Hoarding

“ But the instinct of hoarding, like all other instincts, tends to become hypertrophied and perverted; and with the institution of private property comes another institution—that of plunder and brigandage. ”

“ Why, Joanna, that is the clearing of two pounds twelve and three-pence per annum. At that rate you may burn coals and I will not grumble.’
‘There is nothing like thrift, is there, master?’
‘Ah,’ said the Jew, ‘talk of the beauties of nature! What I look to is the moral lessons it preaches. How many of your holiday-takers, who run over the sea cliffs, look at the thrift that covers them, and lay the flower to heart? I’m not one who approves of hoarding. Hoarding is a low and savage virtue, but Turning over is the cultured virtue. Turn your eggs and they don’t addle, but they won’t set. ”

“ Hoardings and scaffoldings are now so scientifically erected as to be little or no inconvenience to foot-passengers. Care must, however, be taken to see that in the erection of a hoarding the doors or gates in it shall not open outwards, and the police should be instructed to prevent carts being backed in and left standing across the footpath.
The surveyor must exercise great discretion in the length of time he allows a hoarding to remain; without undue hardship on the builder, he must study at the same time the more important question of the public convenience. ”

“ Everyone is familiar with the varying strength and weakness of the instincts of getting and hoarding as shown by his neighbors and acquaintances. Some seem to have no ambition or thought for getting or keeping money. Some can get it but cannot keep it. Some have in them from childhood the instinct for getting the better of every trade; for hoarding what they get, and accumulating property all their lives. ”

“ Gold or silver thus brought to rest as money, forms a hoard. Among nations with an exclusively metallic circulation, such as the ancients were, hoarding is practiced universally from the individual to the state which guards its state hoard. ”

“ While industry constitutes the positive condition of hoarding, saving forms the negative one. The less the equivalent of a commodity is withdrawn from circulation in the form of particular commodities or use-values, the more it is withdrawn in the shape of money or exchange value. [6] The acquisition of wealth in its universal form thus requires abstinence from wealth in its material reality. Thus the stimulating impulse for hoarding is greed, the objects of which are not commodities as use-values, but exchange value as commodity. ”

“ When the despatching of sums from one city to another instead of taking minutes by telegraph or hours by post occupy, under normal circumstances, days, weeks, a month or even more, because the payments are made in solid silver which has to travel by caravan, it is easy to understand how the dangerous system of hoarding comes to be practised with impunity and facility all over Persia. ”

“ The lees the production of commodities is developed, the more important is the first crystallization of exchange value into money, or hoarding, which plays, therefore, an important part among the ancient nations, in Asia until the present day, and among modern agricultural nations where exchange value has not as yet taken hold of all the relations of production. Before taking up the consideration of the specific economic function of hoarding within the sphere of metallic circulation, let us mention another form of hoarding. ”

“ The only good I have ever been able to see in a small house is, that no one can possibly hoard there. If hoarding is begun it cannot be carried on, because if it were, there would speedily be no room to turn round. ”

“ Of a morning we see the new and significant “hoarding” set up: in a week or two we pass again, and the “housebreakers,” as they are called, are hard at work with their pickaxes, shovelling down the old Queen Anne bricks in showers of dust. From year’s end to year’s end this goes on. The hungry eyes of the speculator, or of the thriving man of business, are often fixed upon the old Wren churches, which, in his view, so idly cumber space that might be covered with useful warehouses at enormous rents. ”

“ Man is, by nature, a hoarding animal; and his endeavours to accumulate property will be proportioned to the security and stability which the laws afford for the possession and enjoyment of that property. ”

“ We are scarcely to argue therefrom that hoarding is the true principle; that a nation is better off because its work-people hide their savings, withdrawing them from public use, rather than placing them in banks where they may become active capital. ”

“ Our hoarding of earthly treasures must be limited, because of our disposition to trust in them. We must always be so dependent that we shall pray truly with the spirit of dependence, "Give us this day our daily bread." "Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me."
Thrift does not require that we shall hoard an amount that will support us through life, much less that we shall lay up a fortune, that shall free our children from the necessity of productive labor. ”

“ The hoarding or the outflow of gold is a hardship when, under the law, somebody is obliged to have it, as was the case during the war, when gold alone would pay duties on imports. Combinations to hoard gold at that time frequently involved great loss to the importer. ”

“ Until someone gets a medium of exchange, we're forced to go on the barter-and-trade basis. Fabriville will toss out anyone who isn't paying his way by working. In return, he has free call upon the market, the manufacturing center, and the professionals. Thank God that hoarding is silly in a realm of ultra-plenty. ”

“ Between hiding and hoarding there is only a difference of degree. The first is forced upon the villager, for public opinion is too many for him; he dare not let it be known that he has anything to put by. ”

“ The hoards of some of the native princes are enormous. The treasure of the Maharajah of Burdwan occupied half a dozen or more large rooms and vaults. These hoards acquire in time a sort of sanctity as a family treasure, and it becomes a point of honor not to break into them; so that they are not drawn upon except in extreme cases. Hoarding is common among the thrifty peasantry of Europe ”

“ She walked anxiously up and down Sauchiehall Street, half hoping to find the missing number somehow transported from its legitimate numerical position, but all to no avail. Again and again she returned to survey the deserted site where Mr. Punter's residence ought to be. Unless he camped in the shadow [pg 125] of the hoarding, as did one or two stray cats—a sudden thought flashed across her! Pushing past the small gate that hung partly open on its hinges, and ploughing her way through the long grass, she penetrated round to the back of the hoarding. ”

“ Writers, administrators, the Church from its pulpit, the Press in its columns, all to whom chance has given power to influence the masses, should say and resay this truth,—to hoard is a social crime. The deliberate hoarding of a province arrests industrial life, and injures the health of a nation.
Thus the little town of Arcis, without much means of transition, doomed apparently to the most complete immobility, is, relatively, a rich town abounding in capital slowly amassed by its trade in hosiery.
Monsieur Phileas Beauvisage was the Alexander, or, if you will, the Attila of this business. ”

“ To purchase that number yon wretched man has been hoarding perhaps for months past, nearly starving himself and those dependent on him, or may be he has been robbing his employer, intending to repay when he should become the possessor of the mighty prize which has been the dream of his midday thoughts and nightly slumbers for so many weeks past. ”

“ Shut off from the possibility of personal bequests or of “founding a family,” the guardians will have no stimulus to laying up a hoard of material goods; nay, they will not be moved to such hoarding by fear of the morrow, for a modest but sufficient maintenance will be supplied them by the working classes. ”

“ Doubtless there is a good deal of hoarding by people who distrust banks or are not near enough to use them. It might be urged that no larger proportion of people here hoard than is the case in Europe. Without disputing this, it is true, however, that if only the same proportion hoard and in the same relative amounts as is done by corresponding classes of the population, the absolute amount thus withdrawn would be larger because of our higher scale of wages and prices.... ”

“ It is possible that when the banks resume a very few people who have not recovered from their fear may again begin withdrawals. Let me make it clear that the banks will take care of all needs—and it is my belief that hoarding during the past week has become an exceedingly unfashionable pastime. ”

“ It is well known that in communities where there are habitually no businesslike credit extensions or investments for profit, savings take the form of hoarding, that is, accumulation for future use in preference to present consumption. ”

“ The hoarding, therefore, by the railway labourer, and the reserves nominally kept for the use of Scotland and Ireland, will account [755] for the disappearance of a large proportion of the coinage from the circle. These are only primary causes of the scarcity, yet they are material elements in inducing that want of confidence, which, as we have already said, is the mighty evil that is now oppressing and bearing us to the ground. Whenever want of confidence is manifested, the circulation must farther contract. ”

“ The allegation that the contracts called for a delivery more than thirty days in the future, and therefore were unlawful as tending to increase the price and promote hoarding, was of no legal effect. While section 6 prohibited willful hoarding, and also certain acts done for the purpose of unreasonably increasing or diminishing the price, it did not prohibit a selling for delivery more than thirty days in the future. ”

“ No person can put up hoards or scaffolds in the streets without first obtaining the consent of the urban authority, vide sections 144 and 149 of the Public Health Act 1875. Many towns also have private improvement Acts with very binding clauses on this subject, empowering the surveyor to demand a fee for a licence to erect a hoarding, and empowering him to remove these after notice, &c. ”

“ To cut a long story short, I got the permission from a hundred lot-owners in a week through my brother Willie, who as an estate agent knew them all. Then I made a contract with a little English carpenter and put the hoardings up and got the bills all posted three days before the date agreed upon. Hatherly’s Minstrels had a great fortnight and everyone was content. From that time on, I drew about fifty dollars a week as my profit from letting the hoardings, in spite of the slump. ”

“ Hoardings are now so restricted by the London Building Acts that new hoardings cannot, except under special conditions, be erected exceeding 12 feet in height, and no existing hoardings can be increased in height so as to exceed that limit. The huge signs which some advertisers, both in England and the United States, have placed in such positions as to mar the landscape, have so far aroused public antagonism that there is reason to hope that this form of nuisance will not increase. ”

“ In the spring of this year 1875, I had to return to Lawrence on business connected with my hoardings. In several cases the owners of the lots refused to allow me to keep up the hoardings unless they had a reasonable share in the profits. Finally I called them all together and came to an amicable agreement to divide twenty-five percent of my profit among them, year by year.
I had also to go through my examination and get admitted to the Bar. I had already taken out my first naturalization papers and Judge Bassett of the District Court appointed the lawyers Barker and Hutchings to examine me. ”

“ What pleasure is it for you, trembling to deposit an immense weight of silver and gold in the earth dug up by stealth? Because if you lessen it, it may be reduced to a paltry farthing.
But unless that be the case, what beauty has an accumulated hoard? Though your thrashing-floor should yield a hundred thousand bushels of corn, your belly will not on that account contain more than mine: just as if it were your lot to carry on your loaded shoulder the basket of bread among slaves, you would receive no more [for your own share] than he who bore no part of the burthen. ”

“ This robbery is not like theft of a horse or a sum of money that ceases with the act. It is a fresh and continuous robbery that goes on every day and every hour. It is not from the produce of the past that rent is drawn; it is from the produce of the present. It is a toll levied upon labour constantly and continuously. Every blow of the hammer, every stroke of the pick, every thrust of the shuttle, every throb of the steam engine, pays its tribute. It levies upon the earnings of those men who, deep underground, risk their lives, and of those who over white surges hang to reeling masts. ”

“ Even the poor caught the flame so ardently, that no one paused to think of the inadequacy of his means, or to consider whether he ought to yield up his farm, his vineyard, or his fields. Each one set about selling his property at as low a price as if he had been held in some horrible captivity, and sought to pay his ransom without loss of time. Those who had not determined upon the journey joked and laughed at those who were thus disposing of their goods at such ruinous prices, prophesying that the expedition would be miserable and their return worse. ”

“ He was also well acquainted with their treasures and secret hoards, and sometimes upbraided them on that account; for as often as they seemed to act sparingly p. 89and avariciously, he used to say, “Why are you afraid to spend that heap of gold or silver, since your lives are of so short duration, and the money you so cautiously hoard up will never do you any service?” He gave the choicest meat and drink to the rustics and hired servants, saying that “Those persons should be abundantly supplied, by whose labours they were acquired.” ”