Part 11 (1/2)
”'I shall just be ruined, madam, if that's the way you are going on. I can't afford to dress you and the girls in the style you have set up: look at this milliner's bill!'
”'I a.s.sure you,' says Mrs. Jones, 'we haven't got any more than the Stebbinses, nor so much.'
”'Don't you know that the Stebbinses are worth five times as much as ever I was?'
”No, Mrs. Jones did not know it: how should she, when her husband makes it a rule never to speak of his business to her, and she has not the remotest idea of his income?
”Thus mult.i.tudes of good, conscientious women and girls are extravagant from pure ignorance. The male provider allows bills to be run up in his name, and they have no earthly means of judging whether they are spending too much or too little, except the semi-annual hurricane which attends the coming in of these bills.
”The first essential in the practice of economy is a knowledge of one's income, and the man who refuses to accord to his wife and children this information has never any right to accuse them of extravagance, because he himself deprives them of that standard of comparison which is an indispensable requisite in economy. As early as possible in the education of children, they should pa.s.s from that state of irresponsible waiting to be provided for by parents, and be trusted with the spending of some fixed allowance, that they may learn prices and values, and have some notion of what money is actually worth and what it will bring. The simple fact of the possession of a fixed and definite income often suddenly transforms a giddy, extravagant girl into a care-taking, prudent little woman. Her allowance is her own; she begins to plan upon it,--to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and do numberless sums in her little head. She no longer buys everything she fancies; she deliberates, weighs, compares.
And now there is room for self-denial and generosity to come in. She can do without this article; she can furbish up some older possession to do duty a little longer, and give this money to some friend poorer than she; and ten to one the girl whose bills last year were four or five hundred finds herself bringing through this year creditably on a hundred and fifty. To be sure, she goes without numerous things which she used to have. From the standpoint of a fixed income she sees that these are impossible, and no more wants them than the green cheese of the moon. She learns to make her own taste and skill take the place of expensive purchases. She refits her hats and bonnets, retrims her dresses, and in a thousand busy, earnest, happy little ways sets herself to make the most of her small income.
”So the woman who has her definite allowance for housekeeping finds at once a hundred questions set at rest. Before it was not clear to her why she should not 'go and do likewise' in relation to every purchase made by her next neighbor. Now, there is a clear logic of proportion.
Certain things are evidently not to be thought of, though next neighbors do have them; and we must resign ourselves to find some other way of living.”
”My dear,” said my wife, ”I think there is a peculiar temptation in a life organized as ours is in America. There are here no settled cla.s.ses, with similar ratios of income. Mixed together in the same society, going to the same parties, and blended in daily neighborly intercourse, are families of the most opposite extremes in point of fortune. In England there is a very well understood expression, that people should not dress or live above their station; in America none will admit that they have any particular station, or that they can live above it. The principle of democratic equality unites in society people of the most diverse positions and means.
”Here, for instance, is a family like Dr. Selden's: an old and highly respected one, with an income of only two or three thousand; yet they are people universally sought for in society, and mingle in all the intercourse of life with merchant millionaires whose incomes are from ten to thirty thousand. Their sons and daughters go to the same schools, the same parties, and are thus constantly meeting upon terms of social equality.
”Now it seems to me that our danger does not lie in the great and evident expenses of our richer friends. We do not expect to have pineries, graperies, equipages, horses, diamonds,--we say openly and of course that we do not. Still, our expenses are constantly increased by the proximity of these things, unless we understand ourselves better than most people do. We don't, of course, expect to get a fifteen-hundred-dollar Cashmere, like Mrs. So-and-so, but we begin to look at hundred-dollar shawls and nibble about the hook. We don't expect sets of diamonds, but a diamond ring, a pair of solitaire diamond ear-rings, begin to be speculated about among the young people as among possibilities. We don't expect to carpet our house with Axminster and hang our windows with damask, but at least we must have Brussels and brocatelle,--it _would not do_ not to. And so we go on getting hundreds of things that we don't need, that have no real value except that they soothe our self-love; and for these inferior articles we pay a higher proportion of our income than our rich neighbor does for his better ones. Nothing is uglier than low-priced Cashmere shawls; and yet a young man just entering business will spend an eighth of a year's income to put one on his wife, and when he has put it there it only serves as a constant source of disquiet, for, now that the door is opened and Cashmere shawls are possible, she is consumed with envy at the superior ones constantly sported around her.
So, also, with point-lace, velvet dresses, and hundreds of things of that sort, which belong to a certain rate of income, and are absurd below it.”
”And yet, mamma, I heard Aunt Easygo say that velvet, point-lace, and Cashmere were the cheapest finery that could be bought, because they lasted a lifetime.”
”Aunt Easygo speaks from an income of ten thousand a year: they may be cheap for her rate of living; but for us, for example, by no magic of numbers can it be made to appear that it is cheaper to have the greatest bargain in the world in Cashmere, lace, and diamonds than not to have them at all. I never had a diamond, never wore a piece of point-lace, never had a velvet dress, and have been perfectly happy, and just as much respected as if I had. Who ever thought of objecting to me for not having them? n.o.body, that I ever heard.”
”Certainly not, mamma,” said Marianne.
”The thing I have always said to you girls is, that you were not to expect to live like richer people, not to begin to try, not to think or inquire about certain rates of expenditure, or take the first step in certain directions. We have moved on all our life after a very antiquated and old-fas.h.i.+oned mode. We have had our little, old-fas.h.i.+oned house, our little old-fas.h.i.+oned ways.”
”Except the parlor carpet, and what came of it, my dear,” said I mischievously.
”Yes, except the parlor carpet,” said my wife, with a conscious twinkle, ”and the things that came of it; there was a concession there, but one can't be wise always.”
”_We_ talked mamma into that,” said Jenny.
”But one thing is certain,” said my wife,--”that, though I have had an antiquated, plain house, and plain furniture, and plain dress, and not the beginning of a thing such as many of my neighbors have possessed, I have spent more money than many of them for real comforts. While I had young children, I kept more and better servants than many women who wore Cashmere and diamonds. I thought it better to pay extra wages to a really good, trusty woman who lived with me from year to year, and relieved me of some of my heaviest family cares, than to have ever so much lace locked away in my drawers. We always were able to go into the country to spend our summers, and to keep a good family horse and carriage for daily driving,--by which means we afforded, as a family, very poor patronage to the medical profession. Then we built our house, and, while we left out a great many expensive commonplaces that other people think they must have, we put in a profusion of bathing accommodations such as very few people think of having. There never was a time when we did not feel able to afford to do what was necessary to preserve or to restore health; and for this I always drew on the surplus fund laid up by my very unfas.h.i.+onable housekeeping and dressing.”
”Your mother has had,” said I, ”what is the great want in America, perfect independence of mind to go her own way without regard to the way others go. I think there is, for some reason, more false shame among Americans about economy than among Europeans. 'I cannot afford it' is more seldom heard among us. A young man beginning life, whose income may be from five to eight hundred a year, thinks it elegant and gallant to affect a careless air about money, especially among ladies,--to hand it out freely, and put back his change without counting it,--to wear a watch chain and studs and s.h.i.+rt-fronts like those of some young millionaire. None but the most expensive tailors, shoemakers, and hatters will do for him; and then he grumbles at the dearness of living, and declares that he cannot get along on his salary. The same is true of young girls, and of married men and women, too,--the whole of them are ashamed of economy. The cares that wear out life and health in many households are of a nature that cannot be cast on G.o.d, or met by any promise from the Bible: it is not care for 'food convenient,' or for comfortable raiment, but care to keep up false appearances, and to stretch a narrow income over the s.p.a.ce that can be covered only by a wider one.
”The poor widow in her narrow lodgings, with her monthly rent staring her hourly in the face, and her bread and meat and candles and meal all to be paid for on delivery or not obtained at all, may find comfort in the good old Book, reading of that other widow whose wasting measure of oil and last failing handful of meal were of such account before her Father in heaven that a prophet was sent to recruit them; and when customers do not pay, or wages are cut down, she can enter into her chamber, and, when she hath shut her door, present to her Father in heaven His sure promise that with the fowls of the air she shall be fed and with the lilies of the field she shall be clothed: but what promises are there for her who is racking her brains on the ways and means to provide as sumptuous an entertainment of oysters and champagne at her next party as her richer neighbor, or to compa.s.s that great bargain which shall give her a point-lace set almost as handsome as that of Mrs. Croesus, who has ten times her income?”
”But, papa,” said Marianne, with a twinge of that exacting sensitiveness by which the child is characterized, ”I think I am an economist, thanks to you and mamma, so far as knowing just what my income is, and keeping within it; but that does not satisfy me, and it seems that isn't all of economy; the question that haunts me is, Might I not make my little all do more and better than I do?”
”There,” said I, ”you have hit the broader and deeper signification of economy, which is, in fact, the science of _comparative values_. In its highest sense, economy is a just judgment of the comparative value of things,--money only the means of enabling one to express that value. This is the reason why the whole matter is so full of difficulty,--why every one criticises his neighbor in this regard.
Human beings are so various, the necessities of each are so different, they are made comfortable or uncomfortable by such opposite means, that the spending of other people's incomes must of necessity often look unwise from our standpoint. For this reason mult.i.tudes of people who cannot be accused of exceeding their incomes often seem to others to be spending them foolishly and extravagantly.”
”But is there no standard of value?” said Marianne.