enching of her
expenses, and not at the same time to retrench his own; seeing that
keeping horses and high company is every way as great and expensive, and
as necessary to be abated, as any of the family extravagances, let them
be which they will.

All this relates to the duty of a tradesman in preventing his family
expenses being ruinous to his business; but the true method to prevent
all this, and never to let it come so far, is still, as I said before,
not to marry too soon; not to marry, till by a frugal industrious
management of his trade in the beginning, he has laid a foundation for
maintaining a wife, and bringing up a family, and has made an essay by
which he knows what he can and cannot do, and also before he has laid up
and increased his stock, that he may not cripple his fortune at first,
and be ruined before he has begun to thrive.

FOOTNOTES:

[22] [Defoe's views on the subject of the too early marrying of young
tradesmen, are in every particular sound. Though there are instances of
premature marriages followed by no evil result, but rather the contrary,
there can be no doubt, that the only prudent course is to wait till a
settlement in life, and a regular income, have been secured. A young
man, anxious for other reasons to marry, is sometimes heard to express
his conviction that he might live more cheaply married than single.
There could be no assertion more inconsistent with all common
experience. Even if no positively ruinous consequences arise from an
over-early marriage, it almost always occasions much hardship. It
saddens a period of life which nature has designed to be peculiarly
cheerful. The whole life of such a man becomes like a year in which
there has been no May or June. The grave cares of matrimony do not
appear to be naturally suitable to the human character, till the man has
approached his thirtieth, and the woman her twenty-fourth year.]

CHAPTER XII

OF THE TRADESMAN'S LEAVING HIS BUSINESS TO SERVANTS

It is the ordinary excuse of the gentlemen tradesmen of our times, that
they have good servants, and that therefore they take more liberty to be
out of their business, than they would otherwise do. 'Oh!' says the
shopkeeper, 'I have an apprentice--it is an estate to have such a
servant. I am as safe in him as if I had my eye upon the business from
morning till night; let me be where I will, I am always satisfied he is
at home; if I am at the tavern, I am sure he is in the cou