The standard in this matter should be set by the rich, on whom rests the greatest responsibility, moral and social.  It is impossible to expect workers to save if they see luxury and extravagance everywhere round them.  One cannot too strongly say that.

The civilians who work hard to produce, who have done heavy toil in munitions and industry, and receive good wages and then go out and spend it lavishly might just as well have slacked at their work.  The ultimate effect is the same.  They have undone the good they did.  It is as if soldiers having won a trench let the Germans come back into it.

People of small means often feel that all they can save is so small that it cannot really help and wonder if the effort to save is worth while, but if every person in America saved 2 cents a day, it would amount to $730,000,000 in a year, and that would find a great deal of munitions.

Finding the money by saving finds everything, releases men for the army, finds labour and money for munitions, finds labour for ships and relieves the demands on tonnage, finds supplies.  It is the fundamental service of the civilian, and no good citizen wants luxuries while soldiers and sailors need clothes and guns and ships and munitions.

Everybody, man, woman, and child, can join the great financial army and march behind our men, and women have done with us and can do everywhere a great work in this.  Women are on our National Committee and doing a great deal of its organization.  Our men in the trenches, in the air, at sea, endure for us what we would have said before the war was humanly unendurable.  They pay for our freedom with a great price—­and we send them out to pay it—­in death, disablement, suffering and sacrifice.  To fail in our duty behind them would be the great betrayal.

Our treasures are very small things compared with our men.  Shall we give them and not our money?

[Illustration:  REVERSE OF BEFORE YOU SPEND]

[Illustration]

A BOOKMARK, ISSUED BY N.W.S.C.

[Illustration:  THINK BEFORE YOU SPEND]

[Illustration:  REVERSE OF HOW 15/6]

ANOTHER BOOKMARK

FOOD PRODUCTION AND CONSERVATION

“The whole country ought to realise that we are a beleaguered
city.”

—­The President of the Board of Agriculture.

“If you have any belief in the cause for which thousands of your fellow-countrymen have laid down their lives, you will scrape and scrape and scrape, you will go in old clothes, and old boots, and old ties until such a mass of treasure be garnered into the coffers of the Government as to secure at the end of all this tangle of misery a real and lasting settlement for Europe.”

—­The President of the Board of Education.

CHAPTER X

FOOD PRODUCTION AND CONSERVATION