The instances which we have already cited of persons in the humbler ranks of life having by prudential forethought accumulated a considerable store of savings for the benefit of their families, and as a stay for their old age, need not by any means be the comparatively exceptional cases that they are now.  What one well-regulated person is able to do, others, influenced by similar self-reliant motives, and practising like sobriety and frugality, might with equal ease and in one way or another accomplish.  A man who has more money about him than he requires for current purposes, is tempted to spend it.  To use the common phrase, it is apt to “burn a hole in his pocket.”  He may be easily entrapped into company; and where his home provides but small comfort, the public-house, with its bright fire, is always ready to welcome him.

It often happens that workmen lose their employment in “bad times.”  Mercantile concerns become bankrupt, clerks are paid off, and servants are dismissed when their masters can no longer employ them.  If the disemployed people have been in the habit of regularly consuming all their salaries and wages, without laying anything by, their case is about the most pitiable that can be imagined.  But if they have saved something, at home or in the savings bank, they will be enabled to break their fall.  They will obtain some breathing-time, before they again fall into employment.  Suppose they have as much as ten pounds saved.  It may seem a very little sum, yet in distress it amounts to much.  It may even prove a man’s passport to future independence.

With ten pounds a workman might remove from one district to another where employment is more abundant.  With ten pounds, he might emigrate to Canada or the United States, where his labour might be in request.  Without this little store of savings, he might be rooted to his native spot, like a limpet to the rock.  If a married man with a family, his ten pounds would save his home from wreckage, and his household from destitution.  His ten pounds would keep the wolf from the door until better times came round.  Ten pounds would keep many a servant-girl from ruin, give her time to recruit her health, perhaps wasted by hard work, and enable her to look about for a suitable place, instead of rushing into the first that offered.

We do not value money for its own sake, and we should be the last to encourage a miserly desire to hoard amongst any class; but we cannot help recognizing in money the means of life, the means of comfort, the means of maintaining an honest independence.  We would therefore recommend every young man and every young woman to begin life by learning to save; to lay up for the future a certain portion of every week’s earnings, be it little or much; to avoid consuming every week or every year the earnings of that week or year; and we counsel them to do this, as they would avoid the horrors of dependence, destitution, or beggary.  We would have men and women of every class able to