THE SEAMY SIDE OF THRIFT.
"Yet sure of qualities deserving praise, More go to ruin fortunes than to raise."
THIS sentiment of Pope's is truly English. Certainly the majority of Englishmen see the quality of thrift with the seamy side uppermost, and regard it as an expedient rather than a virtue. We have most of us a sneaking admiration for carelessness. Waste strikes us less unpleasantly than stingi- ness, and we say to ourselves that time and thought may be wasted as well as money and advantage, and we dislike to see
any inadequate consideration given to trifles. One of the great uses of virtue is to foster love, admiration, and emula- tion in the beholder. Perhaps the extent to which any virtue has power to do this is a test of its greatness. Thrift wakes no such response in the mind of the average Englishman. He can imagine a perfect character without it ; indeed, in describing an ideal character he would hardly impute it. Circumstances alone, he believes, render it necessary. He would not go so far as seriously to class it among "the vices useful in daily life." But in cynical mood he would laugh to hear it enumerated with them.
But if the point of view we have been describing is the commonest and most natural one for an Englishman, the virtue of thrift is not without its devotees in this country. There are those who would lead us to suppose that if once it can be firmly rooted in the national character it will supply the place of all the virtues,—temperance, energy, independence, self-respect, and no one knows how many others besides. Those who worship at its shrine hold up to our admiration the clean German towns and the prosperous French villages. They tell us of housewives who can cook a palatable dinner out. of nothing, and save out of an income on which an Englishman can barely weather a fortnight's enforced idleness. For our- selves, while we incline to Pope's opinion rather than to that of the thrift-loving minority, honesty constrains us to admit that this minority have something on their side. It cannot be denied that the great squalor-destroying principle is thrift, and that squalor is at this moment a disease which threatens the national well-being. If we could store thrift like oxygen, and pump exactly the right amount into any given "mean street," its aspect would be wholly changed. In a month the aspect of that street, inside and outside the houses, would show more improvement than the most perfect system of local government could accomplish in a year. But how hard it is to pump it into an Englishman. It goes against the genius of the people. He is constitutionally untluifty, and the superficial appearance of his town life is for that very reason more ugly than that of any country in Europe. Yet perhaps it is in the light of this defect that we see most clearly the greatness of the English character.
It has often been said that the English Poor Law has destroyed the thrift of the English people. We are inclined to believe that this is true; but we believe also that it is thanks to the English Poor Law that we are what we are. The want of thrift comes largely from absence of fear,—and with absence of fear comes enterprise, and from enterprise the Empire. Certain defects are the corollaries of certain virtues. If the Englishman does not look forward or lay up for a rainy day, he has some great moral advantages to set against this obvious defect. He is almost wholly without sordid anxiety, and has leisure of mind for the simpler forms of aspiration which show themselves most often in a rough but practical sympathy. Those of us who love our country and our capital city would rather see Londoners dirty for ever, untlnifty for ever, even pauperised for ever, than see such a scene enacted in a London railway-station as took place the other day in Paris, when for the sake of a beggarly three-halfpence—to which, be it remembered, they had a just right—a crowd of Parisian workmen became deaf to the cries of their fellow-creatures suffocating in an underground station, and blocked the gangways in thrifty determination not to waste a third-class ticket. Such a thing could not have happened in London. The majority of poor people here are not sufficiently anxious about their pence to be in- different to an accident seen even from its dramatic side. The crowd would want too much to know what was going forward, if only from curiosity and apart from feelings of humanity. They are not taken up with the thought of gain. Any diversion is sufficient to call their attention from it, partly, as we believe, because they have for so many genera- tions been saved from the real terror of poverty, which is starvation. Truly the workhouse is not a pleasant place, and the poor are the last to exaggerate its amenity ; but to end one's days in a huge institution where one's physical well- being is considered to the extent of due attention to health does not impress the imagination as hunger and possible death impress it.
The Englishman has always known as he walked the tight- rope of extreme poverty that there is a net spread between him- self and the ground. To fall into that net is ignominious and uncomfortable, but the thought of it keeps him from trembling and leads willingly to adventure. What risks he chooses to take depends upon his character. If he wants to be lazy, he is lazy; but this is not the temptation of our people. If he wants to drink, he drinks ; if he wants to do a kindness, he does it; if he wants to try his luck and exchange a bird in the hand for two in the bush, he tries it ; and if any of these various things bring him to ruin, well—there is always the net. But, it may be said, surely it would have been better for him to have learned in the hard school of experience. We doubt it. No one can bring up a child on such a principle.
He cannot be allowed to experience the full consequence of all his imprudent actions. If such a system of education prevailed. for one wise man resulting from it we should get two broken-
spirited, cautious cowards. In Roman Catholic countries the religious duty of indiscriminate alms-giving has to some extent supplied the place of legal support for all who ask it; but it is a very partial substitute, and cripples the hands of charity by robbing it of reason.
But, it may be asked, what do you mean by leisure for aspira- tion ? Recent discoveries prove little enough aspiration in lower London. Apparently there is no spirituality among them, and certainly very little dogmatic religion. It is difficult to define what one means by spirituality, and not easy to say in what religion consists. Evidently the Londoner thinks little about systems of theology, far less than any of his bene- factors could wish. The present systems undoubtedly fail, for some, alas! unknown reason, to appeal to him, but it is not the "covetousness which is idolatry" that blinds his
eyes to their truth. The Charity Organisation Society, which encourages thrift, as it seems to us, upon the wisest lines,
keeping in mind the temper of the people, and not trying to crush a virtue under a defect, requires of those who apply for a pension that they should bring evidence of thrift. Evidence, however, of expensive kindness is counted as thrift,—for in- stance, the partial or entire support of some relation or friend, or the adoption or upbringing of a child; and it is astonish- ing how often this spiritual thrift has to be reckoned with.
Does this willingness to risk the workhouse for the sake of practical Christianity look like gross materialism ? To some sort of freedom from care the lower English do attain, and it is a great emancipation. This absence of anxiety is a very fine quality, a good ground for the seeds of the distinctively Christian virtues, and one in which envy will hardly grow. In England we have no class hatred, because we are really convinced that money is not the sole cause of happiness.
But if so many advantages accompany a want of thrift, is it not then a mistake to teach it P To ask this is to mis- apprehend our point. We would explain ourselves by a quotation from La Rochefoucauld :—" Some good qualities when natural degenerate into faults. For example, reason must make us sparing of our property and confidence, while, on the contrary, nature should give us a good heart and valour." Far be it from us to argue that an increase of thrift among the lower population is not infinitely desirable. All we would maintain is that a soil which does not naturally produce it is a soil which often produces far finer things. If by any effort we can induce thrift to grow here, well and good. It will never run riot in the uncongenial atmosphere of the English mind, and we think there is small cause for regret that in that mind it is not indigenous.
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