The
more a man earned, the more he--or his wife--spent. I saw fathers and
mothers and their children dressed beyond their incomes. The
proportion of families who ran into debt was far greater than those who
saved. When a panic came, the families "pulled in"; when the panic was
over, they "let out." But the end of one year found them precisely
where they were at the close of the previous year, unless they were
deeper in debt.
It was in this atmosphere of prodigal expenditure and culpable waste
that I was to practise thrift: a fundamental in life! And it is into
this atmosphere that the foreign-born comes now, with every inducement
to spend and no encouragement to save. For as it was in the days of my
boyhood, so it is to-day--only worse. One need only go over the
experiences of the past two years, to compare the receipts of merchants
who cater to the working-classes and the statements of savings-banks
throughout the country, to read the story of how the foreign-born are
learning the habit of criminal wastefulness as taught them by the
American.
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