as a group against which the individual, sooner or later, invariably rebels. "The Tenth" is that part of the family income, more or less than an actual tenth, which is given away. It is not mine to offer advice as to the size or use of this division. I merely emphasize its necessity. It is the small thing, which keeps meanness and bitterness out of the management of scanty means, and selfishness and brutality out of the management of ample means. Establish a give-away division in your plan, for the sake of your own disposition, if you are not urged to it by any other consideration. Next to this division, which is considered the generous division, comes one which has a less agreeable reputation, but undeservedly--"Savings." Many people who will say giving is a good thing, will deny that saving is. And is it? Why? What is it for? It is to provide those who suffer adversity, or who live to old age, against becoming a "public charge"; or against dependence upon relatives and friends. There is a fine honour in not taking the risk of these things. One ought to be willing to struggle hard and self-denyingly to save oneself and one's family from becoming burdens to other people.