Advice to Young Men / And (Incidentally) to Young Women in the Middle and Higher Ranks of Life. In a Series of Letters, Addressed to a Youth, a Bachelor, a Lover, a Husband, a Father, a Citizen, or a Subject.

by William Cobbett

66. Just thus would it be with every man that never purchased but with ready money: he would make the amount as low as possible in proportion to his means: this care and frugality would make an addition to his means, and therefore, in the end, at the end of his life, he would have had a great deal more to spend, and still be as rich as if he had gone in trust; while he would have lived in tranquillity all the while, and would have avoided all the endless papers and writings and receipts and bills and disputes and law-suits inseparable from a system of credit. This is by no means a lesson of stinginess; by no means tends to inculcate a heaping up of money; for the purchasing with ready money really gives you more money to purchase with; you can afford to have a greater quantity and variety of things; and I will engage that, if horses or servants be your taste, the saving in this way gives you an additional horse or an additional servant, if you be in any profession or engaged in any considerable trade. In towns, it tends to accelerate your pace along the streets; for the temptation of the windows is answered in a moment by clapping your hand upon your thigh; and the question, 'Do I really want that?' is sure to occur to you immediately, because the touch of the money is sure to put that thought in your mind.

67. Now, supposing you to have a plenty; to have a fortune beyond your wants, would not the money which you would save in this way be very well applied in acts of real benevolence? Can you walk many yards in the streets; can you ride a mile in the country; can you go to half-a-dozen cottages; can you, in short, open your eyes, without seeing some human being, some one born in the same country with yourself, and who, on that account alone, has some claim upon your good wishes and your charity; can you open your eyes without seeing some person to whom even a small portion of your annual savings would convey gladness of heart? Your own heart will suggest the answer; and, if there were no motive but this, what need I say more in the advice which I have here tendered to you?

68. Another great evil arising from this desire to be thought rich; or, rather from the desire not to be thought poor, is the destructive thing which has been honoured by the name of 'speculation;' but which ought to be called Gambling. It is a purchasing of something which you do not want either in your family or in the way of ordinary trade: a something to be sold again with a great profit; and on the sale of which there is a considerable hazard. When purchases of this sort are made with ready money, they are not so offensive to reason and not attended with such risk; but when they are made with money borrowed for the purpose, they are neither more nor less than gambling transactions; and they have been, in this country, a source of ruin, misery, and suicide, admitting of no adequate description. I grant that this gambling has arisen from the influence of the 'Goddess' before mentioned; I grant that it has arisen from the facility of obtaining the fictitious means of making the purchases; and I grant that that facility has been created by the system under the baneful influence of which we live. But it is not the less necessary that I beseech you not to practise such gambling; that I beseech you, if you be engaged in it, to disentangle yourself from it as soon as you can. Your life, while you are thus engaged, is the life of the gamester; a life of constant anxiety; constant desire to over-reach; constant apprehension; general gloom, enlivened, now and then, by a gleam of hope or of success. Even that success is sure to lead to further adventures; and, at last, a thousand to one, that your fate is that of the pitcher to the well.

69. The great temptation to this gambling is, as is the case in other gambling, the success of the few. As young men who crowd to the army, in search of rank and renown, never look into the ditch that holds their slaughtered companions; but have their eye constantly fixed on the General-in-chief; and as each of them belongs to the same profession, and is sure to be conscious that he has equal merit, every one deems himself the suitable successor of him who is surrounded with Aides des camps, and who moves battalions and columns by his nod; so with the rising generation of 'speculators:' they see the great estates that have succeeded the pencil-box and the orange-basket; they see those whom nature and good laws made to black shoes, sweep chimnies or the streets, rolling in carriages, or sitting in saloons surrounded by gaudy footmen with napkins twisted round their thumbs; and they can see no earthly reason why they should not all do the same; forgetting the thousands and thousands, who, in making the attempt, have reduced themselves to that beggary which, before their attempt, they would have regarded as a thing wholly impossible.

70. In all situations of life, avoid the trammels of the law. Man's nature must be changed before law-suits will cease; and, perhaps, it would be next to impossible to make them less frequent than they are in the present state of this country; but though no man, who has any property at all, can say that he will have nothing to do with law-suits, it is in the power of most men to avoid them in a considerable degree. One good rule is to have as little as possible to do with any man who is fond of law-suits, and who, upon every slight occasion, talks of an appeal to the law. Such persons, from their frequent litigations, contract a habit of using the technical terms of the Courts, in which they take a pride, and are, therefore, companions peculiarly disgusting to men of sense. To such men a law-suit is a luxury, instead of being as it is, to men of ordinary minds, a source of anxiety and a real and substantial scourge. Such men are always of a quarrelsome disposition, and avail themselves of every opportunity to indulge in that which is mischievous to their neighbours. In thousands of instances men go to law for the indulgence of mere anger. The Germans are said to bring spite-actions against one another, and to harass their poorer neighbours from motives of pure revenge. They have carried this their disposition with them to America; for which reason no one likes to live in a German neighbourhood.

71. Before you go to law consider well the cost; for if you win your suit and are poorer than you were before, what do you accomplish? You only imbibe a little additional anger against your opponent; you injure him, but do harm to yourself. Better to put up with the loss of one pound than of two, to which latter is to be added all the loss of time, all the trouble, and all the mortification and anxiety attending a law-suit. To set an attorney to work to worry and torment another man is a very base act; to alarm his family as well as himself, while you are sitting quietly at home. If a man owe you money which he cannot pay, why add to his distress without the chance of benefit to yourself? Thousands of men have injured themselves by resorting to the law; while very few ever bettered themselves by it, except such resort were unavoidable.

72. Nothing is much more discreditable than what is called hard dealing. They say of the Turks, that they know nothing of two prices for the same article; and that to ask an abatement of the lowest shopkeeper is to insult him. It would be well if Christians imitated Mahometans in this respect. To ask one price and take another, or to offer one price and give another, besides the loss of time that it occasions, is highly dishonourable to the parties, and especially when pushed to the extent of solemn protestations. It is, in fact, a species of lying; and it answers no one advantageous purpose to either buyer or seller. I hope that every young man who reads this, will start in life with a resolution never to higgle and lie in dealings. There is this circumstance in favour of the bookseller's business: every book has its fixed price, and no one ever asks an abatement. If it were thus in all other trades, how much time would be saved, and how much immorality prevented!

73. As to the spending of your time, your business or your profession is to claim the priority of everything else. Unless that be duly attended to, there can be no real pleasure in any other employment of a portion of your time. Men, however, must have some leisure, some relaxation from business; and in the choice of this relaxation much of your happiness will depend. Where fields and gardens are at hand, they present the most rational scenes for leisure. As to company, I have said enough in the former letter to deter any young man from that of drunkards and rioting companions; but there is such a thing as your quiet 'pipe-and-pot-companions,' which are, perhaps, the most fatal of all. Nothing can be conceived more dull, more stupid, more the contrary of edification and rational amusement, than sitting, sotting, over a pot and a glass, sending out smoke from the head, and articulating, at intervals, nonsense about all sorts of things. Seven years service as a galley-slave would be more bearable to a man of sense, than seven months confinement to society like this. Yet, such is the effect of habit, that, if a young man become a frequenter of such scenes, the idle propensity sticks to him for life. Some companions, however, every man must have; but these every well-behaved man will find in private houses, where families are found residing and where the suitable intercourse takes place between women and men. A man that cannot pass an evening without drink merits the name of a sot. Why should there be drink for the purpose of carrying on conversation? Women stand in need of no drink to stimulate them to converse; and I have a thousand times admired their patience in sitting quietly at their work, while their husbands are engaged, in the same room, with bottles and glasses before them, thinking nothing of the expense and still less of the shame which the distinction reflects upon them. We have to thank the women for many things, and particularly for their sobriety, for fear of following their example in which men drive them from the table, as if they said to them: 'You have had enough; food is sufficient for you; but we must remain to fill ourselves with drink, and to talk in language which your ears ought not to endure.' When women are getting up to retire from the table, men rise in honour of them; but they take special care not to follow their excellent example. That which is not fit to be uttered before women is not fit to be uttered at all; and it is next to a proclamation, tolerating drunkenness and indecency, to send women from the table the moment they have swallowed their food. The practice has been ascribed to a desire to leave them to themselves; but why should they be left to themselves? Their conversation is always the most lively, while their persons are generally the most agreeable objects. No: the plain truth is, that it is the love of the drink and of the indecent talk that send women from the table; and it is a practice which I have always abhorred. I like to see young men, especially, follow them out of the room, and prefer their company to that of the sots who are left behind.

74. Another mode of spending the leisure time is that of books. Rational and well-informed companions may be still more instructive; but books never annoy; they cost little; and they are always at hand, and ready at your call. The sort of books must, in some degree, depend upon your pursuit in life; but there are some books necessary to every one who aims at the character of a well-informed man. I have slightly mentioned HISTORY and Geography in the preceding letter; but I must here observe, that, as to both these, you should begin with your own country, and make yourself well acquainted, not only with its ancient state, but with the origin of all its principal institutions. To read of the battles which it has fought, and of the intrigues by which one king or one minister has succeeded another, is very little more profitable than the reading of a romance. To understand well the history of the country, you should first understand how it came to be divided into counties, hundreds, and into parishes; how judges, sheriffs, and juries, first arose; to what end they were all invented, and how the changes with respect to any of them have been produced. But it is of particular consequence that you ascertain the state of the people in former times, which is to be ascertained by comparing the then price of labour with the then price of food. You hear enough, and you read enough, about the glorious wars in the reign of KING EDWARD the THIRD; and it is very proper that those glories should be recorded and remembered; but you never read, in the works of the historians, that, in that reign, a common labourer earned threepence-halfpenny a day; and that a fat sheep was sold, at the same time, for one shilling and twopence, and a fat hog, two years old, for three shillings and fourpence, and a fat goose for twopence-halfpenny. You never read that women received a penny a day for hay-making or weeding in the corn, and that a gallon of red wine was sold for fourpence. These are matters which historians have deemed to be beneath their notice; but they are matters of real importance: they are matters which ought to have practical effect at this time; for these furnish the criterion whereby we are to judge of our condition compared with that of our forefathers. The poor-rates form a great feature in the laws and customs of this country. Put to a thousand persons who have read what is called the history of England; put to them the question, how the poor-rates came? and nine hundred and ninety-nine of the thousand will tell you, that they know nothing at all of the matter. This is not history; a list of battles and a string of intrigues are not history, they communicate no knowledge applicable to our present state; and it really is better to amuse oneself with an avowed romance, which latter is a great deal worse than passing one's time in counting the trees.

75. History has been described as affording arguments of experience; as a record of what has been, in order to guide us as to what is likely to be, or what ought to be; but, from this romancing history, no such experience is to be derived: for it furnishes no facts on which to found arguments relative to the existing or future state of things. To come at the true history of a country you must read its laws: you must read books treating of its usages and customs in former times; and you must particularly inform yourself as to prices of labour and of food. By reading the single Act of the 23rd year of EDWARD the THIRD, specifying the price of labour at that time; by reading an Act of Parliament passed in the 24th year of HENRY the EIGHTH; by reading these two Acts, and then reading the CHRONICON PRECIOSUM of BISHOP FLEETWOOD, which shows the price of food in the former reign, you come into full possession of the knowledge of what England was in former times. Divers books teach how the divisions of the country arose, and how its great institutions were established; and the result of this reading is a store of knowledge, which will afford you pleasure for the whole of your life.