Abroad, as many of us know, the status of the matter is very different. There interest is figured in advance, and those who pay promptly get a handsome discount on the face of their bills. While this custom may seem to encourage debt, it is at least a mutual arrangement, and seems to have proved satisfactory, to judge from the fact that the fashionable tailors and dress-makers of London and Paris are apt to demur or shrug their shoulders at immediate payment, and to be rather embarrassingly grateful if their accounts are settled by the end of a year. No one would wish to change the national inclination of upright people on this side of the water to pay on the spot, but the master and mistress of an establishment may well consider whether the fashionable tradesmen ought to oblige them to bear the entire penalty of being sheep instead of goats. With this qualification, which is set forth rather as a caveat than a doctrine, the prompt payment of one’s bills seems to be strictly co-ordinate with virtue, and may be properly described as the corner-stone of wise modern living.
There are so many things which one has to have nowadays in order to be comfortable that it seems almost improvident to inquire how much one ought to save before facing the question of what one can possibly do without. Here the people who are said to have too much for their own good have an advantage over the rest of us. The future of their children is secure. If they dread death it is not because they fear to leave their wives and children unprovided for. Many of them go on saving, just the same, and talk poor if a railroad lowers a dividend, or there is not a ready market for their real estate at an exalted profit. Are there more irritating men or women in the world than the over-conservative persons of large means who are perpetually harping on saving, and worrying lest they may not be able to put by for a rainy day, as they call it, twenty-five per cent. or more of their annual income? The capitalist, careworn by solicitude of this sort, is the one fool in creation who is not entitled to some morsel of pity.
How much ought the rest of us to save? I know a man--now you do not know him, and there is no use in racking your brains to discover who he is, which seems to be a principal motive for reading books nowadays, as though we writers had a cabinet photograph in our mind’s eye whenever we took a pen in hand. I know a man who divides his income into parts. “All Gaul is divided into three parts,” you will remember we read in the classics. Well, my friend, whom we will call Julius Cæsar for convenience and mystification, divides his income, on the first of January, into a certain number of parts or portions. He and his wife have a very absorbing and earnest pow-wow over it annually. They take the matter very seriously, and burn the midnight oil in the sober endeavor to map and figure out in advance a wise and unselfish exhibit. So much and no more for rent, so much for servants, so much for household supplies, so much for clothes, so much for amusements, so much for charity, so much to meet unlooked-for contingencies, and so much for investment. By the time the exhibit is finished it is mathematically and ethically irreproachable, and, what is more, Julius Cæsar and his wife live up to it so faithfully that they are sure to have some eight or ten dollars to the good on the morning of December thirty-first, which they commonly expend in a pair of canvas-back ducks and a bottle of champagne, for which they pay cash, in reward for their own virtue and to enable them at the stroke of midnight to submit to their own consciences a trial balance accurate to a cent.