d then his wife, instead of
taking hold to help him earn a livelihood by doing her own work,
must have a hired servant to help her spend his limited earnings.
Ten years afterward, you will find him struggling on under a double
load of debts and children, wondering why the luck was always
against him, while his friends regret his unhappy destitution of
financial ability. Had they, from the first, been frank and honest,
he need not have been so unlucky.

"Through every grade of society this vice of inordinate expenditure
insinuates itself. The single man 'hired out' in the country at ten
to fifteen dollars per month, who contrives to dissolve his year's
earnings in frolics and fine clothes; the clerk who has three to
five hundred dollars a year, and melts down twenty to fifty of it
into liquor and cigars, are paralleled by the young merchant who
fills a spacious house with costly furniture, gives dinners, and
drives a fast horse, on the strength of the profits he expects to
realize when his goods are all sold and his notes all paid. Let a
man have a genius for spending, and whether his income is a dollar a
day or a dollar a minute, it is equally certain to prove inadequate.
If dining, wining, and party-giving won't help him through with it,
building, gaming, and speculation will be sure to. The bottomless
pocket will never fill, no matter how bounteous the stream pouring
into it. The man who (being single) does not save money on six
dollars a week, will not be apt to on sixty; and he who does not lay
up something in his first year of independent exertion, will be
pretty likely to wear a poor man's hair into his grave.

"No man who has the natural use of his faculties and his muscles,
has any right to tax others with the cost of his support, as this
class of non-financial gentlemen habitually do. It is their common
mistake to fancy that if a debt is only paid at last, the obligation
of the debtor is fulfilled; but the fact is not so. A man who sells
his property for another's promise to pay next week or next month,
and is compelled to wear out a pair of boots in running after his
due, which he finally gets after a year or two, is never really
paid. Very often, he has lost half the face of his demand, by not
having the money when he needed it, beside the cost and vexation of
running after it. There is just one way to pay an obligation in
full, and that is to pay it when due. He who keeps up a running
fight with bills and