If these be the effects of luxuries, why is it that we continue to strive to increase them with all our might?  I have already insisted that I am not speaking of such things as are beneficial to body and soul, but such as are detrimental.  But it will be said, you are spending money, and to gratify your longings labourers of different sorts have been employed, and the wealth of the world is thereby increased.  But we must consider the loss to the man who is indulging himself, and therefore the loss to the community; and further, that his money might have gone in producing something necessary, and not noxious, something in its turn reproductive.  In Boswell’s Life of Johnson is this passage, “Johnson as usual defended luxury.  You cannot spend money in luxury without doing good to the poor.  Nay, you do more good to them by spending it in luxury; you make them exert industry, whereas by giving it you keep them idle.  I own indeed there may be more virtue in giving it immediately in charity, than in spending it in luxury.”  He was then asked if this was not Mandeville’s doctrine of “private vices are public benefits.”  Of course this did not suit him, and he demolished it.  He said, “Mandeville puts the case of a man who gets drunk at an alehouse, and says it is a public benefit, because so much money is got by it to the public.  But it must be considered that all the good gained by this through the gradation of alehouse-keeper, brewer, maltster, and farmer, is overbalanced by the evil caused to the man and his family by his getting drunk.”

Perhaps you will say, what is a man to do with his money, if he may not spend it in luxury?  If, as Dr. Johnson says, and as we all of us find out occasionally, it is worse spent if given in charity, are we to hoard it?  No, surely this is more contemptible still.  “What is the use of all your money,” said one distinguished barrister to another, “you can’t live many more years, and you can’t take it with you when you go?  Besides, if you could, it would all melt where you’re going.”  This hoarding of wealth, this craving for it, is only another form of luxury, the luxury of growing rich.  Some like to be thought rich, and called rich, and treated with a fawning respect on account of their riches; others love to hide their riches, but to hug their money in secret, and seem to enjoy the prospect of dying rich.  I was engaged in a singular case some time ago, in which an old lady who had starved herself to death, and lived in the greatest squalor, had secreted 250 pounds in a stocking under the mattress of her bed.  It was stolen by one nephew, who was sued for it by another, and all the money went in law expenses.  If then we are not to spend our money upon luxuries, and if we are not to hoard it, what are we to do with it if we have more than we can lay out in what is useful.  I have not time (nor is the question a part of my subject) to discuss what should be done with the money hitherto