ife. My family had come from a land (the
Netherlands) noted for its thrift; but we had been in the United States
only a few days before the realization came home strongly to my father
and mother that they had brought their children to a land of waste.

Where the Dutchman saved, the American wasted. There was waste, and
the most prodigal waste, on every hand. In every street-car and on
every ferry-boat the floors and seats were littered with newspapers
that had been read and thrown away or left behind. If I went to a
grocery store to buy a peck of potatoes, and a potato rolled off the
heaping measure, the groceryman, instead of picking it up, kicked it
into the gutter for the wheels of his wagon to run over. The butcher's
waste filled my mother's soul with dismay. If I bought a scuttle of
coal at the corner grocery, the coal that missed the scuttle, instead
of being shovelled up and put back into the bin, was swept into the
street. My young eyes quickly saw this; in the evening I gathered up
the coal thus swept away, and during the course of a week I collected a
scuttleful. The first time my mother saw the garbage pail of a family
almost as poor as our own, with the wife and husband constantly
complaining that they could not get along, she could scarcely believe
her eyes. A half pan of hominy of the preceding day's breakfast lay in
the pail next to a third of a loaf of bread. In later years, when I
saw, daily, a scow loaded with the garbage of Brooklyn householders
being towed through New York harbor out to sea, it was an easy
calculation that what was thrown away in a week's time from Brooklyn
homes would feed the poor of the Netherlands.

At school, I quickly learned that to "save money" was to be "stingy";
as a young man, I soon found that the American disliked the word
"economy," and on every hand as plenty grew spending grew. There was
literally nothing in American life to teach me thrift or economy;
everything to teach me to spend and to waste.

I saw men who had earned good salaries in their prime, reach the years
of incapacity as dependents. I saw families on every hand either
living quite up to their means or beyond them; rarely within them. The
more a man earned, the more he--or his wife--spent. I saw fathers and
mothers and their children dressed beyond their incomes. The
proportion of families who ran into debt was far greater than those who
saved. When a panic came, the families "pulled in"