The Golden Censer Part 6

[Ill.u.s.tration]

ECONOMY.

Behold there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand.

--I Kings, XVIII, 44.

Franklin says that, if you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher's stone. Cicero, many hundreds of years before Ben Franklin said: "Economy is of itself a great revenue,"

and another Roman writer put it still better when he said: "There is no gain so certain as that which arises from sparing what you have."

"Beware of small expenses," again writes Franklin; "a small leak will sink a great s.h.i.+p." In our large cities there are thousands of servant girls earning from two and a half to three dollars a week. The men who employ them often get from twenty-five to one hundred dollars per week, yet it is a notorious fact that the prudent servant girl usually has more money at her command, clear of all debts, than her employer, whose expenses sc.r.a.pe very closely against his income. Now you are on a salary in a store. Perhaps that salary is yours, to spend as you see fit. If so, remember that, like the highest officer in the land, you have certain duties. If you were President you could not appoint your old schoolmate Secretary of State unless he had made as much progress in politics as yourself. So, too,

IN YOUR MONEY MATTERS,

you cannot make yourself so valuable to your employer that he will not, before he advances you, inquire into your personal expenses, and find out what you do with your money. If you have spent it, year after year, as fast as you could get it, he will have great misgivings about letting you into a position where your desire to distribute currency can possibly lead you to practice on his funds. Among the easy ways to spend money in a small town is the habit of hiring livery-rigs. The business is just as useful as a drug-store, but no poor boy should hire equipages for mere pleasure. To attend a funeral, or to take a sick mother or sister out in the suns.h.i.+ne, is commendable. The youth who does that rarely needs the other suggestion, however, for those who spend the most money at a livery stable are usually seen with their mothers and sisters the least. No young man who thinks well of himself will enter a saloon at all. Often the worst cla.s.ses in the whole country frequent

RURAL SALOONS,

men who dare not walk through the streets of any of the large cities.

Perhaps at the card-table in the groggery across the street is a man who has come to your town to break into your employer's store! Anyway, there is no "business" in the world which returns so little for the money accepted as the saloon. Take

A GALLON OF WHISKY,

for instance. It is worth a dollar to a dollar and a half. It has been taxed ninety cents by the Government, leaving it worth that much less.

Well, now, a man is expected to go into a saloon, and, for about three tablespoonsful of this stuff, he pays ten cents in the town and fifteen cents in the city. Your news dealer pays eight cents for an ill.u.s.trated paper, and twenty-eight cents for a popular magazine. He sells the one for ten cents and the other for thirty-five cents, taking all the risk of not getting a sale. If you could afford to travel with such people as are found in saloons, in the first place, and to put such truly abominable stuff in your mouth in the second place, you could not, even then, in the third place, afford to give fifteen cents for what is in fact worth less than a mill. You are in reality giving away your money to the Government and the saloon keeper.

LET VANDERBILT SUPPORT THE GOVERNMENT,

and those who have made their fortunes and their bad habits the saloon-keeper. I have dwelt on this, because these are few young men who are not tempted. All the above applies to tobacco. It is an utterly obnoxious habit to use tobacco. It is the cause, together with the dough falsely called pastry, of all the dyspepsia in our climate. It ruins the eyes, it costs money in vast quant.i.ties, returning almost nothing in goods, and has but one redeeming feature that I know of--it is

JUST AS BAD ON MOTHS AS IT IS ON MEN,

and it makes a musty room smell a little better. If you can keep out of saloons and shooting galleries, you will not play billiards or cards--both very expensive--you will not use tobacco, and you will be less apt to go to dances and hire livery teams. Should you preserve yourself against these vices of our young men, you will have money without denying yourself clothes as handsome as a poor young man looks well in. Three short years' savings will put you in possession of a sum of money sufficient to set you to thinking about business for yourself, either with your employer or alone, for

LIFE IN AMERICA IS SHORT.

A man is a failure almost before he thinks he ought to have been considered as started. If you have been receiving small remuneration, be a.s.sured that a capital all the smaller is needed in your town. The market value of labor is the largest element in the problem of business.

If you worked cheap, then others will, and if they will, it is because living is cheap. The high-priced man in the city has to be paid highly because of his expenses, not because he has taken a vow to save a large amount of money. "He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father's wisdom than he that has a great deal left to him does to his father's care," says William Penn. "He is a good wagoner who can turn in a little room," says Bishop Hall. How many a man, in getting a costly home, has found that old Franklin was right when he said it was easier to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel. Therefore, when you get anything,

BEWARE IT ENTAILS LITTLE EXPENSE OF KEEPING.

A horse will eat you poor; a gun will cost you a hundred guns. Think of it when you buy them, and you will thereafter have no regrets, besides being less apt to make such purchases. "Gain may be temporary and uncertain," says Franklin, "but expense is constant and certain." "Not to be covetous is money; not to be a purchaser is income," says Cicero.

"A fool and his money are soon parted," says the adage. "Live by hope, and you will die by despair," says the Italian proverb. Save all you can honorably. Harness it up and make it pull also by bringing in to you a little interest. Here will be your first real business move--one of grave importance. The little cloud that ariseth out of the sea, like a man's hand, will soon cover your financial sky, and bring an abundant shower of the good things of this life.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

COURAGE.

I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.--Shakspeare.

Courage is adversity's lamp. Perhaps the young man's courage is more sorely tried than that of the man of middle age, for age dreads the whip of events, while youth champs their bit. Youth cannot endure the thought of a long siege. The ladders must be put against the walls, the breach must be clambered through, and if the citadel be strong, the rash onset will be repulsed with heavy loss. But Hope dotes on youth. The young are her flock, her fold, her children. Into the hands of her children she puts the scimitar of courage, and bids them go forth again. Let us suppose you have been cast down your ladder, and have little but your courage. It may be necessary to leave your pleasant little town and seek employment where men are used as machines--in the great cities. Such a fate is, indeed, a sad reverse. The safety of home, the magazines of moral ammunition stored all about you, the bomb-proofs against the sh.e.l.ls of soul-destruction aimed at every soldier in life, will all be torn from you, and you will be as a Knight of the Cross, alone on the desert. Perhaps

YOU HAVE REACHED THE GREAT CITY.

Now buckle on your armor. You do not need an intrepid courage, now; intrepid courage may have brought you here; intrepid courage is but a holiday kind of a virtue, to be seldom exercised, as experience will teach you. You need firmness to resist all kinds of attacks. You need good-nature, and yet you must repel temptation with a look as black as Erebus. You need affability, yet you must speak almost by rote, and the opportunities to keep from speaking outnumber the exigencies in which you must speak by ten to one. You must be tender, and yet you must be cruel as a surgeon. Without these opposites well balanced in your character, you will not fight the battle successfully.

NAPOLEON

won his battles by hurling ten thousand men upon two thousand. Simple, was it not? Now you are one young soldier. You will have to find a place in the enemy's lines which is even weaker than you before you can throw yourself against it with success. You, therefore, cannot be too circ.u.mspect. If the General pushes two thousand men against one thousand, on ground that is otherwise even, he is a wise leader, but if he finds four thousand enemies there, and if his princ.i.p.al attack is hazarded in the action, he is always accounted a daring fool. Let me recall

THE ATTACK OF A YOUNG MAN

who broke through the enemy's lines, in the City of Chicago. He got eight dollars a week in a city on the Mississippi River, and was led to believe that, if he went to Chicago, he could get ten dollars. He was employed as a clerk in a Commercial Agency, a business which aims to ascertain the standing and degree of success or lack of fortune of the retail dealers of the region it covers. He felt that eight dollars a week were all that he could ever get where he was. Upon his arrival in the City of Chicago he was put at work for seven dollars, the representations made to him having proven unreliable. There were about fifty young men and women in the same room. Seated at his desk when eight o'clock came, he found that his chances to rise were seemingly restricted to the hours of noon and six o'clock. In this way he worked for six months. He was fortunate enough to obtain board at five dollars a week, leaving him, after his was.h.i.+ng, perhaps a dollar and a quarter clear. To a man of twenty-five years who could see the real difficulties of his future, the need of a high quality of moral courage was urgent.

And he had it. He got acquainted with a humble friend, considerably better off, who therefore, could talk to him very bravely of the dignity of labor, and the honor of paying one's way, even if it took only five dollars and seventy-five cents to do it. This young friend did thus encourage and inspire the young clerk, and he was able to set about improving his mind.

HE READ THE BIBLE THROUGH

during this six months, and thus acquired a style of simple expression which would be of value to him in his reports when he should travel. He read Plutarch's Lives. He studied French, and read "The Man Who Laughs"

and "Paul and Virginia," two remarkably different works. You see he was a man of persistence. But such a mind finds the humiliation of a dollar and a quarter a week all the more bitter. A man conversing with Plutarch about the relative merits of Pompey and Lucullus, or of Marius and Sylla, dislikes to be

DOCKED THREE HOURS

for being ten minutes late, and dislikes to return to his landlady at the end of the week and give her five-sevenths of the whole spoil of Bythnia and the Propontis! One day the second a.s.sistant manager spoke to him, and this ray of hope lit his way to a seat on a high stool to write out "tickets" for merchants who send in to see about Blow & Co., of Bugleville. This gave him eight dollars a week, and enabled him to go to a theatre once in a while and hear

SHAKSPEARE'S PLAYS.

One night he approached his friend and announced that the die was cast, and that he should become an actor. Nothing could be worse than he was doing. Absolutely no business paid less than eight dollars per week, unless it were his own itself which had paid him seven dollars. It was a summer month. A theatre was empty. A dramatic agent had agreed to get up a company and run the place a week. It would require only twenty-five dollars from the young man. He would then be a sharer in the profits, would be given a minor part in the cast of characters, and would thereafter be secured