Buchanan County bulletin. [volume] (Independence, Iowa) 1869-1891, 1877-09-28
Penny Wise and Pound Foolish.
Harper's Bazaar.

Just as some people love beauty, and
some love books, and some love pleas
ure, there are some who love money
They do not seem to love it for any
thing that it will do or that it will pro-
cure, for any power it gives them, for
any extrinsic happiness, but simply for
itself alone; and the sight Of double
eagle that is theirs warns the cookies
Of their heart as the sight Of no perfect
face or lovely landscape on earth could
do.
Most of us desire money for the COM
fort it can give us, the appreciation in
the eyes Of the rest of the world, the
pleasure it allows us to bestow. But
these people love it for no such utterly
exterior quality; they love it simply as
money; it hurts their heart to part with
it, and every dollar they add to their
store is more to them than good deed
added up in heaven. Far beneath their
love of money sinks their desire for the
esteem of their fellow men; they had
rather be thought rich than good or no
BILE, or generous or kind, and in truth,
these do not care whether they are
thought rich or not so long as they are
rich. Their wives lead dreadful lives,
that drive them to rebellion or reduce
them to idiocy; their sons runaway as
soon as they are old enough to know any
road that leads from home, feeling that
nothing can be worse than home, and
their daughters, hating the hand that
compels them to unrighteous drudgery
grow up to labor through all their
heavy-hearted youth, if they also do not
forsake home, only to flaunt in supera-
bundance Of inery, to rejoice in gross
tables, and to marry husbands that will
do their best to run through their prop
erty so soon as they come into possess
ion of what the father could not take
with him.
What agony these men endure in
knowing that as they brought nothing
into this world, therefore they can car
ry nothing out" it is difficult to conjec-
ture. They do their best still to retain
heavy grasp of mortmain on what
they have accumulated; making their
hand felt, although in the grave; they
subject the inevitable bequest to all
sorts of conditions, sometimes making
the business so knotty that nobody but
the lawyers get any property, at all, and
sometimes, in the endeavor to tie it up
so fast, leaving such meshes that the
whole creeps through, and is inherited
free of any condition. Leaving it so
they must suffer in the leaving it al
most sufficiently to punish them for the
suffering they occasion while they hold
it.
For it is difficult to over-estimate the
suffering caused sensitive girl by the
shabby apparel she is obliged to wear;
by the schoolbooks she is obliged to
borrow, the pleasures she is obliged to
forego, the mean house in which she is
obliged to see her acquaintance, where
such father rules; or caused to a wife
by her sympathy with her children, or
by similar evidence Of the superiority
of her husbands love for money over
his love for herself.
Certainly these men must be desti-
tute Of family affection in an in
tense degree, for we have known fami-
lies who lived on little but oatmeal from
years beginning to years end, and sold
half the milk of the COW at that; who
never had SO much as the ears of the
yearly pig that was sold to the butcher;
who, though they worked in the garden,
had none of the vegetables, and who
would as soon have touched the fruit of
the tree of life as have dared to pick an
apple; yet the father sat in high places,
and was respected as a moneyed man,
with the vague aura surrounding him
that somehow seems always to accompa-
ny the possession of money even in the
hands Of the most unworthy, instead of
being executed as ruffian for his cruel
ty to animals, if for nothing else 'Too
much luxury! Too much luxury!' he
said, when he found an ambitious mar
ried daughter had earned with her own
hands common ingram carpet for her
little parlor; and he cut her off with a
shilling.
Nor can they value the opinion of
penny, pretty one," said the man who
was an authority in his town, two-thirds
of which he owned, having given child
coin to keep it quiet for moment or
two; "a cent spoils the face of a dollar.
And sometimes it is a puzzle to us
whether they really do love money as a
possession, or as an abstract entity to
which honor is due; for we have heard
of one of them who, dropping dime
beneath door-sill, and finding his own
efforts unavailing to remove it, hired a
laborer to take up the door-stone, and
paid him a quarter for the job. Yet it
is impossible that such case as that
only emphasizes the love of it, since the
recovery of the dime was felt to be
worth the greater sum; and quite as
possibly the computation of the interest
on that dime, lying idle and lost for all
time weighed heavily in the balance
against the expenditure of the quarter
for value received in work, and there
may, after all, have been only a bragga-
docio about it and a sacrifice of real
feeling, in the fancy that it might after
ward be said: He does not love money
so much as exactitude and justice"
Such men are almost invariably as
tyrannical as they are close-fsted; in
deed, the exercise of this dominant quail
ity obliges them to hold the rein closely.
The result of this in the family is usual
ly open insubordination; petty theft,
constant deceit, or else slavish submis-
sion that begets chronic weakness of
mind which, not daring to think, borders
closely upon stupidity. My dear" said
one Of these hard times, two candles
are an extravaganza nowadays. l think,
considering the high price Of living, we
must content ourselves with burning one
candle, no matter who it may be that
drops In in the evening They must
take us as they find us. And the slave
quite agreed But on coming home the
next night what was his amazement to
find two candles burning! He quietly
extinguished one, and waited for the de-
parture of the guests in order to expos
tulate with his wife. 1 don't know
what you mean,' answered the slave,
with flicker Of indignation. l was
only burning the one: | took one candle
and cut it in two
1t seems to us that such people as
these are really almost outside the pale
of humanity They afford only pain and
no pleasure during their lives, and theil
death might be called their first praise
worthy act. Families have rights as well
as heads of families, and it is not even
questionable how far man is warranted
in mortifying and humiliating his wife
and daughters and sons in order to graf