To use the common
phrase, it is apt to "burn a hole in his pocket." He may be easily
entrapped into company; and where his home provides but small comfort,
the public-house, with its bright fire, is always ready to welcome him.

It often happens that workmen lose their employment in "bad times."
Mercantile concerns become bankrupt, clerks are paid off, and servants
are dismissed when their masters can no longer employ them. If the
disemployed people have been in the habit of regularly consuming all
their salaries and wages, without laying anything by, their case is
about the most pitiable that can be imagined. But if they have saved
something, at home or in the savings bank, they will be enabled to break
their fall. They will obtain some breathing-time, before they again fall
into employment. Suppose they have as much as ten pounds saved. It may
seem a very little sum, yet in distress it amounts to much. It may even
prove a man's passport to future independence.

With ten pounds a workman might remove from one district to another
where employment is more abundant. With ten pounds, he might emigrate to
Canada or the United States, where his labour might be in request.
Without this little store of savings, he might be rooted to his native
spot, like a limpet to the rock. If a married man with a family, his ten
pounds would save his home from wreckage, and his household from
destitution. His ten pounds would keep the wolf from the door until
better times came round. Ten pounds would keep many a servant-girl from
ruin, give her time to recruit her health, perhaps wasted by hard work,
and enable her to look about for a suitable place, instead of rushing
into the first that offered.

We do not value money for its own sake, and we should be the last to
encourage a miserly desire to hoard amongst any class; but we cannot
help recognizing in money the means of life, the means of comfort, the
means of maintaining an honest independence. We would therefore
recommend every young man and every young woman to begin life by
learning to save; to lay up for the future a certain portion of every
week's earnings, be it little or much; to avoid consuming every week or
every year the earnings of that week or year; and we counsel them to do
this, as they would avoid the horrors of dependence, destitution, or
beggary. We would have men and women of every class able to help
themselves--relying upon their own resources--upon their own saving