HOW TO SAVE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 127, 8 October 1868, Page 3

HOW TO SAVE.

(From the Spectator.") Keen workmen have told us that among their own comrades the inability of some quite sober and industrious men to lay by a pound, amounts to a mental incapacity, and we can see for ourselves that the statement is just as true of the professionals. The latter have, it is true, learned to dread poverty for women —as their daughters JJcannot work— with a dread which instils one form of thrift —and a shockingly wasteful form it is in the long run—and they do subscribe to life offices, but with that exception there is not a pin to choose between them and the workmen. They do not keep Saint Monday, but are just as shortsighted as if theydid. We have often wondered why so many men, not vicious, or luxurious, or stupid, find it so hard to save, whether it would be impossible to implant in lads the spirit of saving, or ambition, or, as-we believe, though this will be denied, the habit of calculation. No doubt a born instinct has something to do with the matter, for there are races which save, while others squander, just as there are mice which accumulate grains, and mice which starve two days to gorge themselves on the third. But much must be due to training and circumstances, else the Saxon in Edinburgh and the Saxon in Kent, the Frenchman in Brittany and the Frenchman in Spitalfields would not differ so violently as they do in the accumulative faculty. A Breton would grow rich and portion hia daughters, and leave heaps of broad pieces behind him on Spitalfields wages, and so would a genuine Lowlander on the income of an Essex artisan. The evil, the greatest of the economical evils in our society, must ba curable, and the first step to cure it is to ascertain its cause. The Times said, about a year since, it was inability to do multiplication, to remember that a shilling a day is £18 5s a year; and the suggestion was shrewd, but it does not cover the whole case. Nobody saves less than the man who is always worrying over the details of his daily expenditure, fixed, as it usually is, by circumstances he can hardly control, who is always multiplying the omnibus fare he cannot avoid by 626. It is not love of luxury, for very simple men very often do not save ; and it is not, like extravagance, due to wilfulness, for the majority would like to save if they only saw the way. Patience is, we strongly suspect, the wanting faculty in non-savers; but that is a very dreary thought, for patience is one of the virtues which cannot be instilled from the outside. Endurance can, but a born impatience can no more be cured than that " restless marmot," or whatever it is, in the Zoological could be taught to keep itself quiet for fifty seconds. Is it, however, possible to secure the results of patience without securing the virtue, if it be a virtue, itself ? We suspect it is, and that a very slight adjustment of our social system would develop the habit in unexpected strength. The writer had once the fortune to live among an English community in which every man either saves, or thinks he will save, or is slightly annoyed with himself for not saving, and repeatedly saw men instinctively careless of money, born spendthrifts, succeed in the attempt. It was always done in one way —a way any one with an ascertained income or salary can adopt, but which Englishmen seem to dread as a sort of slavery. This was to apply the lifeinsurance principle to the entire income. Most men, indeed all men who begin it, find in themselves the nerve and the patience to pay the premium on life insurance, and they have only to compel themselves to the same practice on a larger scale to make independence certain. Let them pay away into a bank, month by month or quarter by quarter, the sum they think they can afford, or rather, are determined to afford, as a first charge upon income, a life insurance, and live upon the remainder, running into debt, if necessary, rather than break the rule. It seems somewhat silly advice, and one to be defended only by experience ; but the man who tries it will find hi two years that his ideas of his own wealth have contracted, that he regards the "remainder " as his whole income, just as much as if he were paying the same sum to a life insurance or a mortgage. No doubt any compulsion from without makes the matter easier, | as all men know, and we have always wondered why some great bank did not trade on ' that special form of human weakness, open- | ing accounts on which no cheque be I drawn, except at long-distant intervals, or | after some disagreeable process. Very slight obstacles will prevent people from spending money once saved, and the simple rule of the old savings' banks that a depositor must attend in person or send a certificate was the keynote to the success which attended that artificial inducement to thrift. Molly would soon lose all her savings if she could draw cheques, and people far above Molly would be immensely benefited hy a similar inability. A money box without a key somehow seems more attractive to a child than a money-box with one, and about money the half of us are babies. But men can make themselves do it by compulsion from within, just as we often see the most luxurious class of society set themselves just in this way to pay off ancient mortgages which worry them only in their pride. The sense of the hopelessness of the task disappears as the heap grows, and the pace at which it grows soon astonishes the depositor. Half the workers in London of all grades would live just as comfortably on threefourths of their income as on the whole, the difference going in superfluities; and four years of such saving gives them the clear year's income,, the possession of which makes the whole difference between independence and slavery, care and contentment, poverty and competence. There is no need whatever to set up any loftier standard of saving, to dream of fortunes, or think for ever about the charms of that garden which is to repay the stupid mistake made by so many active men, called " retiring from business. We will guarantee any man who has

once saved a whole year's income from ever again growing poor through any default of Ms own. If the worthy woman whose letter suggested this lay sermon ever gets that £200 she will lire to be rich, for she will have learned what half England does not know — the secret of accumulation.