25 FEBRUARY 1865, Page 11

PRIVATE ACCOUNTS.

THE Duke of Sutherland is obviously a little amused by the fuss the circular to his tradesmen has created, and has stepped -forward again, this time openly in the character of aristocratic Mentor. In a letter to the Times, published on Tuesday, he tells the employing world in a series of italicized apophthegms how to defeat their servants' habit of extortion and their tradesmen's tendency to connivance. They are to send written orders and ask for the vouchers back, to have those vouchers countersigned by the servant who takes in the goods, to see the order-book "daily, or when convenient," and in short, to keep careful household accounts It is very sensible advice, and open only to this one criticism —that it is of very little use to the classes principally aggrieved. It is all very well for Dukes, or people without strawberry-leaves but with incomes ranging from ten thousand a year upwards, to keep very etriet accounts, for they have not to do the work theais They are in the position of business men with clerks to take tedium off their shoulders. There is always in great establishments a secretary, or a steward, or a "led-captain," or a Ur. Fothergill of some kind, quite willing and well qualified to take all that trouble off the paymaster's hands, but what is the average householder, with an income ranging from 500/. to 5,0001., to do? He certainly will not keep strict accounts of his whole expenditure, and if his wife keeps her share they will be very often unintelligible, and always so im- perfect as to supply no real and trustworthy check upon his outlay. Something must be allowed, even when a Duke is teaching us all from a golden stump, for the weaknesses of English human nature, and among them is this inability to keep private accounts. As a rule no- body keeps them, and the few exceptions who prove the rule do it with a sense of obedience to duty deep enough to diminish greatly their reserve of moral-force. They are like people who get up early "on principle," and consider themselves entitled thereby to be disagreeable for all the rest of the day. The annoyance of keeping accounts is very much greater than that of enduring a well-regulated and decent amount of plunder. Women have usually time, and pencils lying about, and a deficiency of mental perspec- tive as to the comparative importance of occupations, but the man who tries it soon wearies. Weekly accounts are for him a delusion, for he forgets half the orders be gives, and all the money he spends except that shilling to the barkeeper, and could no more tell how much he has wasted on cabs than how many ounces of sulphur London gas-burners have poured on his plate. He must, to do it properly, do it daily, and he won't do it daily. Daily means for him every evening, and every evening the worrys of finding the book, and remembering the totals, and being quizzed by his wife for his little wastefulnesses, and feeling as if he were the most extravagant of mankind increases on him till at last he accepts the Duke's odd alternative, looks at the accounts "when convenient," and finds that the only convenient day is the day on which his banker's account makes him fancy himself half ruined. Then he will look sharp enough, and finally decide that too many scrubbing-brushes have been bought, and that his wife's milliner is really intolerable, but after the fractious fit,—which a wise wife will meet by offering to change wax for composition, or something else which would save sixpence a twelvemonth,—the .accounts are no better kept than before.

Is it quite so certain that they should be? We are inclined to suspect that as society is now organized in great towns the opinion in favour of private accounts,—for though nobody keeps them everybody admires those who pretend to do it,—is a mere super- stition. People are deceived by a false analogy between private and business accounts. A tradesman who did not keep his books would probably soon be in trouble—though Messrs. Coleman, Turquand, and Young's clerks could probably give some odd information on that point—but a tradesman's books have a mean- ing which private account-books have not. If well kept they really afford some inkling of the whole state of affairs, which house- hold books never do. Their main object is to remind the trades- man of the wasting away of his stock and the sums he is to receive to supply the deficiencies, but private books never show either loss or liabilities. Nobody puts down his income except under legal pressure, or his bank balance, or the bills that will come in at Christmas, or anything else that has the smallest real bearing on his affairs. He would not do it even if he thought of it, lest the servants should find his book lying about, and he does not as a rule think of it. His object is to put down the items of his cash outlay, and those only, &process utterly delusive, and serving only, like any other troublesome process, as an opiate to the economical conscience. What is the use of gravely recording—tailor so many pounds, cab hire so many shillings, charity so many pence, when there are the inilliner's bill, and the coachmaker's little account, and the poor relation's supplication all left out, and all just as sure to come in ? The wife's book is useful to her because it consists only of pay- ments which ought week by week to bear some comparison with previous ones, but the husband's is simply a fret, telling him nothing worth knowing, and keeping up a perpetual recognition of that process of bleeding money which people with incomes have in great towns to submit to, happy if only the hour of exhaustion never comes. Worry, or, as the country folk call it in their much more racy dialect, " worrit," is something in the balance even against economy, and as against mere book-keeping weighs it utterly down. Of course real book-keeping might be useful, and men might if they chose keep their household books as complete as the books of a business, but if they 41,.. we cannot wish them joy of their lives. They will find book-keeping without clerks an occu- pation only to be compared in tedium with listening to music one does not understand, and will probably end as a business friend of ours once did. His notion of the end of business was not a bank balance but books, and when in the Bankruptcy Court the Com- missioner complimented him on his accounts he came out quite radiant, and rather disposed to exult over people so " unbusineas- like" that they cared about nothing but profit.

But surely there must be accounts even in private houses ? Cer- tainly there must, and let the banker who understands how to keep them properly, keep them for you. The man who, having more than three hundred a year, does not keep a banking account dos not deserve to be solvent. That datum once granted, every- thing is easy, accounts included. Let the sufferer who wants to be thrifty and cannot bear domestic arithmetic, i. e., five English income-tax payers out of every six, first allowance himself for his personal petty outlay, and then pay every account, his wife's weekly requirements included, by cheque payable only to order. If the sum is less than a pound let his wife pay it, but over that let him pay by cheque, and cheque only. He need have no shame- facedness about the number of his drafts presented at the bank, for the advantage is not on his side. The calm impudence with which bankers keep and use a few thousands of small accounts, amounting in the aggregate to millions, as if they were doing a favour to their customers by refusing them interest, is impudence merely, never to be encouraged except when the bank takes trouble off those customers' hands. Let the householder examine that bank book once a month, and he will know far more about his affairs than any book he is likely to keep accurately will teach him, for he will have the business data, receipts, expenses, stock, and waste of stock. Most men know pretty nearly their own income and the dates on which it comes in, and the bank book will show every- thing else—wife's demands, sums paid to tradesmen, and sum left to get along with until the next day of receipt. But liabilities? Why should he have any ? There is no reason whatever why any man sol- vent and living in a city should ever have a bill running for more than a week. Tradesmen are only too delighted to find that a customer means ready money, and serve him better in fifty ways, the most ac- ceptable one being that he gets a distinct preference in his choice of the goods, and is never put off with unsaleable stock. The very few items which, like rent and taxes, cannot be paid weekly are fixed amounts, as easily remembered as the income. With weekly pay- ments, a fixed allowance for the husband's waste, a cheque to the wife instead of cash, and cheques to everybody else, private accounts become a worrying delusion. If the middle-clam man has the nerve to go one step further and mount his establishment on a scale just one-third less than he can well afford, he may go on through life free from three-fourths of the pecuniary annoyances which make up so large a portion of English household trials. We do not mean that he should save the money unless he needs it. He may spend it, but the difference between his stated income and inevitable expenditure will always keep him easy. "It is not," said an old lady one day, "it is not the house, my dear, which ruins me, or the carriage, or the servants ; it is the scrub .brushes, my dear !" and most men, interpreting the scrub-brushes merely as the accidental demands which always recur, will think that old lady wise.