[THRIFT.]
By CHARLES KINGSLEY.
A Lecture for Women.
Consider that word thrift. If you will look at Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, or if you know your Shakspere, you will see that thrift signified originally profits, gain, riches gotten—in a word, the marks of a man’s thriving.
How, then, did the word thrift get to mean parsimony, frugality, the opposite of waste? Just in the same way as economy—which, first, of course, meant the management of a household—got to mean also the opposite of waste.
It was found that in commerce, in husbandry, in any process, in fact, men throve in proportion as they saved their capital, their material, their force.
Now this is a great law which runs through life; one of those laws of nature—call them, rather, laws of God—which apply not merely to political economy, to commerce, and to mechanics; but to physiology, to society; to the intellect, to the heart, of every person in this room.