Debt is so degrading that if I owed a man a penny I would walk twenty miles in the dead of winter to pay him, sooner than feel that I was under an obligation. I should be as comfortable with peas in my shoes, or a hedge-hog in my bed, or a snake up my back, as with bills hanging over my head at the grocer's, and the baker's, and the tailor's. An honest man thinks a purse full of other people's money to be worse than an empty one. The jackdaw in the peacock's feathers was soon plucked, and borrowers will surely come to poverty-a poverty of the bitterest sort because there is shame in it. Show, style, and smartness run away with a man's means, keep the family poor, and the fathers nose down on the grindstone.
Frogs try to look as big as bulls and burst themselves.
Economy is half the battle in life, but it is not so hard to earn money as to spend it well. Hundreds would never have known want if they had not first known waste. If all poor men's wives knew how to cook, how far a little might go. Some people are much too fine nowadays to eat what their fathers were thankful to see on the table, and so they please their palates with costly feeding, come to the workhouse, and expect everybody to pity them. They turn up their noses at bread and butter and end up eating raw turnips stolen out of the fields.