THE SPENDTHRIFT.

Observer, Volume XL, Issue 24, 14 February 1920, Page 3

THE SPENDTHRIFT.

And a Moral

THERE is a harsh old saying, "Put a beggar on horseback and he will ride to the'devil:" There is also the Scriptural injunction, "Eat, drink, and be nierry, for to-morrow ye die.' 5 The other day an ex-soldier appeared in court to answer a charge, and it was elicited in evidence that he had squandered £370 deferred pay and gratuity in six months. The sitting judge said that the squanderer had disgraced himself "worse than the swine." * - * * The riding to the devil of a begyar on horseback * is a great moral losson, but one isn't quite sure that the fatted profiteer avlio spends £500 in five hours on a freak feed to his

friends, isn't quite as devilish as the fool who spends £370 in six months. In effect, the person with unexpected wealth in his progress to the devil should get there as quickly as possible. * * * Nobody ever yet saved a man from himself if he intended to go to the devil. In the matter of "loose money," there are thousands of New Zealanders who in the past few years have had more of it than ever before, and as was shown in the ox-soldier case, many women with unexpected cash at their disposal have "gone the whole hog." • * . * * The point of view of the public, which doesn't "hit it up," is that all this loose money has been and is to be extracted from the- pockets of the people. The public has no protection in the matter, and no redress. Even when the squanderer has "cut up" his gratuity among the ileshpots, he is still a charge on the community as soon as he is a pauper—or a gaolbird. The hope, of course, is that the squanderer is a rare bird, and. that the majority of the people with loose cash hold it tight. * * * The habit of the man hitherto unused to money is to spend it, and this habit has been indulged in in New Zealand immensely to the detriment to the without any foreign capital. The tradesman, for instance, in regard to the gratuity man, "sees him coming," and bleeds him accordingly. He has in many cases fixed his prices on the largest amount he can extract for any given article from the ex-soldier. Some, of course, there are avlio, having "done in their dough" (to borrow an expression), are "fain to be fed with the husks the swine did eat," and the disappearance of this "foreign capital," as soon as possible," ■will stabilise the small domestic finances of those with none. * * * The molality of the story of the ex-soldier who "did in" £370 in six months, is that he wasn't fit to have command of capital, and that the best thing he could do was to get rid of it as quickly as possible to someone who knew its value. If you insist that it is an immoral act for a man to spend his own money in useless pursuits, it is most immoral for M.P.'s to spend money which is not their own in a flying gorge to Samoa. The soldier had at least earned the money he threw away.