Mr. Moore was a great lover of the Bible, and distributed it by the thousand, far and near. He always insisted on its being read in schools. When the Middle-class schools were established in London, he offered a thousand pounds on condition that the Bible was read there; but he refused to give it till he found that actually such was the case. In the case of Christ’s Hospital, after Dr. Jacob’s sermon on the institution, he became an ardent reformer. As prime warden of the Fishmongers’, he distinguished himself by the vigour of his speeches. When Paris was in want, and its people destitute of bread, he flew to their relief; and no man was more active in giving relief for the destitute when the Northfleet was sunk. In 1872, he was proud to be the high sheriff of his native county. Among his last public works was to give a supper to the cabmen of London, and to attend the funeral of Dr. Livingstone. And he died as he lived—engaged in works of mercy. In November, 1876, he left his grand mansion in Cumberland to attend a meeting of the Nurses’ Institute in Carlisle. While he was standing opposite the Grey Coat Inn, two runaway horses, which had escaped from a livery stable, came galloping up. One of them knocked Mr. Moore down. He was taken up insensible. Sir William Gull was sent for; but from the first there was no chance, and in twenty hours he was dead. Great was the sorrow felt everywhere, and in London and Carlisle public meetings were held for a George Moore memorial fund. At that in London the Archbishop of Canterbury presided, and Mr. Samuel Morley was one of the speakers.
Friend of the church as he was at all times, and especially attached to the Evangelical clergy, in one thing he differed from them. “The parsons,” he once said to a meeting of children at Wigton, “will tell you a good deal about money. They will tell you that it is the root of all evil; but my opinion is that it is a good thing to make plenty of money, provided you make a proper use of it.” Such was George Moore, and such were his views and works. We owe to Dr. Smiles a biography of him, which is as interesting and instructive as could well be imagined. It should be read by all City young men; it should be in every City library. The character therein portrayed ought to be studied, and revered, and imitated in every home. Few of us can expect to realise his wealth, but his example is one to be held up to every City man.
“People who believe,” says a writer in the Daily News, “that genius is great natural power accidentally directed, may think that the career of the late Mr. George Moore justifies the well-known definition. Mr. Moore’s name was very well known, not in England only, but on the continent, by every one who was labouring to lighten the misery of the poor. The philanthropic schemes to which he gave the aid of his energy, his knowledge of men and of life, and his money, were too many to be numbered here. The French, in particular, cherish a grateful memory of his benevolent activity, of the help he extended to the victims in the war of 1870. To many who only heard of Mr. Moore in his later life, and in the full tide of his helpfulness and prosperity, it may have been unknown that he was the maker of the fortune which he distributed with a generous hand. The biography of him by Mr. Smiles, which has just been published, is a very interesting account of a career which began in a humble though honourable estate, and ended by a singular accident in the northern town where it may be said to have begun. The history of ‘Self-Help’ is not invariably edifying. The chief end of man, after all, is not to get on in the world, to make a great deal of money, and to have paragraphs devoted to his glory. This is so far from being the case that one has even to overcome a slight natural prejudice against the strength which displays itself mainly in the acquisition of a fortune. In almost every rank of life leisure has its charms and good gifts, which a man who never takes rest must miss. The subject of Mr. Smiles’s book escapes from the vulgar renown of the self-made by his unselfishness. His energy, his ceaseless labours in his early life, were not the manifestations of a desire for wealth and for advancement, but the natural expression of immense natural strength of mind and body. When success was secured, the same vigour spent itself in work for other people—for the poor, the weak, the helpless, the ignorant. Mr. Moore might have devoted himself to the joys of the collector, of the sportsman, of the ambitious parvenu. Instead of doing so, he made amusement and enjoyment subordinate to work for the benefit of others. He had not the hardness and narrowness of people whose career has been one of victory over the natural pleasures and innocent impulses of an indolent race. ‘I don’t think I ever came across any other self-made man who had so entirely got the chill of poverty out of his bones,’ Dr. Percival wrote to Mr. Smiles. His geniality and unselfishness soften the edges of his iron will and determination. People may think that so much of the material and force that make greatness, might have been better employed in work of a nobler tone—in science, literature, law, or art. Mr. Moore took the only career that was open to him, the career that was most distinctly in contrast with the pastoral life to which he was bred. He had no education in his youth, none lay within his reach in the Cumbrian valley where he was born. With the chances of Dr. Whewell he might have been a Whewell. With an opening in the East, he might have been, if not a Clive, a Meadows Taylor. As it happened, the choice lay between the existence of a farm labourer and that of a tradesman.”
Men who are not supposed to be mercenary often make a great deal of money. Most of our artists rose from very humble beginnings. Turner was the son of a hair-dresser. Wilkie was desperately poor; so was Barry; and William Etty, that great colourist, was the son of a baker in York—was bound apprentice, wholly against his will, to a printer in Hull; but he released himself from the shackles of so uncongenial a pursuit. He was greatly self-taught, for the help he derived for a hundred guineas, as a private pupil of Sir Thomas Lawrence, seems rather to have baffled him with despair; yet he became the most surprising and effective flesh-painter of his age. The nude style of his figures has often been a topic of remark with a certain order of critics. Etty himself was wont to say, “‘To the pure in heart, all things are pure.’ My aim in all my great pictures has been to paint some great moral on the heart.” He lived, in 1849, to find all his great works—130 pictures—in the great room of the Society of Arts: he died that year. By the universal acclamation of artists he is regarded as our English Titian, and some claim for him a still higher place, for his canvases have not only the wonderful colour of that master, but the splendour of Paul Veronese. He died in his beloved and native city of York; and the poor baker’s boy, by his industry and genius, had become the master of a considerable fortune.
Actors and actresses also have made much money. Amongst the money-making men may emphatically be placed David Garrick, who was fond of money, and careful about it to the last. Some of our earlier circus people seem to have made much money.—Batty was reputed to have died worth half a million.—Ducrow gave himself extraordinary airs. When the Master Cutler and Town Council of Sheffield paid Ducrow a visit, with the principal manufacturers and their families, Ducrow sent word that he only waited on crowned heads, and not upon a set of dirty knife-grinders.—Philip Astley was born in 1742, at Newcastle-under-Lyme, where his father carried on the business of a cabinet-maker. He received little or no education, and after working a few years with his father, enlisted in a cavalry regiment. His imposing appearance, being over six feet in height, with the proportions of a Hercules, and the voice of a Stentor, attracted attention to him; and his capture of a standard at the battle of Emsdorff made him one of the celebrities of his regiment. While serving in the army, he learned some feats of horsemanship from an itinerant equestrian named Johnson, perhaps the man under whose management Price introduced equestrian performances at Sadler’s Wells, and often exhibited them for the amusement of his comrades. On his discharge from the army, he was presented by General Elliot with a horse, and thereupon he bought another in Smithfield, and commenced those open-air performances in Lambeth which have already been noticed.
After a time he built a rude circus upon a piece of ground near Westminster Bridge, which had been used as a timber-yard, being the site of the theatre which has been known by his name for nearly a century. Only the seats were roofed over, the ring in which he performed being open to the air. One of his horses, which he had taught to perform a variety of tricks, he soon began to exhibit, at an earlier period of each day, in a large room in Piccadilly, where the entertainment was eked out with conjuring and ombres Chinoises—a kind of shadow pantomine.
Having saved some money out of these performances, Astley erected his amphitheatre. At the same time he had to contend with a fierce competition from what was then the Royal Circus, which afterwards was called the Surrey Theatre. Astley’s, however, soon became the popular place of amusement, and as such was visited and described by Horace Walpole. The fame of the place received a further illustration in the remark of Dr. Johnson, who, speaking of the popularity of certain preachers, and the ease with which they get a crowd to hear them, said, “Were Astley to preach a sermon standing on his head, or on a horse’s back, he would collect a multitude to hear him, but no wise man would say he had made a better sermon for that.”
Let us now turn to a master of homely English—a man whose name was, at one time, in every one’s mouth, and an author, whose books, at one time, every one read. His moral works excel in descriptive power. In politics his savage personalities encircle sarcasm; his faculty for inventing national nick-names, and mastery of a Saxon style of inimitable raciness, have given his writings historical reputation. He has never been equalled among political writers in his capacity of explaining what he understood. He was the first journalist who called attention to the condition of the working classes, I mean William Cobbett.
William Cobbett was born at Farnham, in Surrey, in 1776. His father was a very poor farmer, who knew enough to teach his boys to read, and had enough of intellectual originality to think that the triumph of Washington in the American War of Independence was just. William began as a mere child to do something towards earning his own livelihood, and took great delight in the flowers which, while weeding in great folks’ gardens, he saw. When eleven years old, he heard some one speak of the splendid flowers in the Royal Gardens at Kew. Without a word of announcement, and with sixpence-halfpenny in his pocket, he set off to seek employment in that irresistible Paradise. When he reached Richmond his funds were reduced to threepence, and he was very hungry. In a shop-window, however, he saw the “Tale of a Tub,” price threepence. Mind triumphed over body; he bought the tale; and sat under a hay-stack reading it till he fell asleep. He was delighted beyond measure with the piece, and continued to read and re-read it for many years. The circumstance was not of happy omen. Swift’s terrible tale we should pronounce to be as well-fitted to sap the moral and religious principles of a lad as any book in the English language; and lack of moral principle was the fatal defect of Cobbett throughout life.
He found employment at Kew, and no doubt gloated over the floral splendours which he had come to see; but he returned to Farnham, and grew up in his father’s house. He made an appointment one day to meet some young friends and accompany them to Guildford Fair; but coming upon the high road as the London coach was passing in full career, he made up his mind on the spur of the moment to start for London. He arrived at the foot of Ludgate Hill with half-a-crown in his pocket. An honest hop-seller, who knew his father, took him by the hand, and he found work as an Attorney’s clerk. He speaks with unlimited abhorrence of the roguery he witnessed and the misery he endured in this place. “No part of my life,” he says, “has been totally unattended with pleasure except the eight or nine months I passed in Gray’s Inn. The office—for so the dungeon was called where I wrote—was so dark that on cloudy days we were obliged to burn candles. I worked like a galley-slave from five in the morning till eight or nine at night, and sometimes all night long. * * * When I think of the saids and so forths, and the counts of tautology that I scribbled over—when I think of those sheets of seventy-two words, and those lines of two inches apart—my brain turns. Gracious Heaven! if I am doomed to be wretched, bury me beneath Iceland snows, and let me feed on blubber; stretch me under the burning Line, and deny me Thy propitious dews; nay, if it be Thy will, suffocate me with the infected and pestilential air of a democratic club-room; but save me, save me from the desk of an attorney!” Anything seemed better than this. William, acting again on the spur of the moment, enlisted. For more than a year he did duty at Chatham. Here he mastered grammar—an acquisition which he always regarded as the basis of his fortunes. He read also in a circulating library, swallowing enormous quantities of useful or useless knowledge, and laying it up in a memory of great tenacity. His father meanwhile was treated by him with heartless neglect. The old man had been offended by his running away, and appears to have made no effort to release him from the bondage of the attorney’s office. When he enlisted, however, his father relented, and wrote saying that the last hay-rick or pocket of hops at Farnham would be sold off to buy his discharge. But William vouchsafed no reply.
Cobbett’s regiment was ordered to Canada, and he accompanied it to St. John’s, New Brunswick. Here his conduct as a soldier was exemplary. His talent and activity made him conspicuous, and he became sergeant-major, raised, though he was still but about twenty, over the heads of thirty sergeants. In 1791 the regiment returned to England, and he procured his discharge “in consideration of his good behaviour, and the services he had rendered his regiment.” Then occurred one of the most strange and ambiguous episodes in his life. He lodged charges of pecuniary defalcation against four of his late officers. A day was appointed for their trial by court-martial. The functionaries met, the accused were present, all was ready for commencement, when it transpired that Cobbett was missing. As he was the accuser, the trial was adjourned to a stated day in order that an opportunity might be afforded him to appear. The court again met; he was again absent; the accused officers, accordingly, were acquitted. They made some show of a wish to proceed against Cobbett, and what looks very like a feint of arresting him in his refuge at Farnham. But the upshot was that he escaped to France, and passed from France, when the revolutionary atmosphere became too hot for him, to America. Mr. Watson very properly devotes a good deal of attention to these circumstances, and we are bound to say that we agree with him in thinking that Cobbett was bribed with a good round sum to suppress his charges. It was, of course, an act of flagrant and base dishonesty; but there is nothing in Cobbett’s life to prove that he shrank from dishonesty, or was superior to temptation. He was a most affectionate husband and father, and many of his advices to young men and to the poor are excellent. His talent was of a coarse kind, but very great. His activity and indomitable spirit deserve all admiration. He boasted, probably with truth, that he had never passed an idle day.
Cobbett first distinguished himself in America by publishing a fierce pamphlet against Priestley. He was soon a noted political writer, taking the side of ultra-Toryism, and denouncing with furious emphasis all that savoured of Radicalism or Republicanism. His talent was indubitable; and as vehement and able rhetoric on the Church-and-King side was then in demand, he attracted attention. On returning to England, he was welcomed by the authorities as an out-and-out Tory, and became the most violent, uncompromising, and popular of writers on the ministerial side. It is worthy of recollection that William Cobbett had his windows broken by the mob for the vehemence of his anti-popular utterances. According to his own account he met Pitt at dinner in Mr. Windham’s house; and the fact is not impossible, so highly did ministers at that time prize the aid of any one who could fight for them against the patriots.
By what steps it is needless to trace, Cobbett gradually sidled round, and left the cause of the king for that of the mob. His circumstances became embarrassed, and he fled to America, leaving behind him debts to the value of upwards of £33,000. He resided at Long Island, near New York, and continued to edit his Register. In a few years the irrepressible giant—he stood six foot two, with shoulders and chest and girth to match—returned to England. He had once denounced Tom Paine as a miscreant whom no words could blacken. He now brought Tom Paine’s bones with him, bent upon having a grand monument built over them in England. In this instance he signally misunderstood his countrymen. The dead man’s bones were laughed at, and declared to be those of an old nigger. Cobbett proposed to sell 20,000 hair-rings at a sovereign a-piece, with some of Paine’s hair in each; and he was reminded that when Paine died he was almost bald. Cobbett had at last to shuffle the bones underground, no one knows where. His own eloquence and sarcasm made him popular, and procured him a seat in parliament. He was now the fiercest of democrats. He assailed Protestantism and detested ministers of religion. His quackery grew worse and worse until he died in 1835.
Sir Francis Chantrey was a poor lad. He began his career by being a carver on wood. Rogers used to say—“One day Chantrey said to him, ‘Do you recollect that about twenty-five years ago a journeyman came to your house from the wood-carver employed by you and Mr. Hope, to talk about these ornaments (pointing to some on a mahogany sideboard), and that you gave him a drawing to execute them by.’ Rogers replied that he recollected it well. ‘Well,’ said Chantrey, ‘I was that journeyman.’” Chantrey practised portrait-painting both at Sheffield and after he came to London. It was in allusion to him that Lawrence said—“A broken-down painter will make a very good sculptor.”
In 1823, London society was much exercised on the subject of literary gains. Miss Wynn writes in her “Diaries of a Lady of Quality”—“I heard to-day from Mr. Rogers that Constable, the bookseller, told him last May that he paid the author of ‘Waverley’ the sum of £110,000. To that may now be added the produce of ‘Red Gauntlet,’ and ‘St. Ronan’s Well;’ for I fancy Quentin Durward’ was at least printed, if not published. I asked whether the ‘Tales of my Landlord,’ which do not bear the same name, were taken into calculation, and was told they were, but of course the poems were not. All this has been done in twenty years.” In 1803, an unknown Mr. Scott’s name was found as the author of three very good ballads in Lewis’s “Tales of Wonder.” This was his first publication.—Pope, who until now had been considered as the poet who had made the most by his works, died worth about £800 a-year.—Johnson, for his last and best work, his “Lives of the Poets,” published after the “Rambler” and the “Dictionary” had established his fame, got two hundred guineas, to which was added one hundred more. Mr. Hayward, in a note, adds—“‘Waverley’ having been published in 1814, the sum mentioned by Constable was earned in nine years, by eleven novels in three volumes each, and three series of ‘Tales of my Landlord,’ making nine volumes more; eight novels twenty-four volumes, being yet to come. Scott’s first publication, ‘Translations from the German,’ was in 1796. During the whole of his literary life he was profitably engaged in miscellaneous writing and editing; and whatever the expectations raised by has continued popularity and great profits, they were surpassed by the sale of the collected and illustrated edition of the novels commenced under his own revision in 1829. Altogether, the aggregate amount gained by Scott in his lifetime, very far exceeds any sum hitherto named as accruing to any other man from authorship. Pope inherited a fortune, saved and speculated; and we must come at once to modern times to find plausible subjects of comparison. T. Moore’s profits, spread over his life, yield but a moderate income. Byron’s did not exceed £20,000. Talfourd once showed me a calculation, by which he made out that Dickens, soon after the commencement of ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ ought to have been in the receipt of £10,000 a-year. Thackeray never got enough to live handsomely and lay by. Sir E. B. Lytton is said to have made altogether from £80,000 to £100,000 by his writings’. We hear of 500,000 francs (£20,000) having been given in France for Histories—to MM. Thiers and Lamartine for example; but the largest single payment ever made to an author for a book, was the cheque for £20,000, on account, paid by Messrs. Longman to Macaulay soon after the appearance of the third and fourth volumes of his History, the terms being that he should receive three-fourths of the net profits.” This note of Mr. Hayward’s, it should be remembered, was written in 1864. Macaulay cleared a fine sum by his History, and so did the publishers. During the nine years, ending with the 25th of June, 1857, Messrs. Longman disposed of 30,978 copies of the first volume of the History; 50,783 copies during the nine years ending with June, 1866; and 52,392 copies during the nine years ending with June, 1875. Within a generation of its first appearance, upwards of 150,000 copies of the History will have been printed and sold in the United Kingdom alone.
It is to be questioned, when her life comes to be written, whether any author has been more successful, in a pecuniary point of new, than Miss Braddon, whose “Lady Audley’s Secret” at once placed her on the pinnacle of fame and fortune, and yet she began the world as a ballet-girl.
Few Irishmen, in a literary and political point of view, did better than the Right Hon. John Wilson Croker. In his “Memoirs,” Charles Mayne Young thus speaks of his rise and progress:—
“I suspect few people now alive are aware of the commencement of Croker’s career in London. Horace Smith, James’s brother, and one of the joint authors of ‘Rejected Addresses,’ told me that he, his brother, and Cumberland, formed the staff of the Morning Post when Colonel Mellish was its sole proprietor. On a certain quarter-day, when he was in the habit of meeting them at the office and paying them their salary, he took occasion to pass them unqualified commendation for the great ability they had brought to bear upon his journal. He assured them that the circulation of the paper had quadrupled since their connection with it; ‘but—but—that he was, nevertheless, under the necessity of dispensing with their pens for the future.’ The two Smiths were so utterly unprepared for such a declaration, that they were tongue-tied. Not so the testy Cumberland, who took care to make himself as clearly understood as if he had been the veritable Sir Fretful Plagiary.
“‘What,’ he asked his employer, ‘the d—l do you mean? In the same breath in which you laud your servants to the skies, and express your sense of obligation to them, you discharge them oven without the usual month’s warning!’
“Mellish, quite unmoved, replied—‘You must know, good sirs, that I care for my paper, not for its principles, but as an investment; and it stands to reason, that the heavier my outgoings, the less my profits. I do, as I have said, value your merits highly; but not as highly as you charge me for them. Now, in future, I can command the services of one man, who will do the work of three for the wage of one.’
“‘The deuce you can,’ said Cumberland. ‘He must be a phœnix. Where, pray, may this omniscient genius be met with?’
“‘In the next room! I will send him to you.’
“As he left, a young man entered, with a well-developed skull, a searching eye, and a dauntless address.
“‘So, sir,’ screamed out Cumberland, ‘you must have an uncommon good opinion of yourself! You consider yourself, I am told, three times as able as any one of us; for you undertake to do an amount of work, single-handed, which we have found enough for us all.’ ‘I am not afraid,’ said the young man, with imperturbable sang froid, ‘of doing all that is required of me.’ They all three then warned him of the tact, discretion, and knowledge of books and men required—of the difficulties of which he must expect to find an enterprise of such magnitude beset, &c., &c. They began then to sound his depth; but on politics, belles lettres, political economy, even the drama, they found him far from shallow. Cumberland, transported out of himself by his modest assurance, snatched up his hat, smashed it on his head, rammed snuff incontinently up his nose, and then rushed by Mellish, who was in the adjoining room, swearing, and saying as he left, ‘Confound the potato. He’s so tough, there’s no peeling him!’ The tough potato was John Wilson Croker.”
That Charles Dickens made a great deal of money, all the world is well aware. That in the tale of “David Copperfield,” a little of his childish life was outlined, was known, or rather suspected; but till his life appeared, no one had the least idea how low down in the world he and his family were, and how much more creditable to him was his rise.
If it is good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth, Dickens certainly had this advantage. We have seldom read a more touching picture than that which is given of the life of the neglected, untaught, half-starved boy at this time. It is tragic and affecting enough in itself, but it is still more impressive as suggesting the possible lot of hundreds and thousands in this great London of ours. The one boy, by means of marvellous genius, forces his way to the front; but who is to tell the story of the obscure multitude who perish in the struggle? What imagination has ever pictured scenes as tragic as the following experiences?—
“It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me, that even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.
“The blacking warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford-stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscotted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rose up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first, with a piece of oilpaper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary’s shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label; and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in ‘Oliver Twist.’
“Our relative had kindly arranged to teach me something in the dinner-hour—from twelve to one, I think it was—every day. But an arrangement so incompatible with counting-house business soon died away, from no fault of his or mine; and for the same reason, my small work-table, and my grosses of pots, my papers, string, scissors, paste-pot, and labels, by little and little, vanished out of the recess in the counting-house, and kept company with the other small work-tables, grosses of pots, papers, string, scissors, and paste-pots, down stairs. It was not long before Bob Fagin and I, and another boy whose name was Paul Green, but who was currently believed to have been christened Poll (a belief which I transferred, long afterwards, again to Mr. Sweedlepipe, in ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’), worked generally side by side. Bob Fagin was an orphan, and lived with his brother-in law, a waterman. Poll Green’s father had the additional distinction of being a fireman, and was employed at Drury-lane Theatre; where another relation of Poll’s, I think his little sister, did imps in the pantomimes.
“No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sank into this companionship; compared these every-day associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless—of the shame I felt in my position—of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more—cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children—even that I am a man—and wander desolately back to that time of my life.
“My mother and my brothers and sisters (excepting Fanny in the Royal Academy of Music) were still encamped, with a young servant-girl from Chatham workhouse, in the two parlours in the emptied house in Gower Street North. It was a long way to go and return within the dinner-hour; and, usually, I either carried my dinner with me, or went and bought it at some neighbouring shop. In the latter case it was commonly a saveloy and a penny loaf; sometimes, a four-penny plate of beef from a cook’s shop; sometimes a plate of bread and cheese, and a glass of beer, from a miserable old public-house over the way—the ‘Swan,’ if I remember right, or the ‘Swan’ and something else that I have forgotten. Once I remember tucking my own bread (which I had brought from home in the morning) under my arm, wrapped up in a piece of paper like a book, and going into the best dining-room in Johnson’s alamode-beef-house in Charles Court, Drury Lane, and magnificently ordering a small plate of alamode-beef to eat with it. What the waiter thought of such a strange little apparition, coming in all alone, I don’t know; but I can see him now, staring at me as I ate my dinner, and bringing up the other waiter to look. I gave him a halfpenny, and I wish, now, that he hadn’t taken it.”
It was thus Dickens was trained to fight the battle of life. After this one feels inclined to say, “How great are the blessings of poverty!” What an impulse it gives the man to raise himself above it, somehow or other. Hazlitt used to say that “the want of money often places a man in a very ridiculous position.” There is no doubt about that. It is also equally clear, that, without money, there can be little comfort, little independence of thought or action, little real manliness. Poverty is a wonderful tonic. Volumes might be written in its praise. Almost all the wonderful things that have been done in the world have been accomplished by men who were born and bred in poverty. She is the nurse of genius, the mother of heroes. She has garlanded the world with gold. Luxury and wealth have ever been the ruin alike of individuals and nations. The world’s greatest benefactors have been the money-getting men. Of course there are a few exceptions; but they are the exceptions that confirm the rule.
We have little faith in reflections. If a man cannot draw an inference for himself, it is little use anyone attempting to draw it for him. The reader of the preceding pages must have been taught, by example, how to get money. The art of money-making is a very simple one. If your income is twenty pounds, and you spend nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings, and elevenpence-three-farthings, you will never be troubled about money matters; and, in the course of years, may have a fortune commensurate with so modest an expenditure. Having thus acquired a small amount of capital, you must not part with it to mining-brokers or stock-brokers, however plausible the tale they tell, and however friendly you may be with them. They are bound to do business, and for the sake of that, will help their nearest friend to an investment of the rottenest character. Stock-brokers may have a sense of honour—may be gentlemen; but I question much whether a money-broker has any feeling for his clients, I have known little money made by outsiders speculating on the Stock Exchange or in mines. I have known many reduced to beggary and want by such means.
Commerce, in our day, is the high road to wealth. You must begin at the bottom, and work your way up to the top. It is not talent that makes a man succeed in business, but the intense determination which carries a man through every obstacle till the desired end is attained. It was thus George Moore became a great man. The first elements in his character were simplicity and directness. He was prompt, energetic, precise; doing at once what he had to do. He never cavilled about trifles. There was no shuffling about him—no humbug. The only thing he could not tolerate was the drone. He held strong opinions on most subjects, and he adhered to them firmly. He never did anything by halves; he went into it body and soul, with the whole of his nature; he went straight to the point. When he had settled a thing he left it as something done; when two sides of a question were presented to him, he was quick to decide, and he was usually right in his decision.
Dr. Smiles writes—“The successful merchant is not merely the man who is most fertile in commercial combinations, but the man who acts upon his judgment with the greatest promptitude.” Mr. Crampton, George Moore’s partner, says—“I never knew him make a mistake in judgment.”
Another fact to be observed is, that it is the country lads who, as a rule, are the most successful. At first they fail in accuracy, and quickness, and promptitude. They are slow compared with town-bred boys. “The City boy,” writes Dr. Smiles, “scarcely grows up; he is rushed up; he lives amid a constant succession of excitements, one obliterating another. It is very different with the country boy; he is much slower in arriving at his maturity than the town boy, but he is greater when he reaches it; he is hard and uncouth at first, whereas the town boy is worn smooth by perpetual friction, like the pebbles in a running stream. The country boy learns a great deal, though he may seem to be unlearned; he knows a good deal about nature, and a great deal about men. He has had time to grow. His brainpower is held in reserve; hence the curious fact, that, in course of time, the country-bred boy passes the City-bred boy, and rises to the highest positions in London life. Look at all the great firms, and you will find that the greater number of the leading partners are those who originally were country-bred boys. The young man bred in the country never forgets his origin.” “There is,” says Rochefoucauld, “a country accent, not in his speech only, but in his thought, conduct, character, and manner of existing, which never forsakes him.”
George Moore had a brother. He was far apter than George; he had a better education; he had read extensively, and was well versed in literature; but he wanted that which his brother George had—intense perseverance. Hence the failure of the one, and the success of the other. It is thus the determined, persevering man who succeeds. It was thus Warren Hastings won back the broad lands of his ancestors.
“In New York,” says an American writer, “fortunes are suddenly made, and suddenly lost. I can count over a dozen merchants who, at the time I began to write this book, a few months ago, were estimated to be worth not less than 250,000 dollars—some of them half a million—who are now utterly penniless. At the opening of this year (1868), a merchant, well-known in this city, had a surplus of 250,000 dollars in cash. He died suddenly in July. He made his will about three months before his death, and appointed his executors. By that will he divided 250,000 dollars. His executors contributed 1,000 dollars to save a portion of his furniture for his widow, and that was all that was left her out of that great estate. He did what thousands have done before him—what thousands are doing now, and will do to-morrow. He had money enough; but he wanted a little more. He was induced to go into a nice little speculation in Wall Street; he put in 50,000 dollars. To save it he put in 50,000 dollars more. The old story was repeated, with the same result.” I knew a gentleman who began the world as an advertising agent; he managed to get a share in a newspaper, which eventually became an immense commercial success. His share of the profits amounted to some thousands a-year; but this was not enough—he must have more. He turned money-lender, borrowing at 5 per cent., to lend money on bad security at a high rate of interest. He died in the prime of life, a bankrupt, and of a broken heart.
It is not every one who knows when to leave off money-making; but there is a time when a wise man will remain satisfied with what he has won. I knew a gentleman in the Corn Exchange, who was worth £80,000. That was not enough for him, though to many it would have been a fair fortune. He was determined to make one grand coup before finally retiring from business, and enjoying the fruits of his industry and enterprise. He did so against the entreaties of his friends. The grand coup was a failure, and he died as poor as Job. Such men are to be met in London every day.
A man who died very rich, was very poor when he was a boy. When asked how he got his riches, he replied—“My father taught me never to play till all my work for the day was finished, and never to spend money till I had earned it. If I had but half-an-hour’s work to do in a day, I must do that the first thing, and in half-an-hour. After this was done I was allowed to play. I early formed the habit of doing everything in its time, and it soon became perfectly easy to do so. It is to this habit that I owe my prosperity.”
Sir Titus Salt, the millionaire, who made a fortune by the introduction of alpaca-wool-cloth into the country, was a very early riser. At Bradford, where he first commenced business, before he had built his grand manufactory at Saltaire, it used to be said—“There is Titus Salt; he has made a thousand pounds before other men were out of bed.”
It was industry that helped to make Franklin a successful man of business. This industry was, he tells us, a source of credit. “Particularly I was told, that mention being made of the new printing-office at the Merchants’ Every-Night Club, the general opinion was that it must fail, there being already two printers in the place—Kermer and Bradford. But Dr. Baird gave a contrary opinion: ‘for the industry of that Franklin,’ he said, ‘is superior to anything I ever saw of the kind. I see him still at work when I go from the club, and he is at work again before the neighbours are out of bed. This struck the rest, and he soon after had offers from one of them to supply us with stationery; but as yet he did not choose to engage in shop business.’ I mention this,” adds Franklin, “more particularly, and the more emphatically, though it seems to be talking in my own praise, that those of my posterity who shall read it, may know the use of that virtue (industry) when they see its effects in my favour throughout this relation.”
Again, let us see how men lose money; for the art of keeping money is of greater importance to a man than that of making it. The great house of Overend and Gurney fell, and threw all London into a panic, because the house did not know how to keep money, but went into all sorts of ruinous speculations, which ultimately brought it to the ground. “In a little room in one of the by-streets of New York, up a narrow, dingy flight of stairs, may be seen a man,” says an American writer, “doing a little brokerage which his friends put into his hands. That man at one time inherited the name and fortune of a house which America delighted to honour. That house was founded by two lads who left their homes to seek their fortunes in a great city. They owned nothing but the clothes they wore, and a small bundle tied to a stick, and thrown over their shoulders. Their clothes were home-spun, were woven under the parental roof, and cut and made by motherly skill and sisterly affection. They carried with them the rich boon of a mother’s blessing and a mother’s prayers. They were honest, industrious, truthful, and temperate. They did anything they found to do that was honest. They began a little trade, which increased in their hands, and extended till it reached all portions of the civilised world. They identified themselves with every good work. Education, humanity, and religion blessed their munificence. The founders of the house died, leaving a colossal fortune, and a name without a stain. They left their business and their reputation to the man who occupies the little chamber that we have referred to. He abandoned the principles on which the fame and honour of the house had been built up. He stained the name that for fifty years had been untarnished. He fled from his home; he wandered about the country under an assumed name. Widows and orphans who had left trust-money in their hands, lost their all. In his fall he dragged down the innocent, and spread consternation on all sides. A few years passed, and after skulking about in various cities abroad, he ventured back. Men were too kind to harm him. Those whom he had befriended in the days of his prosperity, helped him to a little brokerage to earn his bread, and so he lingered on, and died, poor and forgotten, and obscure;—a warning to the prosperous, not to forget that honesty is the best policy after all.”
A fast man in business, sooner or later, comes to grief. A young man in New York represented a New England house of great wealth and high standing. He was considered one of the smartest and most promising young men in the city. The balance in the bank, kept by the house, was very large, and the young man used to boast that he could draw his cheque any day for 200,000 dollars, and have it honoured. The New England house used a great deal of paper, and it could command the names of the best capitalists to any extent. He was accustomed to sign notes in blank and leave them with the concern, so much confidence had he in its soundness and integrity. Yet, strange to say, these notes, with those of other wealthy men, with nearly the whole financial business of the house, were in the hands of the young manager in New York. In the meanwhile he took a turn at Harry Hill’s to relieve the pressure of business. Low amusements, and the respectable company he found, suited him. From a spectator he became a dancer. From dancing he took to drinking. He then tried his hand at play, and was cleaned out every night, drinking deeply all the while. He became enamoured of a certain class of women, clothed them in silk, velvets, and jewels, drove them in dashing teams in the Central Park, secured them fine mansions, and paid the expenses of their costly establishments, all the while keeping the confidence of his business associates. In his jaded, wan, and dissipated look, men saw his attention to business. The New England manager of the house was the father of the young man. His reputation was without a stain, and confidence in his integrity was unlimited. In the midst of his business he dropped down dead. This brought things to a crisis, and an exposure immediately followed. The great house was bankrupt, and everybody ruined that had anything to do with it. Those who supposed themselves well off, found themselves quite the reverse. Widows and orphans lost their all. Men suspended business on the right hand and the left. In gambling, drinking, and dissipation, this young fellow had squandered the enormous sum of 1,400,000 dollars. It is an old familiar moral to be learnt from the story of that man’s decline and fall.
But to return to money-making. “I find,” said a shrewd merchant, “I make most money when I am least anxious about it.”
The distinguished American, James Halford, rose, step by step, up the ladder of fortune till he reached the top. Some twenty years before he had stood at the bottom, and it was curious to hear what the world said.
“It is all luck,” cried one. “Nothing but luck. Why, sir, I have managed at times to get up a step or two, but have always fallen down ere long; and now I have given up striving, for luck is against me.”
“No, sir,” cried another, “it is not so much luck as scheming; the selfish schemer goes up, while more honest folk remain at the foot.”
“Patronage does it all,” said a third. “You must have somebody to take you by the hand, and help you up, or you have no chance.”
James Halford heard all these varied opinions of the world, but still persisted in looking upwards, for he had faith in himself. He rose from the lowest situation in a store till he became a trader for himself, and amassed a large fortune.
Mr. Freedley’s unvarying motto was—“Self-reliance and self-dependence.” He said—“My observations through life satisfy me, that at least nine-tenths of those most successful in business start in life without any reliance except upon their own heads and hands—hoe their own row from the jump.”
Nicholas Longworth, the Cincinnati millionaire, says—“I have always had these two things before me:—Do what you undertake thoroughly. Be faithful in all accepted trusts.”
Stephen Gerard’s motto was the well-worn one—“Take care of the cents, the dollars will take care of themselves.”
Mr. Stuart, the merchant prince of New York, said—“No abilities, however splendid, can command success without intense labour and persevering application.”
David Ricardo had his three golden rules when on the Stock Exchange. They were—“Never refuse an option when you can get it.” “Cut short your losses.” “Let your profits run on.”
A man who had, by his own unaided exertions, become rich, was asked by his friend the secret of success. His reply was—“I accumulated about half my property by attending to my own business, and the other half by letting other people’s entirely alone.”
According to the great Wedgewood, there was another—an eleventh commandment; and it was—“Thou shalt not be idle.”
Let us string together, in this collection, a few of Poor Richard’s maxims—
“I never saw an oft-removed tree,
Nor yet an oft-removed family,
That throve as well as those that settled be.”
Again, he wrote—
“He that by the plough would thrive,
Himself must either hold or drive.”
“Many estates are spent in the getting,
Since women for tea forsook spinning and knitting,
And men for punch forsook hewing and splitting.”
One must be recorded here for the benefit of the reader who would achieve commercial success—
“Women and wine, game and deceit,
Make the wealth small and the want great.”
Again, Poor Richard writes—
“Fond pride of dress is sure a curse;
Ere fancy you consult—consult your purse.”
A truthful warning is contained in the following lines—
“Vessels large may venture more,
But little boats should keep near shore.”
All should remember—
“For age and want save what you may,
No morning sun lasts a whole day.”
And this other—
“Get what you can, and what you get hold,
’Tis the stone that will turn all your lead to gold.”
One equally well worth remembering as any of Poor Richard’s, is—
“A penny saved is twopence clear,
A pin a day is a groat a year.”
Franklin, in a letter, finished by saying—“In short, the way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the market. It depends chiefly on two words—industry and frugality; that is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. Without industry and frugality nothing will do, and with them everything. He that gets all he can honestly, and saves all he gets, necessary expenses excepted, will certainly become rich, if that Being who governs the world, to whom all should look for a blessing on their honest endeavours, doth not, in His wise providence, determine otherwise.”
Again, in a time of scarcity, as an infallible receipt for filling empty purses, Franklin wrote—“First, let honesty and industry be thy constant companions; and, secondly, spend one penny less than thy clear gains.”
Samuel Budgett, well-known as the successful merchant, when about ten years of age, began, at Coleford, to lay the foundation of his fame and fortune. He thus describes how he first got money—“I went,” he said, “to the mills of Kilmersdon to school, a distance of three miles. One day, on my way, I picked up a horse-shoe, and carried it about three miles, and sold it to a blacksmith for a penny; that was the first penny I ever recollect possessing, and I kept it for some time. A few weeks after, the same man called my attention to a boy who was carrying off some dirt opposite his door, and offered, if I would beat the boy by doing it quicker, he being a bigger boy than myself, to give me a penny. I did so; he made a mark upon it, and promised me that if I would bring it to him that day fortnight he would give me another. I took it to him at the appointed time, when he fulfilled his promise, and I thus became possessed of threepence; since then I have never been without, except when I gave it all away.” “One,” writes his admiring biographer, the Rev. W. Budgett, “would not have imagined, in seeing the little schoolboy stop and look at the old horse-shoe, that the turning-point of his life had come; but so it was; he converts that horse-shoe into his first penny, and never more wants a penny. Those men whom we see often without a penny, have all of them passed by the horse-shoe in their path when they were boys; and those other men who, from nothing, are rising rapidly, have all had the sense to pick up the horse-shoe, and turn it into the foundation of a fortune. Paths vary; but every boy, if his eyes are open, will certainly find the horse-shoe in his path at one point or another.”
Again we fall back on Franklin. “Remember,” he wrote, “that money is of a prolific generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six; turned again it is seven-and-threepence, and so on, till it becomes a hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker. He that kills a breeding sow, destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation. He that murders a crown, destroys all that it might have produced, even scores of pounds.”
Our last words must be of advice to young persons upon entering the world.
Select the kind of business that suits your natural inclinations and temperament.
A business man must keep at the hold, and steer his own ship.
Do not take too much advice.
If you prosper in business, do not make too much show.
Work on positive facts. Do not let hope predominate too much. Don’t be visionary.
Don’t put too much reliance on friends in business.
Never accept a bill for a friend. You stand a chance of losing money and friend.
Speak very little in business. Pump others rather than be pumped yourself.
Consult wisely, and resolve firmly.
Hesitation in business is bad; resolution, after proper consideration, is omnipotent and healthy.
Time, money, and judgment are three essential things for a speculation.
Go with the tide.
Consider everybody sharper than yourself in order to be yourself on your guard. Take the meaning of people, not their words, as a guide in business. Seek an interview rather than communication by letter, and observe the person’s expression by his eyes.
Keep your books posted up systematically.
Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink the ship.
Make the best of a bad bargain.
A policy of life assurance is the cheapest and safest mode of making provision for a man’s family.
Finally, as Matthew Henry wrote—“Hope the best, get ready for the worst, and then take what God sends.”
A spendthrift, who had nearly wasted all his patrimony, seeing an acquaintance in a coat not of the newest cut, told him he thought it had been his great-grandfather’s coat. “So it was,” said the gentleman; “and I have also my great-grandfather’s land, which is more than you can say.”
A gentleman, whose place of business was not a thousand miles from the Exchange, was annoyed, as many business men are, by impecunious individuals desiring small loans. He adopted the following method of dealing with them. He would listen amicably to the long preface to the request to “Just lend me a sovereign for a few days,” and answer, “Certainly;” and then, turning to a clerk, say: “James, we have a sovereign to lend, have we not?” “Yes, sir,” says the well-trained James. “Well, lend it to Mr. Beat.” “It is not in, sir; you loaned it to Mr. Bummer the day before yesterday.” “Ah, yes; so I did. Well, when it comes in lend it to Mr. Beat;” and bowing to the borrower, the merchant resumes his business, and the needy one walks dejectedly out to try a more profitable place.
A man who would thrive should get married. A good wife is a true helpmeet in fighting the battle of life. This is the hidden gem “of purest ray serene.” Dr. Crosby says—“The true girl is to be sought for. She does not parade herself as show goods. She is not fashionable generally; she is not rich. But, oh! what a heart she has when you have found her! So large, and pure, and womanly! When you see her you wonder if those showy things outside were really women. If you gain her love, your two thousand are a million. She’ll wear simple dresses, and turn them when necessary. She’ll keep everything neat and tidy in your sky parlour, and give you such a welcome when you come home, that you’ll think your parlour higher than ever. She’ll entertain true friends on a dollar, and astonish you with the thought how very little happiness depends on money. She’ll make you love home (if you are not a brute), and teach you how to pity while you scorn a poor fashionable society that thinks itself rich, and vainly tries to think itself happy. Now do not, I pray you, say any more, ‘I can’t afford to marry.’ Go, find the true woman, and you can! Throw away that cigar; and avoid intoxicating drinks, the GRAVE of home comforts; be sensible yourself, and seek your wife in a sensible way.”
Look carefully to your expenditures. No matter what comes in, if more goes out, you will always be poor. The art is not in making money, but in keeping it; little expenses, like mice in a barn, when they are many, make great waste. Hair by hair heads get bald; straw by straw the thatch goes off the cottage; and drop by drop the rain comes in the chamber. A barrel is soon empty if the tap leaks but a drop a minute. When you mean to save, begin with your mouth; many thieves pass down the red lane. The ale-jug is a great waste. In all other things keep within compass. Never stretch your legs farther than the blankets will reach, or you will soon take cold. In clothes, choose suitable and lasting stuff, and not tawdry fineries. To be warm is the main thing; never mind looks. A fool may make money, but it needs a wise man to spend it. Remember, it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one going. If you give all to back and board, there is nothing left for the savings-bank. Fare hard and work hard when you are young, and you will have a chance to rest when you are old.
“A successful business man told me there were two things which he learned when he was eighteen, which were ever afterwards of great use to him—namely, ‘Never to lose anything, and never to forget anything.’ An old lawyer sent him with an important paper, with certain instructions what to do with it. ‘But,’ inquired the young man, ‘suppose I lose it; what shall I do then?’ ‘You must not lose it!’ ‘I don’t mean to,’ said the young man; ‘but suppose I should happen to?’ ‘But I say you must not happen to; I shall make no provision for any such occurrence; you must not lose it!’
“This put a new train of thought into the young man’s mind, and he found that if he was determined to do a thing, he could do it. He made such a provision against every contingency, that he never lost anything. He found this equally true about forgetting. If a certain matter of importance was to be remembered, he pinned it down on his mind, fastened it there, and made it stay. He used to say—‘When a man tells me that he forgot to do something, I tell him he might as well have said, ‘I do not care enough about your business to take the trouble to think of it again.’ I once had an intelligent young man in my employment who deemed it sufficient excuse for neglecting any important task to say, ‘I forgot it.’ I told him that would not answer. If he was sufficiently interested, he would be careful to remember. It was because he did not care enough that he forgot it. I drilled him with this truth. He worked for me three years, and during the last of the three he was entirely changed in tins respect. He did not forget a thing. His forgetting, he found, was a lazy and careless habit of the mind, which he cured.”
While we write, the great orator of the age has lectured the people of Hawarden in particular, and of England in general, on the virtues of thrift. The subject is worthy of his genius. Thrift lies at the foundation of all individual or national greatness. The Times notes that Mr. Gladstone only harps on an old string when he says that Englishmen are lacking in thrift. The failing is commonly admitted, and it is by no means confined to a single class. It pervades the whole community. We may be more industrious than our neighbours, but we certainly are more extravagant. We earn strenuously, but it is in order that we may spend freely. In our choice of food and its preparation, in our dwellings, in our comforts and luxuries, and in our recreations, we are lavish as compared with other nations. There is probably no single class in this country which does not, as a rule, live nearer to the margin of its income than the corresponding class in France. The French peasant is almost the slave of his land and his family, and labours unceasingly for the one while he saves ungrudgingly for the other. Our own labourers work as hard no doubt, and probably harder, but they are much more extravagant in their habits. Their food is far more solid and expensive, and it is dressed with far less thrift and skill. The case is not very different with the classes higher in the social scale. Their industry and perseverance are unrivalled, but these virtues are too often made to do duty for prudence and economy as well. Mr. Gladstone is, no doubt, light in attributing to friendly societies an influence which tends in some degree to counteract the evil consequences of individual prodigality. They do not directly encourage a more frugal mode of life among the masses, but they develop a social feeling of common welfare which at least counteracts individual selfishness. Thus, independently of their purely economical advantages, they are by no means despicable instruments of political and social education. But, after all, it is on the individual himself that it depends whether he shall be thrifty, and get on in the world, or shall be careless, and indolent, and extravagant, and finally sink down to the bottom, a burden to the rest of the community. “The way to wealth,” says an old writer, “is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two plain words—industry and frugality; that is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both.”
As we go to press, we find a meeting held at the Mansion House, London (the Earl of Shaftesbury in the chair), to hear Miss Emily Faithfull lecture against the extravagance of modern life. Ladies (she said) were sometimes accused of being the direct means of wild expenditure; and what answer could be made to their accusers? They had only to walk in any fashionable resort to see a great deal of prodigal display in dress, which could be accounted for only by the explanation that many of its wearers were living beyond their means. This state of things arose because women were ranked by what they wore, and not by what they were. Men and women seemed to have lost the faculty of enjoying inexpensive pleasures. The same extravagance was to be found among high and low, master and man. The reason of the outcry about bad servants was, because all those of the present day wished to be like their betters; fine-ladyism had descended from the drawing-room to the kitchen. Of the various causes of this, one was the love of money, more deeply rooted in the minds of the people of England than in those of any other nation in the world. Another was the modern fusion of classes—people finding themselves in a position in which they were compelled, by the tyranny of custom, to “make an appearance” beyond their legitimate means. One of the most crying evils of these times was the credit system, and its twin-brother debt, well described as the curse of the middle classes, and which, like drink, was carried on in a blind, stupid, reckless fashion. The meaning of the word “economy” was continually being falsely made to imply the saving of money, whereas it only meant the best possible administration of time, labour, and money.—Mr. Thomas Hughes, Q.C., said that the great dangers for this country were unthrift and intemperance; and unless we could make it sober and thrifty it would soon become insolvent.