over three hundred a year, you are possibly in a
position to indulge your gentility; but if it be
anything under that amount, you cannot afford
to be genteel at so heavy a cost. Every income,
whatever may be its amount, requires careful
management. It is just as easy to get into debt
and difficulty with a few thousands a year as
with a few hundreds. Perhaps the safest
position is that of the man who earns two or
three pounds a week. His income is so small
that no one will trust him, and so he is obliged
to buy his goods as he wants them, and pay for
them with ready money. This person cannot
live genteely, but by management he gets
enough to eat and drink, and is never troubled
with duns and creditors. By avoiding credit, a
man may live and support a family upon a
hundred a year without getting into debt. By
taking credit, he will be in debt with ten
thousand a year.

It is a very simple matter. Credit never permits
a man to know the real value of money,
nor to have full control over his affairs. It
presents all his expenses in the aggregate and not
in detail. Every one has more or less of the
miser's love of money—of the actual gold pieces
and the crisp bank-notes. Now, if you have
these things in your pocket, you see them, as
you make your purchases, visibly diminishing
under your eyes. The lessening heap cries to
you to stop. You would like to buy this, that,
and the other; but you know exactly how much
money you have left, and that if you go on
buying more things your purse will soon be
empty. You do not see this when you take credit.
You give your orders freely, without thought or
calculation; and when the day of payment comes,
you find that you have overrun the constable.

The honest and the dishonest, the careful and
the reckless, all fall victims to this snare. They
begin life by owing, and they never know what
it is to have direct control over their means.
The consequence is, that they are utterly without
a guide to the scale by which they ought to
live. People who owe instead of paying for
what they require, invariably pitch that scale
too high. Let us take the case of a man with
three hundred a year. Being a gentleman born
and bred, and married to a lady, he considers it
necessary that he should have a genteel house.
Now, in London you cannot get a house with
any pretensions to gentility for less than sixty
pounds a year. Well, perhaps a man with three
hundred a year can afford to pay sixty pounds
for his house. But how seldom does he reckon
that the actual sum he will have to pay, including
rates and taxes, is close upon eighty pounds?
Then comes the furnishing. The young man,
seeing that other persons with the same means
as himself have well-appointed houses, at once
proceeds to furnish his residence from kitchen
to attic, on credit. I say on credit, for if he
were possessed of the necessary money, he
would wait and furnish it by degrees. He now
commences life as a householder, keeps a cook
and a housemaid, runs bills with all his tradespeople,
maintains a genteel establishment, gives
little parties, and lives happily—for three
months. At the end of that time bills tumble in
upon him, and he finds that their united amount
is considerably more than his quarter's salary,
if his creditors press him, he is driven to
borrow money at ruinous interest; and so he
is fairly launched upon a career of misery. And
all for the want of the commonest prudence.
Three hundred a year is a salary upon which a
family may live comfortably; but not luxuriously.
It will not admit of ad libitum expenditure;
it must be nursed, and managed, and
watched. A man with this amount of salary
ought not to pay more than sixty pounds a
year for house-rent, including taxes, and he
ought to purchase his furniture by degrees.
He has no business to set up as a full-blown
householder in a moment. If he can manage
to complete his furnishing in two or three
years, he will do very well. In any case he
cannot afford to pay a premium of five-and-
twenty or thirty per cent on every stick he
buys. On the contrary, it is necessary that he
should get everything at the very cheapest.
This is only to be done by paying ready money,
and ready money is only to be got by living for
a year or two within one's income. Everything
in nature grows by degrees—everything but the
human donkey, which tries to be a magnificent
animal, as like a lion as possible, in a minute.
Let me enumerate a few things which a man
cannot afford to do with an income of no more
than three hundred a year. He cannot afford
two servants; he cannot afford to give set
parties; he cannot afford three courses and a
dessert every day; and, as a broad rule, he
cannot afford to take three months' credit from
his tradespeople. Two servants will cost him at
the very least sixty pounds a year, an amount
entirely out of proportion to his means. Then
that three course and a dessert business is the
very type of a mockery, a delusion, and a snare.
It may be said that a plate of soup does not
cost much; that a bit of fish is an inexpensive
luxury; that a pudding is a very simple viand.
That, perhaps, is true, of each of these dishes
separately; but collectively, as forming the
daily bill of fare in a small establishment, they
will be found to come very costly. At an eating-
house you can get a basin of soup for a
shilling, or a plate of salmon or turbot for the
same amount. But you cannot make a shilling's
worth of soup at home; you cannot buy a
shilling's worth of salmon. A dinner of this
kind cooked for two persons will cost at the
very least three shillings a head. Six shillings
a day for dinners, to say nothing of the
consumption and waste below stairs, on a salary
of less than a pound a day! No; clearly this will
not do. The stern fact must be faced; there
must be a good deal of plain but substantial
boiled beef and roast mutton, occasionally cold,
about the dinners in a three hundred a year
establishment. Better is a dinner of herbs with
love, than the stalled ox and contention therewith.
Better cold mutton and pickles now and
then with independence, than three courses