"How did you acquire your great fortune?" asked a friend of Lampis, the shipowner. "My great fortune, easily," was the reply, "my small one, by dint of exertion."
Four years from the time Marshall Field left the rocky New England farm to seek his fortune in Chicago he was admitted as a partner in the firm of Coaley, Farwell & Co. The only reason the modest young man gave, to explain his promotion when he had neither backing, wealth, nor influence, was that he saved his money.
If a man will begin at the age of twenty and lay by twenty-six cents every working day, investing at seven per cent. compound interest, he will have thirty-two thousand dollars when he is seventy years old. Twenty cents a day is no unusual expenditure for beer or cigars, yet in fifty years it would easily amount to twenty thousand dollars. Even a saving of one dollar a week from the date of one's majority would give him one thousand dollars for each of the last ten of the allotted years of life. "What maintains one vice would bring up two children."
Such rigid economy, such high courage, enables one to surprise the world with gifts even if he is poor. In fact, the poor and the middle classes give most in the aggregate to missions and hospitals and to the poor. Only frugality enables them to outdo the rich on their own ground.
But miserliness or avariciousness is a different thing from economy. The miserly is the miserable man, who hoards money from a love of it. A miser who spends a cent upon himself where another would spend a quarter does it from parsimony, which is a subordinate characteristic of avarice. Of this the following is an illustration: "True, I should like some soup, but I have no appetite for the meat," said the dying Ostervalde; "what is to become of that? It will be a sad waste." And so the rich Paris banker would not let his servant buy meat for broth.
A writer on political economy tells of the mishaps resulting from a broken latch on a farmyard gate. Every one going through would shut the gate, but as the latch would not hold it, it would swing open with every breeze. One day a pig ran out into the woods. Every one on the farm went to help get him back. A gardener jumped over a ditch to stop the pig, and sprained his ankle so badly as to be confined to his bed for two weeks. When the cook returned, she found that her linen, left to dry at the fire, was all badly scorched. The dairymaid in her excitement left the cows untied, and one of them broke the leg of a colt. The gardener lost several hours of valuable time. Yet a new latch would not have cost five cents.