56. As it may be your lot (such has been mine) to live by your literary talent, I will here, before I proceed to matter more applicable to persons in other states of life, observe, that I cannot form an idea of a mortal more wretched than a man of real talent, compelled to curb his genius, and to submit himself in the exercise of that genius, to those whom he knows to be far inferior to himself, and whom he must despise from the bottom of his soul. The late Mr. WILLIAM GIFFORD, who was the son of a shoemaker at ASHBURTON in Devonshire; who was put to school and sent to the university at the expense of a generous and good clergyman of the name of COOKSON, and who died, the other day, a sort of whipper-in of MURRAY'S QUARTERLY REVIEW; this was a man of real genius; and, to my certain personal knowledge, he detested, from the bottom of his soul, the whole of the paper-money and Boroughmongering system, and despised those by whom the system was carried on. But, he had imaginary wants; he had been bred up in company with the rich and the extravagant; expensive indulgences had been made necessary to him by habit; and, when in the year 1798, or thereabouts, he had to choose between a bit of bacon, a scrag of mutton, and a lodging at ten shillings a week, on the one side, and made-dishes, wine, a fine house and a footman on the other side, he chose the latter. He became the servile Editor of CANNING'S Anti-jacobin newspaper; and he, who had more wit and learning than all the rest of the writers put together, became the miserable tool in circulating their attacks upon everything that was hostile to a system which he deplored and detested. But he secured the made-dishes, the wine, the footman and the coachman. A sinecure as 'clerk of the Foreign Estreats,' gave him 329l. a year, a double commissionership of the lottery gave him 600l. or 700l. more; and, at a later period, his Editorship of the Quarterly Review gave him perhaps as much more. He rolled in his carriage for several years; he fared sumptuously; he was buried at Westminster Abbey, of which his friend and formerly his brother pamphleteer in defence of PITT was the Dean; and never is he to be heard of more! Mr. GIFFORD would have been full as happy; his health would have been better, his life longer, and his name would have lived for ages, if he could have turned to the bit of bacon and scrag of mutton in 1798; for his learning and talents were such, his reasonings so clear and conclusive, and his wit so pointed and keen, that his writings must have been generally read, must have been of long duration! and, indeed, must have enabled him (he being always a single man) to live in his latter days in as good style as that which he procured by becoming a sinecurist, a pensioner and a hack, all which he was from the moment he lent himself to the Quarterly Review. Think of the mortification of such a man, when he was called upon to justify the power-of-imprisonment bill in 1817! But to go into particulars would be tedious: his life was a life of luxurious misery, than which a worse is not to be imagined.
57. So that poverty is, except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty, the shame of being thought poor, is a great and fatal weakness, though arising, in this country, from the fashion of the times themselves. When a good man, as in the phraseology of the city, means a rich man, we are not to wonder that every one wishes to be thought richer than he is. When adulation is sure to follow wealth, and when contempt would be awarded to many if they were not wealthy, who are spoken of with deference, and even lauded to the skies, because their riches are great and notorious; when this is the case, we are not to be surprised that men are ashamed to be thought to be poor. This is one of the greatest of all the dangers at the outset of life: it has brought thousands and hundreds of thousands to ruin, even to pecuniary ruin. One of the most amiable features in the character of American society is this; that men never boast of their riches, and never disguise their poverty; but they talk of both as of any other matter fit for public conversation. No man shuns another because he is poor: no man is preferred to another because he is rich. In hundreds and hundreds of instances, men, not worth a shilling, have been chosen by the people and entrusted with their rights and interests, in preference to men who ride in their carriages.
58. This shame of being thought poor, is not only dishonourable in itself, and fatally injurious to men of talent; but it is ruinous even in a pecuniary point of view, and equally destructive to farmers, traders, and even gentlemen of landed estate. It leads to everlasting efforts to disguise one's poverty: the carriage, the servants, the wine, (oh, that fatal wine!) the spirits, the decanters, the glasses, all the table apparatus, the dress, the horses, the dinners, the parties, all must be kept up; not so much because he or she who keeps or gives them, has any pleasure arising therefrom, as because not to keep and give them, would give rise to a suspicion of the want of means so to give and keep; and thus thousands upon thousands are yearly brought into a state of real poverty by their great anxiety not to be thought poor. Look round you, mark well what you behold, and say if this be not the case. In how many instances have you seen most amiable and even most industrious families brought to ruin by nothing but this! Mark it well; resolve to set this false shame at defiance, and when you have done that, you have laid the first stone of the surest foundation of your future tranquillity of mind. There are thousands of families, at this very moment, who are thus struggling to keep up appearances. The farmers accommodate themselves to circumstances more easily than tradesmen and professional men. They live at a greater distance from their neighbours: they can change their style of living unperceived: they can banish the decanter, change the dishes for a bit of bacon, make a treat out of a rasher and eggs, and the world is none the wiser all the while. But the tradesman, the doctor, the attorney, and the trader, cannot make the change so quietly, and unseen. The accursed wine, which is a sort of criterion of the style of living, a sort of scale to the plan, a sort of key to the tune; this is the thing to banish first of all; because all the rest follow, and come down to their proper level in a short time. The accursed decanter cries footman or waiting maid, puts bells to the side of the wall, screams aloud for carpets; and when I am asked, 'Lord, what is a glass of wine?' my answer is, that, in this country, it is everything; it is the pitcher of the key; it demands all the other unnecessary expenses; it is injurious to health, and must be injurious, every bottle of wine that is drunk containing a certain portion of ardent spirits, besides other drugs deleterious in their nature; and, of all the friends to the doctors, this fashionable beverage is the greatest. And, which adds greatly to the folly, or, I should say, the real vice of using it, is, that the parties themselves, nine times out of ten, do not drink it by choice; do not like it; do not relish it; but use it from mere ostentation, being ashamed to be seen even by their own servants, not to drink wine. At the very moment I am writing this, there are thousands of families in and near London, who daily have wine upon their tables, and who drink it too, merely because their own servants should not suspect them to be poor, and not deem them to be genteel; and thus families by thousands are ruined, only because they are ashamed to be thought poor.
59. There is no shame belonging to poverty, which frequently arises from the virtues of the impoverished parties. Not so frequently, indeed, as from vice, folly, and indiscretion; but still very frequently. And as the Scripture tells us, that we are not to 'despise the poor because he is poor'; so we ought not to honour the rich because he is rich. The true way is, to take a fair survey of the character of a man as depicted in his conduct, and to respect him, or despise him, according to a due estimate of that character. No country upon earth exhibits so many, as this, of those fatal terminations of life, called suicides. These arise, in nine instances out of ten, from this very source. The victims are, in general, what may be fairly called insane; but their insanity almost always arises from the dread of poverty; not from the dread of a want of the means of sustaining life, or even decent living, but from the dread of being thought or known to be poor; from the dread of what is called falling in the scale of society; a dread which is prevalent hardly in any country but this. Looked at in its true light, what is there in poverty to make a man take away his own life? he is the same man that he was before: he has the same body and the same mind: if he even foresee a great alteration in his dress or his diet, why should he kill himself on that account? Are these all the things that a man wishes to live for? But, such is the fact; so great is the disgrace upon this country, and so numerous and terrible are the evils arising from this dread of being thought to be poor.
60. Nevertheless, men ought to take care of their means, ought to use them prudently and sparingly, and to keep their expenses always within the bounds of their income, be it what it may. One of the effectual means of doing this is to purchase with ready money. ST. PAUL says, 'Owe no man any thing:' and of his numerous precepts this is by no means the least worthy of our attention. Credit has been boasted of as a very fine thing: to decry credit seems to be setting oneself up against the opinions of the whole world; and I remember a paper in the FREEHOLDER or the SPECTATOR, published just after the funding system had begun, representing 'PUBLIC Credit' as a GODDESS, enthroned in a temple dedicated to her by her votaries, amongst whom she is dispensing blessings of every description. It must be more than forty years since I read this paper, which I read soon after the time when the late Mr. PITT uttered in Parliament an expression of his anxious hope, that his 'name would be inscribed on the monument which he should raise to 'public credit.' Time has taught me, that PUBLIC CREDIT means, the contracting of debts which a nation never can pay; and I have lived to see this Goddess produce effects, in my country, which Satan himself never could have produced. It is a very bewitching Goddess; and not less fatal in her influence in private than in public affairs. It has been carried in this latter respect to such a pitch, that scarcely any transaction, however low and inconsiderable in amount, takes place in any other way. There is a trade in London, called the 'tally-trade,' by which, household goods, coals, clothing, all sorts of things, are sold upon credit, the seller keeping a tally, and receiving payment for the goods, little by little; so that the income and the earnings of the buyers are always anticipated; are always gone, in fact, before they come in or are earned; the sellers receiving, of course, a great deal more than the proper profit.
61. Without supposing you to descend to so low a grade as this, and even supposing you to be lawyer, doctor, parson, or merchant; it is still the same thing, if you purchase on credit, and not, perhaps, in a much less degree of disadvantage. Besides the higher price that you pay there is the temptation to have what you really do not want. The cost seems a trifle, when you have not to pay the money until a future time. It has been observed, and very truly observed, that men used to lay out a one-pound note when they would not lay out a sovereign; a consciousness of the intrinsic value of the things produces a retentiveness in the latter case more than in the former: the sight and the touch assist the mind in forming its conclusions, and the one-pound note was parted with, when the sovereign would have been kept. Far greater is the difference between Credit and Ready money. Innumerable things are not bought at all with ready money, which would be bought in case of trust: it is so much easier to order a thing than to pay for it. A future day; a day of payment must come, to be sure, but that is little thought of at the time; but if the money were to be drawn out, the moment the thing was received or offered, this question would arise, 'Can I do without it?' Is this thing indispensable; am I compelled to have it, or suffer a loss or injury greater in amount than the cost of the thing? If this question were put, every time we make a purchase, seldom should we hear of those suicides which are such a disgrace to this country.
62. I am aware, that it will be said, and very truly said, that the concerns of merchants; that the purchasing of great estates, and various other great transactions, cannot be carried on in this manner; but these are rare exceptions to the rule; even in these cases there might be much less of bills and bonds, and all the sources of litigation; but in the every-day business of life; in transactions with the butcher, the baker, the tailor, the shoemaker, what excuse can there be for pleading the example of the merchant, who carries on his work by ships and exchanges? I was delighted, some time ago, by being told of a young man, who, upon being advised to keep a little account of all he received and expended, answered, 'that his business was not to keep account books: that he was sure not to make a mistake as to his income; and that, as to his expenditure, the little bag that held his sovereigns would be an infallible guide, as he never bought anything that he did not immediately pay for.'
63. I believe that nobody will deny, that, generally speaking, you pay for the same article a fourth part more in the case of trust than you do in the case of ready money. Suppose, then, the baker, butcher, tailor, and shoemaker, receive from you only one hundred pounds a year. Put that together; that is to say, multiply twenty-five by twenty, and you will find, that, at the end of twenty years, you have 500l., besides the accumulating and growing interest. The fathers of the Church (I mean the ancient ones), and also the canons of the Church, forbade selling on trust at a higher price than for ready money, which was in effect to forbid trust; and this, doubtless, was one of the great objects which those wise and pious men had in view; for they were fathers in legislation and morals as well as in religion. But the doctrine of these fathers and canons no longer prevails; they are set at nought by the present age, even in the countries that adhere to their religion. ADDISON'S Goddess has prevailed over the fathers and the canons; and men not only make a difference in the price regulated by the difference in the mode of payment; but it would be absurd to expect them to do otherwise. They must not only charge something for the want of the use of the money; but they must charge something additional for the risk of its loss, which may frequently arise, and most frequently does arise, from the misfortunes of those to whom they have assigned their goods on trust. The man, therefore, who purchases on trust, not only pays for the trust, but he also pays his due share of what the tradesman loses by trust; and, after all, he is not so good a customer as the man who purchases cheaply with ready money; for there is his name indeed in the tradesman's book; but with that name the tradesman cannot go to market to get a fresh supply.
64. Infinite are the ways in which gentlemen lose by this sort of dealing. Servants go and order sometimes things not wanted at all; at other times, more than is wanted; at others, things of a higher quality; and all this would be obviated by purchasing with ready money; for, whether through the hands of the party himself, or through those of an inferior, there would always be an actual counting out of the money; somebody would see the thing bought and see the money paid; and, as the master would give the housekeeper or steward a bag of money at the time, he would see the money too, would set a proper value upon it, and would just desire to know upon what it had been expended.
65. How is it that farmers are so exact, and show such a disposition to retrench in the article of labour, when they seem to think little, or nothing, about the sums which they pay in tax upon malt, wine, sugar, tea, soap, candles, tobacco, and various other things? You find the utmost difficulty in making them understand, that they are affected by these. The reason is, that they see the money which they give to the labourer on each succeeding Saturday night; but they do not see that which they give in taxes on the articles before mentioned. Why is it that they make such an outcry about the six or seven millions a year which are paid in poor-rates, and say not a word about the sixty millions a year raised in other taxes? The consumer pays all; and, therefore, they are as much interested in the one as the other; and yet the farmers think of no tax but the poor tax. The reason is, that the latter is collected from them in money: they see it go out of their hands into the hands of another; and, therefore, they are everlastingly anxious to reduce the poor-rates, and they take care to keep them within the smallest possible bounds.