If he spends it for wine or whiskey, it will go sooner, as these cost more. If no money was spent for liquor in this country, people would not so often be sick, or poor, or bad, or wretched. We should not need so many policemen, and jails, and prisons, as we have now. If no liquor was drunk, men, women, and children would be better and happier.
COST OF TOBACCO.
Most of you have a little money of your own. Perhaps you earned a part, or the whole of it, yourselves. You are planning what to do with it, and that is a very pleasant kind of planning.
Do you think it would be wise to make a dollar bill into a tight little roll, light one end of it with a match, and then let it slowly burn up? That would be wasting it, you say! ([See Frontispiece.])
Yes! it would be wasted, if thus burned. It would be worse than wasted, if, while burning, it should also hurt the person who held it. If you should buy cigars or tobacco with your dollar, and smoke them, you could soon burn up the dollar and hurt yourselves besides.
Can you count a million? Can you count a hundred millions? Try some day to do this counting. Then, when you begin to have some idea how much six hundred millions is, remember that six hundred million dollars are spent in this country every year for tobacco—burned up—wasted—worse than wasted.
Do you think the farmer who planted tobacco instead of corn, did any good to the world by the change?
REVIEW QUESTIONS.
1. How may one waste money?
2. Name some good ways for spending money.