“I own that I have not,” said he. “You know that when I began to till my ground, I had no more capital than was barely sufficient to fence and break up my fields, and feed me and my two labourers while my first crop was growing. Just before it ripened, I had nothing left; but what I had spent was well spent. It proved a productive consumption indeed; for my harvest brought back all I had spent, with increase. This increase was not idly consumed by me. I began to pay attention to my cattle, improved my farm buildings, set up a kiln, and employed a labourer in making bricks. The fruits of my harvest were thus all consumed; but they were again restored with increase. Then I thought I might begin to indulge myself with the enjoyment for which I had toiled so long and so hard. I did not labour merely to have so much corn in my barns, but to enjoy the corn, and whatever else it would bring me,—as we all do,—producing, distributing, and exchanging, that we may afterwards enjoy.”
“Not quite all, Mr. Arthur,” said Johnson, the lawyer. “There is your brother-in-law, Mr. Temple, who seems disposed to enjoy everything, without so much as soiling his fingers with gathering a peach. And there is a certain friend of ours, settled farther east, who toils like a horse, and lives like a beggar, that he may hoard a roomful of dollars.”
“Temple produces by means of the hoarded industry of his fathers,—by means of his capital,” replied Arthur. “And the miser you speak of enjoys his dollars, I suppose, or he would change them away for something else. Well, friends, there is little temptation for us to hoard up our wealth. We have corn instead of dollars, and corn will not keep like dollars.”
“Why should it?” asked Dods the brickmaker. “Who would take the trouble to raise more corn than he wants to eat, if he did not hope to exchange it for something desirable?”
“Very true. Then comes the question, what a man shall choose in exchange. I began pretty well. I laid out some of my surplus in providing for a still greater next year; which, in my circumstances, was my first duty. Then I began to look to the end for which I was working; and I reached forward to it a little too soon. I should have roasted my corn ears and drank milk a little longer, and expended my surplus on a bridge, before I thought of wheaten flour and tea and coffee.”
“Three months hence,” said somebody, “you will be no worse off (except for the corn ears and milk you must consume instead of flour and tea) than if you had had your wish. Your flour and tea would have been clean gone by that time, without any return.”
“You grant that I must go without the pleasure,” said Arthur, smiling. “Never mind that. But you will not persuade me that it is not a clear loss to have flour spoiled, and sugar and salt melted together in the creek; unless, indeed, they go to fatten the fish in the holes. Besides, there is the mortification of feeling that your toil in making this bridge might have been paid with that which is lost in the purchase of luxuries which none will enjoy.”
Being vehemently exhorted to let this consideration give him no concern, he concluded,
“I will take your advice, thank you. I will not trouble myself or you more about this loss; and I enlarge upon it now only because it may be useful to us as a lesson how to use the fruits of our labour. I have been one of the foremost to laugh at our neighbours in the next settlement for having,—not their useful frolics, like ours of to-morrow,—but their shooting-matches and games in the wood, when the water was so bad that it was a grievance to have to drink it. I was as ready as any one to see that the labour spent on these pastimes could not be properly afforded, if there were really no hands to spare to dig wells. And now, instead of asking them when they mean to have their welling frolic, our wisest way will be to get our bridge up before there is time for our neighbours to make a laughing-stock of us. When that is done, I shall be far from satisfied. I shall still feel that it is owing to me that my father goes without his coffee, while he is watching through the night when we common men are asleep.
”That is as much Temple’s concern as the young man’s," observed the neighbours one to another. “Freely as he flings his money about, one would think Temple might see that the doctor was at least as well supplied with luxuries as himself.” “Why the young man should be left to toil and make capital so painfully and slowly, when Temple squanders so much, is a mystery to every body.” "A quarter of what Temple has spent in making and unmaking his garden would have enabled Arthur Sneyd’s new field to produce double, or have improved his team; and Temple himself would have been all the better for the interest it would have yielded, instead of his money bringing no return. But Temple is not the man to lend a helping hand to a young farmer,—be he his brother-in-law or a mere stranger."