Part 12

This plan simply provides for system in spending. It serves to balance expenditures. It also does the best that can be done to provide a reserve for every need. It helps the well-to-do to greater independence. It enables the poor to keep from growing poorer, and often enables them to reach comfortable circumstances. It does not make of a dollar more than a hundred cents. That is impossible. However, it does enable the owner of a dollar to get the full value of a hundred cents from it. It is a good way in which to “pay as you go, and keep books.”

Efficient Spending (1921)

In the common struggle to get on, many of us devote our attention too exclusively to the matter of earning money. We assume that the question of wealth is wholly one of income and that having is altogether a matter of getting. Such is not the case. Efficient spending is quite as important a consideration as is efficient earning. The question as to whether one can succeed depends not only on whether he can get and keep money. It also depends on whether he can accomplish the most with it after he gets it. The usefulness of money is a matter of getting a hundred cents of value from each dollar. Between the hoarding of money, on the one hand, and the reckless habits of the spendthrift, on the other, lies this golden mean. Three general principles relate to efficient spending.

The first is the importance of buying only what one really needs. A great many people are kept poor because they buy what they do not need enough to warrant its purchase. Non-essential industries are permitted to sap the labor and support which rightfully belong to more important things because of this popular willingness to spend good money for that which can bring no real equivalent in value.

Many needs are imagined, or assumed. They have their origin, not in any fact of necessity, but in the fever of a mind wrought up by envy or desire, until its possessor has joined in the general chase after that which is not bread. The chronic invalid of yesterday got a new disease each time she read over the list of symptoms in a patent medicine pamphlet. The spendthrift of today thinks of some new luxury to covet with each glance at a tastefully-decorated window, or an artfully drawn picture.

We must learn to let reason and not desire rule in these matters. Reason is sometimes a little forbidding, it is true, but we frequently need the touch of a restraining hand in the matter of spending. Unchecked desire would soon make paupers of us all.

The standard of living rises or falls according as desire is, or is not, stimulated. If it were gauged to necessity, there would be little variation. Necessity is a well-established thing and, therefore, practically constant. The scale of expenditure varies with the human desire for luxury and the human ability to obtain it.

The measure of real necessity is surprisingly small. When one finds the medium ground between profligacy and stinginess, he will realize that he can live there, even though his income may be moderate. Greater moderation in many things would leave us a healthier and happier race, to say nothing of what it would do for our bank accounts. Certainly, before buying a thing, one should honestly ask himself whether he needs it. He should, likewise, give himself an honest answer.

The second principle of efficient spending is that when one has honestly decided that he needs a thing, he should buy the best he can get. If one buys at all, it pays to search the market for an article of high quality. Moreover, he is very apt not to find an article of high grade unless he does search the market rather carefully.

The purchase of a cheap grade of goods, for any serious use, is very poor economy. Such goods soon give way, and the service they render, while they do last, is not satisfactory. To obtain a given amount of service, one will spend more money on articles of cheap grade than upon those that are better. The obtaining of the same amount of pleasure and satisfaction from the use of a cheap thing and a good one is an impossibility.

It is a fallacy to suppose that the market must be supplied with quantities of shoddy goods for the sake of people who have less money to spend. The very fact that one does have less money to spend is one of the chief reasons why he cannot afford to waste it on inferior things. If all except a really worthy and dependable grade of goods were removed from the market today, purchasers, both rich and poor, would be the gainers.

The selection of a high grade of products calls for some ability and skill in making a choice. It calls for no more, however, than every person should possess. The average citizen should train himself to be something of a judge of materials. Such ability will be of real service almost constantly in the task of living. One of the first things he is apt to learn is the fact that the showiest articles are seldom the best. A certain camouflage of outward appearance is often put on a thing to hide its real defects. Quality does not have to be painted up to show it off. It proclaims itself. The purchaser must learn to see through the outward appearance and judge a thing on its merits.

The third principle of efficient spending follows in logical order. It is that, having decided to buy a thing and having bought the best, one should use it until he has gotten from it the utmost service of which it is capable.

A certain antiquated notion of economy was that when things were purchased they should be put away and saved. The more valuable an article was, the more scrupulously it was kept. Good clothes were bought and hung away to be eaten by the moths instead of rendering their owners the service for which they were intended. Valuable articles were always rusting out and rotting out in the name of economy.

The fact is that disuse is bad for anything. Unused, a piece of machinery will soon become incapable of use. The worst thing that can be done with a piece of cloth is to fold it away and leave it alone. Service is the mission and the means to health of anything from a table fork to the biceps muscle. This is the thing an article is built for. Nothing save its possibilities for usefulness justifies the spending of money for it. If it were not to be used, good judgment would never sanction the purchase of it. It must be made to pay interest on the investment. Use alone proves its right to exist.

A thing should be used as long as there is any usefulness left in it. One of the points at which we are forever losing out in our attempts at economy is in our habit of not waiting until we have exhausted the usefulness of a thing before we put it aside and buy another.

This is the theory of the continual change taking place in styles. From the tip of a lady’s shoe to the shape of an automobile, things are kept continually changing in order to induce the public to buy new articles every so often, whether it needs them or not. This keeps trade going, but it keeps many people poor.

A thing for which one has spent good money should not only be used as long as possible, but it should also be kept capable of use as long as possible. Good care and proper attention in the way of repair will extend its life very considerably. This is a matter of conservation as well as one of economy.

Of course, there is no plan by which the ends of economy and thrift can be accomplished automatically. The human factor will always be the determining one. These principles will not practice themselves. Only human mind and will can do that. They are not a machine for the conservation of money. They are only a plan by which money may be made to accomplish the most.

The poor we always have with us, but many of them are with us unnecessarily. We shall always have a poverty problem, but it would be reduced to a small minimum by the right use of money. Money is made to spend, but the financially independent are those who have learned to spend it wisely.

The Three Agencies in Child Training (1909)

Every normal child is born with certain tendencies and propensities in which either the good or the evil of past generations preponderates. If it is the good, there must be some agency to call forth, develop, and strengthen it; if, on the other hand, it is the evil, there is all the more need why some influence should be brought to bear to check the evil and inculcate the good. Upon three great institutions devolves this momentous responsibility. They are the home, the school, and the Church. Each must help the other two, and no one is complete without the co-operation of the others. Of the three, the home will perhaps come nearest to completeness within itself. The sooner these three agencies, which in the final analysis have a common purpose, come to understand each other and co-operate with each other, the better it will be for the child. For the responsibility of no one of the three ends with this life. The Church is not the only one that builds for eternity, nor should the other two be the only two that build for time, but all may well unite in building for both time and eternity, and the aim of each should be the perfection of personality.

Three forces of equal power, pulling each in a different direction, must either offset the influence of each other and result in stationary failure, or force each other to aimless wandering. Besides all this, the strain is uncomfortably intense for the object upon which the pull is exerted. The child who has had these influences pulling him about in different or totally opposite directions all his life is an object deserving of pity, and if in his case life becomes a failure, the wonder will only be why the failure was not more complete. But when these forces unite in a common purpose, and their purpose should be a common one, the child can only blame himself if he does not attain some very definite goal. And when that common purpose is a good one, that goal can not choose but be a worthy one.

A great many parents are wondering these days why their children did not grow up to be good. If their children are spiritually delinquent, they blame the Church, regardless of what the home example or precept has been. If the children use bad grammar or do not exercise good judgment, the blame falls upon the school, regardless of the standards of those with whom those children have spent the days of their mental unfolding. Sometimes it is more than the Church can do to merely offset the evil done at home, without ever reaching the aggressive side of development. Sometimes it is more than lies within the ability of the school to rescue the child from the misconceptions and errors of everyday life and speech, without arriving at the constructive point at all. God has committed to the home the arduous but sacred task of guiding the first faltering steps of the little ones into the ways of righteousness and truth. The first is out of the reach of the Church’s ability; the second is a part in education that the school can never play. Neither the school nor the Church is an orphans’ home for the purpose of taking the responsibility of raising people’s children from the shoulders of those to whom it belongs. They can only do their work upon the chief cornerstone of home instruction, guidance, and discipline. Better children’s meetings can be held at mother’s knee than anywhere else in the world, and it is wrong to deny to maturity the golden memories of such a childhood. The business of the Church is spiritual ministration, and it ought not to need to be anything more. Spiritual ministration, however, is a broad term, and it ought never to be allowed to center in earthly things. The home, then, ought to be the first school, and it must lay proper foundation for the work of the Church, for never will teachings be better learned nor longer remembered than those received in its quiet precincts.

In this day, the school has been narrowed down in the scope of its work to mere mental discipline. And yet the schools from whose halls the world’s greatest minds have come, have not been mere knowledge machines. Our schools claim to teach literature, and yet their curricula ignore the greatest piece of literature ever written. In some States the law goes so far as to forbid the reading of the Bible in the public schools on the ground that it might engender sectarianism. The Bible is not a sectarian book, nor does the teaching of it need to be sectarian. There is scarcely a truly great life that is not a standing witness to the fact that education is not complete without a knowledge of the Bible, at least as literature and history. And yet pedagogical fads and public customs deny public school students the benefit of the study of it. Public school students are taught the pagan religions. They are taught the mythology of Greece and Rome, but the living and vital religion, to which even the school owes its being, is ignored for the petty fear of sectarianism. A man’s education can not be measured by what he has committed to memory, but by what he has learned by heart. Education is no more what one knows than what he is. The school needs to train the mind, but it can not afford to ignore the necessity of a right culture of the heart.

But it is scarcely a greater mistake for the school to hold itself strictly to mental training to the exclusion of everything pertaining to religion, than it is for the Church to hold itself strictly to religious work to the exclusion of educative effort. In physical science, radiant light and heat are exactly the same thing manifested to different avenues of sense perception. Who knows but that in the spiritual realm, the light of truer wisdom and the warmth of Christian experience are one and the same thing, except that, in the one case, it is perceived through the mind and, in the other, through the heart? Upon the Church devolves the responsibility of lifting the thought of the community to whose needs it ministers to the highest, purest, and best possible plane. In this measure, it needs to be an educative influence. It will be able to reach some minds through the heart, and it will be able to reach some hearts through the mind, and in both cases it will be lifting men to God, who is both love and light. What does it matter if the preacher does lecture once in a while? The Old Book will always supply food for the profoundest thought. We not only need our hearts comforted, however important that may be, but if we expect to understand God’s message and plan, we will have to think, also. Jesus was a Scholar and will baffle the scholarship of this world for many years yet to come. Let the Church not ignore the educational side of Christianity.

And so these three agencies can not encroach on each others’ territory, for they have a common work to do if they are true to their trust. Let the home give the first lessons, and all through the changing years let it be both an educative and religious influence. Let the school be solicitous of both the unfolding mind and the craving heart. Let the Church minister to spiritual needs and not forget that the true education of the heart does not despise the education of the mind. Then shall the child have it said of him, as it was said of that Child of the long ago, “And He advanced in wisdom, and in stature, and in favor with God and man.”

The Association of Mind and Muscle (1918)

In Nicholas Nickleby, the book in which Charles Dickens attempted to set forth the evils of the boarding school system in England in his day, one of the things at which we have sometimes pointed a finger of ridicule really sets forth an important pedagogical principle. It is that part of the story which tells how Squeers, the schoolmaster, first taught a boy to spell a word—usually incorrectly—and then sent him to perform some manual task associated with it. The imperfect spelling cannot be called good pedagogy, and the work to be done was not always calculated to contribute to the dignity of a gentleman, but it is a fact that there is something about the actual doing of a thing which enables the memory the more tenaciously to retain the concept of the thing itself.

In other words, there is some strange but very real and definite association between the mind and the muscle. They act in close cooperation with one another. The mind may be capable of learning things without the corresponding action of the muscle, but it can learn a thing very much more easily and permanently with that cooperative action.

This is a principle which runs through all educational effort. It has had expression from quite remote times. An apostle reminded his hearers of their duty to be doers of the word and not hearers only. His words constituted a very good educational gospel. We not only owe it to ourselves and to the world to act in accordance with the best of our knowledge, but we actually learn better the thing which we take the time and pains to do.

We have always had a certain notion that it is important to keep note books. We have usually supposed that the chief value of a note book is in the fact that it affords a means of quickly referring to any facts which may have fled from memory. If this were the value of a note book, however, those who keep them and then never look at them again would derive no benefit from the process. Yet there are thousands of people who know that they have received large value from the keeping of note books to which they have never referred since they were written. The fact is that the great value of a note book lies in the power of muscular action to record upon the tablet of the mind the thing written down on paper. The fingers themselves seem to possess a certain power to remember. We know a thing better after having written it. One reason may be that the necessity of writing it has forced us to think it through, but another undoubtedly is the fact that the movement of the muscles inscribes its story in the processes of the brain.

It is frequently noticeable, too, that a thing is better remembered after it has been spoken. To give a class recitation upon it, to deliver an address upon it, to make it a subject of conversation with a friend, or even to talk aloud about it to the silences often engraves its subject matter in the memory in an indelible fashion. The very movement of the muscles of speech cooperated with the mind in making the subject an everlasting possession. All this is simply another indication of the principle involved. It also submits proof that there is a certain value in saying what one honestly thinks or truly knows.

In this discussion lies a point of high value to the teacher. It is one thing to get a pupil to take in the knowledge of a fact in such a way as to retain it until some seemingly more commanding fact has forced it from his thought. It is a very different, and a much better, thing to help him to assimilate the matter in question. When knowledge has once been assimilated, nothing save a mental breakdown can ever rob its owner of it. It is then a part of himself. This is the goal of the teacher, and one of the chief paths to it is to induce the pupil to live his knowledge as he gains it.

When this is done, knowledge becomes more than a thing of the mind alone. It is not our concern to merely educate the brain. It is our commission to educate the whole life and to cultivate the entire being. Genuine education is a symmetrical process, and the person who has really learned a thing will profit from it in every interest of his life. As knowledge becomes a matter of action, it becomes a matter of purpose, ideal, and character.

In other words, it is translated into terms of life. It is at this point that the teacher’s work reaches its highest stage of being and usefulness. It is in this sense that both he and his work are immortal.

It would be a serious question whether our earnest attempts at teaching the race would be altogether worth their while if they amounted to nothing more than getting the young to know so many things, to possess such and such a sized storehouse of knowledge, filled with appropriately selected and labelled morsels of fact. It becomes a tremendously worthwhile proposition, however, when it is seen as a means to a larger and richer life. As knowledge is taught to a pupil, it should be as a means of enabling him to live more happily, wholesomely, and successfully. It should be as a sort of transfusion of blood for the living of the larger life.

The principle stated here works both ways and with equal beauty either way. Not only is it true that the actual doing of a thing enables one to learn it better and works the knowledge deeper into life and experience, but it is also true that it best vindicates the useful mission of education.

It is not mere bookishness that the world will want on the part of the girls and boys when they shall at last come to take their places in the ranks of endeavor. It will be expecting people who are capable of earning their keep. It will want them not only to be brilliant and cultivated, but also to be able to meet practical questions and perform everyday tasks.

The boy or girl who has been trained to do the things he knows to do is the one who will best prove to the world the value of the school and the importance of the work of the teacher. The sending of such young people into the arena of action will bring a flood of service which will spell out an ever-accelerated progress for civilization.