I now allude to those financial harassments which have been a marked feature of the home founded and managed by Mr. Smith, who has been eternally worried about money. The children have grown up in this atmosphere of fiscal anxiety, accustomed to the everlasting question whether ends will meet; accustomed to the everlasting debate whether a certain thing can be afforded. And nearly every house in the street where the Smiths live is in the same case.
Why is this? Is it that incomes are lower and commodities and taxes higher in England than in other large European countries? No; the contrary is the fact. In no large European country will money go so far as in England. Is it that the English race is deficient in financial skill? England is the only large European country which genuinely balances its national budget every year and regularly liquidates its debts.
I wish to hint to Mr. Smith that he differs in one very important respect from the Mr. Smith of France, and the Mr. Smith of Germany, his only serious rivals. In the matter of money, he always asks himself, not how little he can spend, but how much he can spend. At the end of a lifetime the result is apparent. Or when he has a daughter to marry off, the result is apparent. In England economy is a virtue. In France, for example, it is merely a habit.
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Mr. Smith is extravagant. He has an extravagant way of looking at life. On his own plane Mr. Smith is a haughty nobleman of old days; he is royal; he is a born hangman of expense.
“What?” cries Mr. Smith, furiousi. “Me extravagant! Why, I have always been most careful! I have had to be, with my income!”
He may protest. But I am right. The very tone with which he says: “With my income!” gives Mr. Smith away. What is the matter with Mr. Smith’s income? Has it been less than the average? Not at all. The only thing that is the matter with Mr. Smith’s income is that he has never accepted it as a hard, prosaic fact. He has always pretended that it was a magic income, with which miracles could be performed. He has always been trying to pour two pints and a gill out of a quart pot. He has always hoped that luck would befall him. On a hundred and fifty a year he ever endeavoured to live as though he had two hundred. And so on, as his income increased.
When he married he began by taking the highest-rented house that he could possibly afford, instead of the cheapest that he could possibly do with, and he has been going on ever since in the same style—creating an effect, cutting a figure.
This system of living, the English system, has indubitable advantages. It encourages enterprise and prevents fossilisation. It gives dramatic interest to existence. And, after all, though at the age of 50 Mr. Smith possesses little beside a houseful of furniture and his insurance policy, he can say that he has had something for his money every year and every day of the year. He can truthfully say, when charged with having “eaten his cake,” that a cake is a futile thing till it is eaten.
The French system has disadvantages. The French Mr. Smith does not try to make money, he tries merely to save it. He shrinks from the perils of enterprise. He does not want to create. He frequently becomes parsimonious, and he may postpone the attempt to get some fun out of life until he is past the capacity for fun.