CIGARETTE PAPERS.

Southland Times, Issue 21579, 17 December 1931, Page 8

CIGARETTE PAPERS.

THE SAVING GRACE. In these days it is not uncommon to find people who are underpaid, and a discussion with them will disclose that in almost every case there is no reference to the value, of services rendered. Usually the proof of inadequate payment is the inability of the disputant to exist on the pittance he or she is compelled to take. Therein lies the kernel of much of our trouble, because in the vast majority of instances it will be found a confusion between luxury and necessity. Luxuries made sufficiently common become necessities, and the relinquishing of them results in complaints that poverty and starvation are at hand. That poverty exists need not be questioned at this moment; but people who are receiving regular wages, cut ten per cent, by the Arbitration Court, and further reduced by taxation and rationing are still troubled by an inability to discriminate between luxury and necessity, between waste and thrift.

Two people live alongside each other and they have like incomes to provide for households of similar size. Rents are the same; but in one case £4 a week is large enough to make saving possible and in the other it is insufficient to keep the household going. What is the explanation of this difference—two opinions as to what constitutes luxury, two views.of living. In one case prudence dictates what certain expenditure shall be avoided to permit the accumulation of money, far later years; in the other the overriding idea is to live for the present, and save nothing. Yet when adversity comes the saver finds himself attacked because he has accumulated by the family which has already enjoyed the eating of its cake. There is another peculiarity. The family which has lived thriftily and saved will be found tidier, better dressed (if less showily) and happier than the family which lived for the moment and spent everything as it came. The saving family will not be a prey to envy; the spending family will be super-charged with it. This, of course, sounds like old-fashioned twaddle. Unfortunately that is what it is, but if every person who takes sufficient interest in the matter to refute all this will seriously apply it to cases they know (not their own for there they will collide with personal bias) they will find quite a lot of evidence to attest that saving is a grace, and extravagance is a despoiler of character as well as a robber of happiness. —CRITICUS.