year gathered an aggregate of eighty million dollars, getting it almost wholly from the gudgeons who bit at their hooks hoping to get rich thereby.

The Louisiana Lottery took in millions of dollars from its dupes, who sent it to them in driblets of a dollar or less, the contributors being to a great extent the laboring men and women of the country. Reference has already been made to the great waste caused by the drink and tobacco habits. If now you add to these the improvident expenditures for luxuries of food, of clothing, of amusements, and kindred extravagances, the waste becomes incalculable, and one need not wonder that so many are poor. I am not speaking of the extravagance of men who have inherited enormous fortunes, like the present Rothschilds, one of which family paid in 1890 one hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars for an old historic clock not worth for service as much as a Waterbury watch, or of that other man of wealth who, at the Siston library sale in 1884, paid fifteen thousand dollars for a Mazarine Bible that was not nearly so good as the seventy-five cent ones of the American Bible Society, nor of the "swells" who pay twenty-six thousand dollars a year for a suite of rooms and board at some of the famous hotels in New York. And yet those rich spendthrifts were not a whit more extravagant in their way than multitudes of working men are in theirs. It is true that the wealth of the world is very unequally divided. But if it was equally divided among men and women to-day, inequality would begin among them before the sun set. Their acquired or inherited appetites, passions, prejudices, and habits would soon produce as great inequality The same waste would produce the same poverty.

What huge sums of money are now being wasted by the laboring man through his "brotherhoods" and their frequent "strikes" and "lockouts!" And he has continued it for generations, and always with the same disastrous results. The guilds and brotherhoods of the Middle Ages had precisely the same paralyzing effect on prosperity as those of to-day have, and for the same reason, namely, they sought to make their

power felt through the "strikes" alone, thus scaring enterprise and capital, and, by stopping production and trade, impoverishing themselves. If, instead of interfering with the inception and management of industries they did not and could not originate, and cannot manage successfully because of a lack of training or ability, they were to exert their power to insure stability of industry rather than to prevent it, they would be immensely better off. Why should not these industrial combinations that so often beggar rather than enrich their members by wasting their capital (i. e. dues, fees, and labor) invest it in industrial enterprises themselves, and likewise become the much denounced and much envied capitalist? In proportion as they feel the risks, anxieties, and hopes, and see the difficulties to be encountered and overcome in order to gain success, in that proportion will they learn that it takes more intelligence profitably to employ muscle, and more wisdom successfully to save and invest its products, than it does to labor with one's hands alone. Good profits, if they came, would show them the conditions for successful ventures; and the losses that are sure in some way to come through the incompetency or dishonesty of others, would show them how dependent all men are on each other's well-doing and well-being, both for their daily bread and for profits for their toil.

Capital is only one of the tools that thinking men use in originating their designs and carrying on their enterprises. It takes a higher order of brain to develop and conduct the business, the commerce, and the inventions of the day, than to work at the loom or the forge. Such a brain must watch for opportunities of investment, devise plans to take advantage of them, provide the means to do it, calculate the costs, determine the risks and overcome them, and on the doing it successfully depends all the laborer's work and wages. The laborer's wages are his wealth, and that wealth stands on precisely the same footing as all other forms of wealth do; and, like them, depends on the general prosperity and advancement in intelligence and culture of society.

Some day the laboring man will learn that his monopoly of labor by means of "strikes" is just as disastrous as any other monoply, and that he himself is responsible for many a collapsed industry, many an abandoned enterprise, and much of the idle capital he complains of, which would be invested for mutual good, if his "strikes" did not make capital timid. No false teaching can be of any real value to anyone, and the sooner the man of to-day accepts it as a fact that his existence, his advancement in society, and his increase in wealth depend upon his intelligence, industry, and freedom from vicious associations and habits, and the wise use he makes of his opportunities, the better it will be for him and for the world.

Ignorance is waste. Vice is waste. Sin is waste. The universe is made up of little savings of atoms. This old earth is but the saving of particles of sand and rock and mineral. The great seas are but the savings of tiny drops of vapor. Your wealth, if you get it, is made up of little savings. More than one man's fortune has been due to the first five dollars he put into the savings bank. More than one rich manufacturer will tell you that his wealth came to him by what most persons would call petty savings of materials, or of time. I would by no means have you penurious, neither is it needful to gnaw morality to the bone as some are doing in order to get rich.

The great reason why you and I should be saving is not merely that by so doing we shall increase our store of wealth, and so increase our comforts and happiness, and add to the welfare of the world, but our habits are made, like savings, by little acts, and these habits form characters, and character is the only possession which we take with us to the next world. It is a dreadful thing to bid farewell to this life either as a miser or a spendthrift. Happy is he who gets all the money he honestly, honorably, can, spends it liberally for his own and others' welfare while he lives, and leaves it without regret when his stewardship of it is at an end. Such a man can walk the streets of the New Jerusalem without having to shudder at the thought of a former deep debasement to that city's paving materials.

Use and Abuse of Money.

REV. WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D.D.

HAT shall we do with our money-with what we inherit, with what is given to us, with what we earn?

WT

How

shall we use it? What principles shall guide us in keeping it, or in parting with it?

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.

"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."

I

This is not a deep saying, but it has a broad application. 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