Thriftiness

“ From such firesides go forth those inheriting the right spirit,—loving industry, loving thrift, and loving home. Emulous of a good example, they in their day and generation would nobly endeavour to lay by a portion of their income. ”

“ The secret of thriving is thrift; saving of force; to get as much work as possible done with the least expenditure of power, the least jar and obstruction, the least wear and tear. And the secret of thrift is knowledge. In proportion as you know the laws and nature of a subject, you will be able to work at it easily, surely, rapidly, successfully, instead of wasting your money or your energies in mistaken schemes, irregular efforts, which end in disappointment and exhaustion. ”

“ You should see the servant-girl, with her greasy flounces, and soiled artificial flowers. You should see young men, with staring diamond pins stuck on their coarse shirt-bosoms, with shabby velvet vests, and mock chains looped over them.
You should go into the “furnishing stores for ladies’ and children’s garments;” and see how impossible it is to find plain, substantial articles of clothing for either—two thirds, at least, of the cost of every article being for elaborate trimming, and ruffling, and useless embroidery. ”

“ Pursued in the right method, from the right motive, with the due moderation and reserve, Business, as he is careful to point out, besides bringing other great advantages, may be a new bond of union and brotherhood: it develops intercourse among men and races of men, and should develop sympathy, goodwill, and a mutual helpfulness. Nevertheless, thrift may degenerate into miserliness, and the honest industry of content into a dishonest eagerness for undue gains, and a wise attention to business into an excessive devotion to it. ”

“ French thrift, if it does so often touch hands with meanness, at least implies the exercise of a quality we all should admire, even when we cannot practise it, thanks to taste, training, or temperament—hardness to ourselves, the capacity for voluntary self-suffering.
The first thing that strikes you as you enter a French beeswaxed flat in winter is the chill of it. Few but the very rich know the delights of generous fires, of well-carpeted houses, of warm, comfortable, and luxurious interiors. ”

“ WHEN I came to the United States as a lad of six, the most needful lesson for me, as a boy, was the necessity for thrift. I had been taught in my home across the sea that thrift was one of the fundamentals in a successful life. My family had come from a land (the Netherlands) noted for its thrift; but we had been in the United States only a few days before the realization came home strongly to my father and mother that they had brought their children to a land of waste.
Where the Dutchman saved, the American wasted. ”

“ That business about thrift being a menace to prosperity may have been a new idea when you were young, but now every kid in school is taught it. So spare us. It makes you sound like an old fuddy duddy. ”

“ But, beside this thrift in clothing, I am not alone, I believe, in wishing for some thrift in the energy which produces it. Labor misapplied, you will agree, is labor wasted; and as dress, I presume, is intended to adorn the person of the wearer, the making a dress which only disfigures her may be considered as a plain case of waste. It would be impertinent in me to go into any details: but it is impossible to walk about the streets now without passing young people who must be under a deep delusion as to the success of their own toilette. ”

“ Take the one field of textile art, for instance: that wide and fluent medium of expression, the making of varied fabrics, the fashioning of garments and the decoration of them—all this is human work and human pleasure. It should have led us to a condition where every human being was a pleasure to the eye, appropriately and beautifully clothed.
Our real condition in this field is too patent to need emphasis; the stiff, black ugliness of our men's attire; the irritating variegated folly of our women's; the way in which we spoil the beauty and shame the dignity of childhood by modes of dress. ”

“ Thrift is measured not by the pound but by the penny, not by the dollar but by the cent. Thus any person in receipt of an income or salary however small finds it in his power to practise thrift and to lay the foundation of prosperity.
The word thrift in its origin means the grasping or holding fast the things that we have. It implies economy, carefulness, as opposed to waste and extravagance. It involves self-denial and frugal living for the time being, until the prosperity which grows out of thrift permits the more liberal indulgence of natural desires. ”

“ You mean the sort of madness that let itself loose a few years ago in what was called household art, and has since gone to make the junk-shops hideous. Each of the eternal-womanly was supposed suddenly to have acquired a talent for decoration and a gift for the selection and arrangement of furniture, and each began to stamp herself upon our interiors. ”

“ It is by individual thrift that society accumulates, and it is wise to encourage thrift.
If I build a mill and, falling sick, cannot use it, it is fair that he who does use it shall pay me for my sacrifice in building it. ”

“ The cloth of gold and silver, the fine satins and velvets, the embroidery, more exquisite than anything we have time or patience for now—embroidery of gold thread which we hear of, an uncomfortable sort of luxury, even upon the linen of great personages—would there be put forth and inspected by gallants in all their fine array, or by the ladies in their veils, half or wholly muffled from public inspection. ”

“ Give the American woman lessons in thrift along the modern lines of income 15 and expenditure, and she will work out her splendid salvation. Throw light on food values, on fabrics and their adulteration. Teach the woman how to buy as well as how to utilize what she buys, and she will be able to solve, in her own way, the much discussed problem of the high cost of living. ”

“ Short-sighted, superficial, unreflecting people have a way—which in time fossilizes into a principle—of mending everything as soon as it comes up from the wash,—a very unthrifty, uneconomical habit, if you use the words thrift and economy in the only way in which they ought to be used, namely, as applied to what is worth economizing. Time, happiness, life, these are the only things to be thrifty about. But I see people working and worrying over quince-marmalade and tucked petticoats and embroidered chair-covers, things that perish with the using and leave the user worse than they found him. ”

“ Nor e'en the gift of your whole self could save
This wand'rer, shipwrecked on the sea of life;
Who, passing by your door, says only this—
"You are no richer, dear, for that day's thrift,
While I am made the poorer for all time." ”

“ In short, thrift negates thrift. If every worker in England should heed the preachers of thrift and cut expenditure in half, the condition of there being more men to work than there is work to do would swiftly cut wages in half. And then none of the workers of England would be thrifty, for they would be living up to their diminished incomes. ”

“ Yet is not dress an art-manufacture as well as a cup and saucer, or a teaboard? Is there less skill and talent, less taste required to clothe the form which we are told is made after God's own image, than to furnish an apartment? Why should not dressmakers and tailors attend the schools of design, as well as those artisans who are intended to be employed in what are called art-manufactures? Why should not shoemakers be taught the shape and movements of the foot? ”

“ If you wish to make a cottage, or a corn-fan bonnet, or a hat, make it to suit yourselves, but do not run after the fashions of the world. I expect, by and by, if this taste for fashion, be not checked, to see this house alive, more or less, with what are termed "shoo fly" hats, bonnets and headdresses; and what else you'll get I do not know. But no matter what the name nor what the fashion if we do not lust after the wicked world. And when you buy yourselves dresses do not purchase one for six or eight dollars, and then want about twenty more for trimmings. ”

“ He had felt, however, that their lack of ordinary business thrift would not be any special hindrance in such an enterprise as this; where, after all, success would come more as the result of chance, than because of shrewdness or capacity. ”

“ As I travel on I am continually hearing of art treasures, of ancient furniture, of fine oak panelling, ruthlessly removed from old houses, of old family pictures and portraits, old pewter, old fireplaces, old everything, having been purchased by Americans, millionaire or otherwise, and conveyed across the Atlantic; how far true I cannot say, but I have also heard that there are sundry manufactories abroad and at home of sham antiques, of old masters, old pottery, "Toby Jugs" in particular, and furniture, kept busily employed for the benefit chiefly of Americans. ”

“ Gray explained, "but the much more ignoble kind, the wasteful thrift that doesn't really save, that simply misses, and that neither enjoys things themselves nor enjoys their horrid little equivalent of hoarded pence. ”

“ Now beauty has become a commodity. To-day, to hold his place, the artisan must become an artist. The era of ugliness, with its clumsy tools and ungainly garments, has gone forever. No longer content with lending strength to coat or chair or car, manufacturers now vie with one another in a struggle to make the garment take on lines of grace, and colors soft and beautiful. ”

“ All England is ringing with the praise of thrift. Not Scotland, for a Scotchman is born thrifty—just as he is said to be born not able to understand a joke. And as to Irishmen, it is to be questioned whether they have such a word in their dictionary at all. No class of mutual thrift institution has flourished there, says the latest writer on the subject, Rev. Francis Wilkinson; and mostly our earlier thrift societies were started by a landlord for his own benefit, rather than for that of the members. ”

“ These societies have done more to teach the people practical thrift than any known device ever promulgated. Thrift is described as “good husbandry, economical management in regard to property, success and advance in the acquisition of property, increase of worldly goods, vigorous growth, as a plant.”
“He is a good wagoner that can turn in a little room.”—Bishop J. Hall.
“Economy is the parent of integrity, of liberty and of ease, and the beautiful sister of temperance, of cheerfulness and health. Without economy none can be rich, and with it few can be poor.”—Dr. ”

“ Indeed, there is a general appearance of thrift. It is in populous centres, in large cities, that real want and hunger are mostly suffered, where from force of circumstances the multitude of people cease to be producers, but are still consumers. ”

“ No one knew better than they the difficulties of the task before them. In England, as in America, thrift is more regarded as a vice than a virtue. Like the taste for olives it [Pg 123] is an acquired thing. ”

“ Leading papers publish illustrated supplements devoted exclusively to the subject of attire, thus carrying temptation into every humble home, and suggesting unattainable luxuries. Windows in many of the larger shops contain life-sized manikins loaded with the latest costly and ephemeral caprices of fashion arranged to catch the eye of the poorer class of women, who stand in hundreds gazing at the display like larks attracted by a mirror! Watch those women as they turn away, and listen to their sighs of discontent and envy. ”

“ I had been taught to admire thrift, but here I found it held to be the meanest of qualities. The Beau Ideal of a Bohemian I discovered to be the young man who is free with his purse and careless of his obligations. ”

“ Yet how little pains are taken to procure this happiness for children! How much more intent are persons in general upon obtaining handsome drawing-rooms, and costly dresses—in short, upon keeping up that external appearance, which is a passport to what is called good society. And when the drawing-room is furnished, the dresses purchased, and the appearances unexceptionable, what is it all worth? Not one of the thousand aches of head and heart which the extreme of material excellence must under ordinary circumstances cost. ”

“ That they swell yearly now, if such be the fact, indicates that what thrift exists does gradually resort more and more thither rather than elsewhither; but the question, Is thrift increasing? runs through the reticulation, and is as water spilt on the ground, not to be gathered here. ”

“ I let men—who were in the business simply to make money, and who knew how to do it!—tell me that my furs must be recut, or changed, and my jewels reset, and my wardrobe restocked and my furniture carried away and replaced. ”

“ Nothing is more important than the subject of thrift. “Look after the pence, the pounds will look after themselves” is an old truism, too often neglected. How do people grow rich? There is only one way, and that is to be thrifty and save. Never spend all your income, be it big or little. ”

“ FITS OF THRIFT. Nothing is more common in the middle ranks of life than to find housewives taking what may be called fits of thrift. Though sensible women in their way, excellent advisers and charming gossips, and though by no means spenders on a great scale, they have no enduring principle of economy, but are only frugal by fits and starts. ”

“ We squander our money on frippery—not in dress merely, but in hideous ornaments for our fire-places, in antimacassars of disagreeably suggestive name, in toys and trinkets and imitation rubbish of all kinds, which encumber our table-surfaces, and are dust-traps occupying the minds and mornings of our parlour-maids to keep them clean. ”