The Richmond palladium and sun-telegram. [volume] (Richmond, Ind.) 1907-1939, 1913-08-07

1
n girls hand in marriage
| wv the first question that
her father puts to him is,
Can you support my daughter in COM
fort?"
No kind and thoughtful parent,
| however, ever takes the trouble to ask
prospective bride, Can you spend
wisely and judiciously my sons hard
earned money!"
| Yet the one thing is just as import
ant as the other, and the happiness
and success of any marriage depends
just as surely on the wife's ability to
get the full purchasing power out of
dollar as it does upon the husbands
| ability to make that dollar. The ne'er
-do-well of a man does not more surely
bring family to want and poverty
| than the thriftless and wasteful wom-
an does.
There is a homely old proverb that
says that a woman can throw more
out of the back door with. a teaspoon
than a man can put in at the front
| door with a shovel. And it's true. No
man, unless he is a financial wizard,
can make any Roadway against the ex-
| travagance Of a wife. 1t is his wife's
discretion as a spender that settles the
average mans fate for him, and deter
mines whether he is to sit on book
keepers stool or stand behind the
counter the balance of his life, or
whether he Is going to be we'll to do
and prosperous when he is middle
aged. e..
When you see the young wife of a
man ON moderate salary always
dressed up in the very latest cut in
fashion, when you meet her at matt
nees every week and watch her having
tea at smart hotel afterward, when
you encounter her in the butcher shop,
negligently ordering sweetbreads and
!. squads, you don't have to go to any
fortune-teller to forecast the future of
her husband and herself.
You can do that for yourself. You
can see stoop-shouldered man grow
ing more and more discouraged as the
years go by, and he has nothing to
show for his labor except a mountain
of receipted bills, and at the end of it
all you see man dead from overwork
or thrown out of his job into hopeless
poverty into which he sinks.
YOU CAN FORECAST.
On the other hand, when you see
the wife of poor young man who
does her own homework and makes
her own frocks and who buys the
cheap cuts of meat at the butcher
shop and is particular about having
the bones and the trimmings sent
home, you are equally able to forecast
the future for her and her husband.
And you see diamonds and motor cars
festooning her horizon along about the
time she is fifty.
There is nothing new in these state
ments. Everybody has seen hundreds
of such cases. Everybody can recite to
you dozens of instances in their per-
sonal knowledge of men who have
been ruined by their wives extrava-
gance or made by their wives thrift.
Every mother and father pray that
their own son will get wife who has
the saving bank habit instead of the
bargain counter mania, yet nobody
raises finger to prevent catastro-
phe that threatens every man who
gets married and every family that is
lstarted.
/ When woman is wasteful and ex-
travagant, and throws her husband
good money away we blame her, and
say all the hard things about her that
We can think if. It's cruel injustice.
1t isn't her fault. It's the fault of the
idiotic way in which we bring girls up.
| We don't teach them the value of
money. We don't teach them how to
spend it, and to expect them to make
a wise use of it is as unreasonable as
to expect a land lubber to know how
to pilot ship.
NO EXPERIENCE. .@
The average girl until she gets mar
ried, has never had the spending of a
dollar. Her father has paid her bills,
and her mother has decided what she
could buy. A little change for street
car and soda water is about all the
money that has ever jingled in her
purse. She has never had any fixed al
lowance for her clothes and personal
expenses, and so has never realized
that il she paid too much for hat she
would have TO do without dress, and
that you can't spend your money and
have it too.
Parents are so afraid that their
daughters viii waste their money that