the
other, it is extremely difficult for a poor man to walk straight.
Illicit gain does not merely mean gain that brings a man within the
range of the criminal law. Many of its forms escape legal and perhaps
social censure, and may be even sanctioned by custom. A competence,
whether small or large, is no sure preservative against that appetite
for gain which becomes one of the most powerful and insatiable of
passions. But it at least diminishes temptation. It takes away the
pressure of want under which so many natures that were once
substantially honest have broken down.

In the expenditure of money there is usually a great deal of the
conventional, the factitious, the purely ostentatious, but we are here
dealing with the most serious realities of life. There are few or no
elements of happiness and character more important than those I have
indicated, and a small competence conduces powerfully to them. Let no
man therefore despise it, for if wisely used it is one of the most real
blessings of life. It is of course only within the reach of a small
minority, but the number might easily be much larger than it is. Often
when it is inherited in early youth it is scattered in one or two years
of gambling and dissipation, followed by a lifetime of regret. In other
cases it crumbles away in a generation, for it is made an excuse for a
life of idleness, and when children multiply or misfortunes arrive, what
was once a competence becomes nothing more than bare necessity. In a
still larger number of cases many of its advantages are lost because men
at once adopt a scale of living fully equal to their income. A man who
with one house would be a wealthy man, finds life with two houses a
constant struggle. A set of habits is acquired, a scale or standard of
luxury is adopted, which at once sweeps away the margin of superfluity.
Riches or poverty depend not merely on the amount of our possessions,
but quite as much on the regulation of our desires, and the full
advantages of competence are only felt when men begin by settling their
scheme of life on a scale materially within their income. When the great
lines of expenditure are thus wisely and frugally established, they can
command a wide latitude and much ease in dealing with the smaller ones.

It is of course true that the power of a man thus to regulate his
expenditure is by no means absolute. The position in society in which a
man is born brings with it certain conventionalities