relation of fitness. The strong, divinely nourished common sense of our fathers perceived this, and they husbanded as earnestly as they prayed. They could give up all for a cause, and take no thought for the morrow, if the occasion required, but they knew how to discriminate between the rare occasion of total self-sacrifice and the conduct of every-day life. Consequently thrift early got a strong hold.

New England has had two great inspiring minds, Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. Far apart in spirit and character, they formed a grand unity in their influence. One taught religion, the other thrift; one clarified theology, the other taught the people how to get on. Edwards tided New England over the infidelity that prevailed in the last century; Franklin created the wealth that feeds society to-day by inspiring a passion for thrift. Hence, for a century, irreligion and beggary were equally a reproach, and still in no country in the world is the latter held so vile.

But these two formative influences are evidently waning. Nor is it to be altogether regretted. Both were too austere to be perpetually healthful; neither regarded the breadth and scope of human nature. The danger is lest the ebb be excessive, and its method be exchanged for others not so sure and wholesome. Thrift pertains to details. It is alike our glory and our fault that we are impatient of details. Our courage prompts to risks, our large-mindedness invites to great undertakings; both somewhat adverse to thrift, -one essentially, and the other practically, because great undertakings are for the few, while thrift is for all. Large enterprises make the few rich, but the majority prosper only through the carefulness and detail of thrift. To speak of it as a Scylla and Charybdis voyage, — while shunning the jaws

of waste, there is danger of drifting upon the rocks of meanness. I say frankly, if either fate is to befall us, I would rather it were not the last.

I begin by insisting on the importance of having money. Speculate and preach about it as we will, the great factor in society is money. As the universe of worlds needs some common force like gravitation to hold them together and keep them apart, so society requires some dominating passion or purpose to hold its members in mutual relations. Money answers this end. Without some such general purpose or passion, society would be chaotic; men could not work together, could achieve no common results, could have no common standards of virtue and attainment. Bulwer says: "Never treat money affairs with levity; money is character." And indeed character for the most part is determined by one's relation to money. Find out how one gets, saves, spends, gives, lends, borrows, and bequeathes money, and you have the character of the man in full outline. "If one does all these wisely," says Henry Taylor, "it would almost argue a perfect man."

Nearly all the virtues play about the use of money, honesty, justice, generosity, charity, frugality, forethought, self-sacrifice. The poor man is called to certain great and strenuous virtues, but he has not the full field of conduct open to him as it is to the man of wealth. He may undergo a very deep and valuable discipline, but he will not get the full training that a rich man may. St. Paul compassed the matter in knowing how to abound as well as how to suffer want. Poverty is a limitation all the way through; it is good only as in all evil there is "a soul of goodness." Mr. Jarvis says, "Among the poor there is less vital force, a lower tone of life, more ill health, more weakness, more early death."

If poverty is our lot, we must bear it bravely, and contend against its chilling and stifling influences; but we are not to think of it as good, or in any way except as something to be avoided or got rid of, if honor and honesty permit it. I wish I could fill every young man who reads these pages with an utter dread and horror of poverty. I wish I could make you so feel its shame, its constraint, its bitterness, that you would make vows against it. You would then read patiently what I shall say of thrift. You may already have a sufficiently ill opinion of poverty, but you may not understand that one is already poverty-stricken if his habits are not thrifty. Every day I see young men - well dressed, with full purses and something of inheritance awaiting them as plainly foredoomed to poverty as if its rags hung about them.

The secret of thrift is forethought. Its process is saving for use; it involves also judicious spending. The thrifty man saves: savings require investments in stable and remunerative forms; hence that order and condition of things that we call civilization, which does not exist until one generation passes on the results of its labors and savings to the next.

Thus thrift underlies civilization as well as personal prosperity. The moment it ceases to act society retrogrades towards savagery, the main feature of which is absence of forethought. A spendthrift or idler is essentially a savage: a generation of them would throw society back into barbarism. There is a large number of young chiefly to be found in cities who rise from their beds at eleven or twelve; breakfast in a club-house; idle away the afternoon in walking or driving; spend a part of the evening with their families, the rest at some place of amusement or in meeting the engagements of society,

men

bringing up at the club-house or some gambling den or place of worse repute; and early in the morning betake themselves to bed again. They do no work; they read but little; they have no religion; they are as a class vicious. I depict them simply to classify them. These men are essentially savages. Except in some slight matters of taste and custom, they are precisely the individuals Stanley found in Central Africa, with some advantages in favor of the African.

The chief distinction between civilization and barbarism turns on thrift. Thrift is the builder of society. Thrift redeems man from savagery.

What are its methods?

(1.) I name the first in one word, -save. Thrift has no rule so imperative and without exception. If you have an allowance, teach yourself on no account to exhaust it. The margin between income and expenditure is sacred ground, and must not be touched except for weightiest reasons. But if you are earning a salary,it matters not how small, plan to save some part of it. you receive seventy-five cents per day, live on seventy; if one dollar, spend but ninety; you save thirty dollars a year, enough to put you into the category of civilization. But he who spends all must not complain if we set him down logically a savage. Your saving is but little, but it represents a feeling and a purpose, and, small as it is, it divides a true from a spurious manhood.

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Life in its last analysis is a struggle. The main question for us all is, Which is getting the advantage, self or the world? When one is simply holding his own, spending all he earns, and has nothing between himself and this "rough world," he is in a fair way to be worsted in the battle. He inevitably grows weaker, while the pitiless world keeps to its pitch of heavy exaction.

There is a sense of strength and advantage springing from however slight gains essential to manly character.

It is a great part of this battle of life to keep a good heart. The prevailing mood of the poor is that of sadness. Their gayety is forced and fitful. Their drinking habits are the cause and result of their poverty. There is no repose, no sense of adequacy, no freedom, after one has waked up to the fact that he is poor. It takes but little to redeem one from this feeling. The spirit and purpose of saving thrift change the whole color of life.

It can hardly be expected that you will look ahead twenty or forty years, and realize the actual stings of poverty and the sharper stings of thriftless habits; but it may be expected that you will see why it is wiser and more manly to save than to spend. There is a certain fascinating glamor about the young man who spends freely; whose purse is always open, whether deep or shallow; who is always ready to foot the bills; who says yes to every proposal, and produces the money. I have known such in the past, but as I meet them now I find them quite as ready to foot the bills, but generally unable to do so. I have noticed also that the givers, and the benefactors of society, had no such youthhood. This popular and fascinating young man is in reality a very poor creature; very interesting he may be in the matter of drinks, and billiards, and theater tickets, and sleighrides, and clothes, and club-rates; but when he earns five or eight or ten hundred dollars a year and spends it chiefly in this way, would charity itself call him anything but a fool? The boys hail him a royal good fellow, and the girls pet him, but who respects him?

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I do not write of him with any hope of bettering him; he is of the class of whom it is said that an experience in a mortar would be a failure. I speak to a higher grade