Half a billion dollars is the value of the buried talent (hoarded money) of the United States, according to investigations made by the Federal Government, the conclusions of which recently were made public by Postmaster-General Meyer in The Woman’s World.
Even at the rate proposed for postal depository savings, 2 per cent, the idleness of the $500,000,000 costs its possessors $10,000,000, a sum equal to the entire public debt of the United States in 1839, and almost as much as the Government spends annually in maintenance of Indians.
However, money is accounted worth in business not less than 4 per cent, and very few securities, particularly in the West, earn less than 4 per cent. The basis of computation of the $20,000,000 annual loss caused by the safety-deposit sort of security was that rate. In the industrial world money—and the very money that is now “hoarded”—is worth more than 4 per cent. The money panic of 1907 never would have happened if the buried talent of $500,000,000 had been in circulation, according to financial authorities.
As the buried talent is loss financially, so it is in every domain of possibility. In the moral and spiritual life it is even worse; the disinclination to use becomes in time inability to use. (Text.)
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TALENTS DIFFER
Ralph Waldo Emerson teaches the lesson that everything is needed in its own place, in this quaint bit of verse:
The mountain and the squirrel
Had a quarrel;
And the former called the latter, “Little prig.”