The Art of Living. Grant Robert
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can possibly do without. Here the people who are said to have too much for their own good have an advantage over the rest of us. The future of their children is secure. If they dread death it is not because they fear to leave their wives and children unprovided for. Many of them go on saving, just the same, and talk poor if a railroad lowers a dividend, or there is not a ready market for their real estate at an exalted profit. Are there more irritating men or women in the world than the over-conservative persons of large means who are perpetually harping on saving, and worrying lest they may not be able to put by for a rainy day, as they call it, twenty-five per cent. or more of their annual income? The capitalist, careworn by solicitude of this sort, is the one fool in creation who is not entitled to some morsel of pity.
How much ought the rest of us to save? I know a man – now you do not know him, and there is no use in racking your brains to discover who he is, which seems to be a principal motive for reading books nowadays, as though we writers had a cabinet photograph in our mind’s eye whenever we took a pen in hand. I know a man who divides his income into parts. “All Gaul is divided into three parts,” you will remember we read in the classics. Well, my friend, whom we will call Julius Cæsar for convenience and mystification, divides his income, on the first of January, into a certain number of parts or portions. He and his wife have a very absorbing and earnest pow-wow over it annually. They take the matter very seriously, and burn the midnight oil in the sober endeavor to map and figure out in advance a wise and unselfish exhibit. So much and no more for rent, so much for servants, so much for household supplies, so much for clothes, so much for amusements, so much for charity, so much to meet unlooked-for contingencies, and so much for investment. By the time the exhibit is finished it is mathematically and ethically irreproachable, and, what is more, Julius Cæsar and his wife live up to it so faithfully that they are sure to have some eight or ten dollars to the good on the morning of December thirty-first, which they commonly expend in a pair of canvas-back ducks and a bottle of champagne, for which they pay cash, in reward for their own virtue and to enable them at the stroke of midnight to submit to their own consciences a trial balance accurate to a cent.
Now it should be stated that Mr. and Mrs. Julius Cæsar are not very busy people in other respects, and that their annual income, which is fifteen thousand dollars, and chiefly rent from improved real estate in the hands of a trustee, flows on as regularly and surely as a river. Wherefore it might perhaps be argued, if one were disposed to be sardonic, that this arithmetical system of life under the circumstances savors of a fad, and that Julius and his wife take themselves and their occupation a trifle too seriously, especially as they have both been known to inform, solemnly and augustly, more than one acquaintance who was struggling for a living, that it is every one’s duty to lay up at least one-tenth of his income and give at least another tenth in charity. And yet, when one has ceased to smile at the antics of this pair, the consciousness remains that they are right in their practice of foresight and arithmetical apportioning, and that one who would live wisely should, if possible, decide in advance how much he intends to give to the poor or put into the bank. Otherwise he is morally, or rather immorally, certain to spend everything, and to suffer disagreeable qualms instead of enjoying canvas-back ducks and a bottle of champagne on December thirty-first.
As to what that much or little to be given and to be saved shall be, there is more room for discussion. Julius Cæsar and his wife have declared in favor of a tenth for each, which in their case means fifteen hundred dollars given, and fifteen hundred dollars saved, which leaves them a net income of twelve thousand dollars to spend, and they have no children. I am inclined to think that if every man with ten thousand dollars a year and a family were to give away three hundred dollars, and prudently invest seven hundred dollars, charity would not suffer so long as at present, and would be no less kind. Unquestionably those of us who come out on December thirty-first just even, or eight or nine dollars behind instead of ahead, and would have been able to spend a thousand or two more, are the ones who find charity and saving so difficult. Our friends who are said to have too much for their own good help to found a hospital or send a deserving youth through college without winking. It costs them merely the trouble of signing a check. But it behooves those who have only four instead of forty times as much as Rogers, if they wish to do their share in relieving the needs of others, to do so promptly and systematically before the fine edge of the good resolutions formed on the first of January is dulled by the pressure of a steadily depleted bank account, and a steadily increasing array of bills. Charity, indeed, is more difficult for us to practise than saving, for the simplest method of saving, life insurance, is enforced by the “stand and deliver” argument of an annual premium. Only he, who before the first crocus thrusts its gentle head above the winter’s snow has sent his check to the needy, and who can conscientiously hang upon his office door “Fully insured; life insurance agents need not apply,” is in a position to face with a calm mind the fall of the leaf and the December days when conscience, quickened by the dying year, inquires what we have done for our neighbor, and how the wife and the little ones would fare if we should be cut down in the strength of our manhood.
And yet, too, important as saving is, there are so many things which we must have for the sake of this same wife and the little ones that we cannot afford to save too much. Are we to toil and moil all our days, go without fresh butter and never take six weeks in Europe or Japan because we wish to make sure that our sons and daughters will be amply provided for, as the obituary notices put it? Some men with daughters only have a craze of saving so that this one earthly life becomes a rasping, worrying ordeal, which is only too apt to find an end in the coolness of a premature grave. My friend Perkins – here is another chance, identity seekers, to wonder who Perkins really is – the father of four girls, is a thin, nervous lawyer, who ought to take a proper vacation every summer; but he rarely does, and the reason seems to be that he is saddled by the idea that to bring a girl up in luxury and leave her with anything less than five thousand dollars a year is a piece of paternal brutality. It seems to me that a father ought in the first place to remember that some girls marry. I reminded Perkins of this one day. “Some don’t,” he answered mournfully. “Marriage does not run in the female Perkins line. The chances are that two of my four will never marry. They might be able to get along, if they lived together and were careful, on seven thousand dollars a year, and I must leave them that somehow.” “Hoot toot,” said I, “that seems to me nonsense. Don’t let the spectre of decayed gentlewomen hound you into dyspepsia or Bright’s disease, but give yourself a chance and trust to your girls to look out for themselves. There are so many things for women to do now besides marry or pot jam, that a fond father ought to let his nervous system recuperate now and then.”
“I suppose you mean that they might become teachers or physicians or hospital nurses or typewriters,” said Perkins. “Declined with thanks.”
“Don’t you think,” I inquired with a little irritation, “that they would be happier so than in doing nothing on a fixed income, in simply being mildly cultivated and philanthropic on dividends, in moving to the sea-side in summer and back again in the autumn, and in dying at the last of some fashionable ailment?”
“No, I don’t,” said Perkins. “Do you?”
Were I to repeat my answer to this inquiry I should be inviting a discussion on woman, which is not in place at this stage of our reflections. Let me say, though, that I am still of the opinion that Perkins ought to give his nervous system a chance and not worry so much about his daughters.
II
Seeing that there are so many things to have and that we cannot have everything, what are we to choose? I have sometimes, while trudging along in the sleighing season, noticed that many men, whose income I believe to be much smaller than mine, were able to ride behind fast trotters in fur overcoats. The reason upon reflection was obvious to me. Men of a certain class regard a diamond pin, a fur overcoat, and a fast horse as the first necessaries of existence after a bed, a hair-brush and one maid-of-all-work. In other words, they are willing to live in an inexpensive locality, with no regard to plumbing, society, or art, to have their food dropped upon the table, and to let their wives and daughters live with shopping as the one bright spot in the month’s horizon, if only they, the husbands and fathers, can satisfy the three-headed ruling ambition in question. The men to whom I am referring have not the moral or æsthetic tone of Rogers and myself, and belong to quite a distinct class of society from