Use and Abuse of Money.

REV. WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D.D.

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HAT shall we do with our money-with what we inherit, with what is given to us, with what we earn? How shall we use it? What principles shall guide us in keeping it, or in parting with it?

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I have put these questions to several wise men and women of my acquaintance, and I have received various replies. Spend less than your income," answers one sententiously, "even if your income be very small." This may be said to be the first principle of personal economy. No man's life can have any comfort or peace in it until he has learned to build on this good foundation. He who lives by this rule may know what self-respect is, and what is independence, and what is manliness; he who despises this rule is always at war with himself, and is often subjected to unspeakable humiliation and embarrassment.

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"Early learn the lesson of frugality," answers a merchant. I have now in mind a number of men, some of whom I have employed, who, to my knowledge, have earned enough to have lived well, and at the same time to have made themselves possessors of good homes, and who to-day are miserably poor, simply because they never learned to save."

This is not a deep saying, but it has a broad application. I have had plenty of opportunity to verify it, in a ministry extending over thirty years, in several towns and cities, with a large number of poor families always under my eye-families with whose habits and circumstances I have been, of course,

much more familiar than most of their neighbors were likely to be. It is the result of my observation that the greater proportion of the poverty of this country is due to foolish habits of spending money. You may often find two families of equal income and equal necessary expenses, one of which will be well-fed, well-clad, and well-housed, with a slowly growing surplus in the savings bank; while the other will be always destitute, and poverty-stricken, and often knocking at the poormaster's back door. The difference is solely due to the fact that the one family expends its income wisely, and the other squanders its income on all manner of small luxuries and diversions.

Most of the poverty of this country is the fruit of extravagance. Nine hundred millions of dollars are expended every year for intoxicating liquors. Of this certainly one-fourth must be spent by the men who work for wages. Putting aside the physical and moral injury occasioned by strong drink, the extravagance of this expenditure is deplorable. If alcohol is a food, as some physiologists maintain, the amount of nutrition contained in it is infinitesimal. It must be classed as a luxury. The same thing must be said of tobacco. And when we know that the people who work for wages spend probably four hundred millions a year on these two luxuries, the voice of their complaint loses much of its impressiveness.

I write these words in the midst of a vigorous effort, on the part of the benevolent people of my own city, to meet and relieve the destitution existing among us. We are told that there are some thousands of families for which charitable aid must be provided. Yet I dare say that if all the money which has been expended during the last year by these families for strong drink and tobacco were now in their hands, half of them, at least, would be able to pull through this depression without aid, and without serious discomfort. I have not dared to say so much as this to my neighbors who are organizing this relief work, for I do not wish to dampen their enthusiasm ; but I am as sure of it as I can be of anything. There is another

fact to which I have not thought it wise to call the attention of my neighbors at this juncture. A pretty well informed man, who knows quite a number of our liquor dealers, told me the other day that the universal testimony of these gentlemen is that their business is not suffering in this depression. Such facts are very discouraging to men of good will who wish to do what they can for the improvement of the condition of the wage workers.

There is, however, a great deal of extravagant expenditure, aside from the money which goes for strong drink and tobacco -expenditure which is simply foolish or childish-for the gratification of a silly vanity or a morbid craving. And the extravagant people in this country are not all working people; those who never earned a cent in their lives are apt to be utterly unprincipled in their use of money; young people in school and college, and the idle and dangerous classes who inhabit the avenues and throng the watering places, very often exhibit a plentiful lack of intelligence and conscience in their dealings with money. The reckless use of money is characteristic of Americans; in no land is it gained so easily; in no land is it flung away so profusely. Our young people early become addicted to this vice of extravagance; it is a vice by which myriads are ruined.

Money furnishes a constant test of character. He who uses it wisely; who spends it when he ought to spend it and saves it when he ought to save it; who gets money's worth for it, in the truest sense, when he parts with it, and makes it always serve his highest interests,-to him money is an unspeakable good. In spending money rationally many of your best powers come into play, your foresight, your judgment, your conscience, your benevolence.

Give one young man a thousand dollars a year to spend, and he will gain largely by the expenditure. In the first place he will have something precious and permanent in the way of material possessions to show for it at the end of the year-good books, choice pictures, useful furniture, and, perhaps, certain

instruments of culture, such as microscopes or natural history specimens, by which his future improvement will be assisted. But this is the smallest part of his gain. He has accustomed himself, day by day, to use his judgment in buying or in refusing to buy; in considering what was needful and judicious expenditure; his will has gained firmness; his moral sense has been educated in resisting temptation; in every way his character has been solidified and broadened. The value of this kind of discipline is quite beyond estimation. It is by just such a regimen that the sturdy virtues are nourished and confirmed.

Give another young man one thousand dollars a year to spend, and he will lose heavily by the expenditure. At the end of the year he will have nothing left to show for his money except a few partly worn garments, swiftly going out of fashion, and a few valueless trinkets; his money has gone for livery bills and suppers and cigars and theater tickets and all sorts of fooleries; he has been ruled, in all this outlay, not by his reason and his judgment, but by his appetites, his vanities, his lower cravings; every day he has known that the money was going foolishly, and he has cursed himself for making such improvident and unproductive use of it; and these weak selfindulgences have steadily lowered his self-respect and confused his judgment and enfeebled his will. Let me tell you, young men, that there is a great deal of manhood to be gained or lost in the spending of your money!

The duty and discipline of saving is a more familiar theme to you; you get well lectured about that, and some of you need all you get, and more. The importance of keeping your expenses within your income and of accumulating thus, by your prudence, some capital for business and some reserves for a rainy day—all this is not to be gainsaid. You ought to be saving something every year; and if you do not begin now there is danger that you never will begin. The habit of living up to and beyond his income is a habit that grows on a man; and it makes little difference whether his income is one dollar a day or ten dollars a day; the man who spends the whole of the

smaller sum will, in nine cases out of ten, spend the whole of the larger sum when he gets it, and run in debt in the bargain. The habit of saving is one that you ought to form at once; and there is good discipline in that, as you have often been told.

But I want you to see that there is also good discipline to be gained in spending money; in wisely using it, as well as in keeping it. You can buy with a small income, if you know how to handle it, something better than rubies, something more precious than fine gold,-yea, durable riches and righteousness.

There is only one word to add. The right use of money implies not only prudence and economy, but also benevolence. No man in this world rightly liveth unto himself. Money is power, and all power is for service. Every man is under obligation to use his money not only productively but also beneficently. Some of your best gains will come through giving. No man gets more money's worth for what he spends than he who knows that his outlay has gone to relieve suffering, or to give help and comfort and happiness to his fellow men. If you never spend any money except for your own benefit-unless you can see that it is coming back to yourself in some form of personal satisfaction-your money will be a curse to you, I care not how you get it. So far as your own soul is concerned, you might just as well be a miser and hoard it all, as to spend it all, no matter how shrewdly, and put no love into the spending.