III.  That it is in vain, as well as unequal, for a tradesman to preach frugality to his wife, and to bring his wife to a retrenching of her expenses, and not at the same time to retrench his own; seeing that keeping horses and high company is every way as great and expensive, and as necessary to be abated, as any of the family extravagances, let them be which they will.

All this relates to the duty of a tradesman in preventing his family expenses being ruinous to his business; but the true method to prevent all this, and never to let it come so far, is still, as I said before, not to marry too soon; not to marry, till by a frugal industrious management of his trade in the beginning, he has laid a foundation for maintaining a wife, and bringing up a family, and has made an essay by which he knows what he can and cannot do, and also before he has laid up and increased his stock, that he may not cripple his fortune at first, and be ruined before he has begun to thrive.

FOOTNOTES: 

[22] [Defoe’s views on the subject of the too early marrying of young tradesmen, are in every particular sound.  Though there are instances of premature marriages followed by no evil result, but rather the contrary, there can be no doubt, that the only prudent course is to wait till a settlement in life, and a regular income, have been secured.  A young man, anxious for other reasons to marry, is sometimes heard to express his conviction that he might live more cheaply married than single.  There could be no assertion more inconsistent with all common experience.  Even if no positively ruinous consequences arise from an over-early marriage, it almost always occasions much hardship.  It saddens a period of life which nature has designed to be peculiarly cheerful.  The whole life of such a man becomes like a year in which there has been no May or June.  The grave cares of matrimony do not appear to be naturally suitable to the human character, till the man has approached his thirtieth, and the woman her twenty-fourth year.]

CHAPTER XII

OF THE TRADESMAN’S LEAVING HIS BUSINESS TO SERVANTS

It is the ordinary excuse of the gentlemen tradesmen of our times, that they have good servants, and that therefore they take more liberty to be out of their business, than they would otherwise do.  ‘Oh!’ says the shopkeeper, ’I have an apprentice—­it is an estate to have such a servant.  I am as safe in him as if I had my eye upon the business from morning till night; let me be where I will, I am always satisfied he is at home; if I am at the tavern, I am sure he is in the counting-house, or behind the counter; he is never out of his post.

‘And then for my other servants, the younger apprentices,’ says he, ’it is all one as if I were there myself—­they would be idle it may be, but he won’t let them, I assure you; they must stick close to it, or he will make them do it; he tells them, boys do not come apprentices to play, but to work; not to sit idle, and be doing nothing, but to mind their master’s business, that they may learn how to do their own.’