how to increase their means, how to avoid losses and prevent reverses of fortune, how to live better and happier, how to be independent of charities, and finally how to become better citizens, better heads of families, and better members of society, by all means let that book be printed and sown broadcast by hundreds of thousands throughout the land.

This volume will probably be met by the more unthinking of the press, and by carping private critics, as are most works of its class, with the accusation that it tends to degrade the immortal soul to mere moneymaking, to make youth mean and age miserly. To this charge there is one conclusive answer, which may be made indirectly, but effectively. You must not educate the physician, lest he administer poison with his remedies. You must not train the orator, for fear of bronchitis or an overstrain of the lungs. You must not instruct in religion, because the instructed may become a bigot. In truth, you must not educate at all, in view of the danger that your pupil may in some way carry his knowledge and training to extremes. But mean or miserly people are invariably those who have not been fitly educated or brought up in the light of right knowledge, and who have learned just enough of money not to know its true uses.

Let the complaining critic choose between two states of fear-one that his son or daughter may be mean with money, the other that he or she may be mean without money, poverty-stricken, destitute, pos

sibly dependent on the charity and living on the earnings of another. This ought to test the reason and the soundness rather the absence of them-of murmurings against a treatise which has for its high aim the education of both the young and the old in the arts of money-getting and money-saving. Let the results of life go to the extreme on both sides-that our dear ones are to be absolutely mean and miserly, but in possession of a competency, or that they are to be still mean and also in poverty, resting hopelessly upon private aid or subjected to the cold charities of the public poor authorities: which, nevertheless, do you choose? If you are truly honest, it is not difficult to frame an answer for any worthy parent or friend.

Therefore let no narrow-minded philosophy or groundless fear meet our book in the way, and cry, "Hold!" Let no captious lips say, "You will make misers of our children." But let the same lips read the lesson, not of one thing only, the way to make, but the better lesson of the way to save money also, the very lesson which every parent wishes early to be put in practice upon his hopeful child. his hopeful child. It is a false philosophy which affects to despise money-making, and no truer a teaching which condemns in unmeasured terms the use of riches to increase riches.

"Because its blessings are abused,

Must gold be censured, cursed, accused?
E'en virtue's self by knaves is made
A cloak to carry on the trade."

GAY.

CHAPTER I.

SOURCES OF WEALTH.

Any one who discovers a new source of gain, without detriment to the community, deserves a mark of honor, for public spirit will then never be extinguished."

XENOPHON.

2N this country, the fountains of wealth are accessible to all. Comparatively few avail themselves of the opportunity presented to accumulate a fortune, while there are few indeed, able in body and sound in mind, who can not make themselves independent of charity and by and by of labor, if not achieve what may be called a fortune. So far as history, sacred or profane, leads us back among the toiling masses of mankind, the struggle for property stands as a beaconlight above all other effort. Within these labyrinths, at every point of view taken by the historian, the ever-abiding desire for gain shows itself in almost every motive and nerves to action almost every toiler's hand. The struggle springs from necessities native to man, implanted in his very existence; and however high or lowly born the man may be in the scale of life, his nature demands sustenance, and whether he

labor for it or not, by some one the necessity must be met and the ground tilled for his sake.

Labor, then, is the living spring of wealth, from whose depths flow the streams of necessity and luxury, of sufficiency, abundance, or superfluity. As the Maker of all things has created one drop of water like another, so by nature is one laborer in his world. like another. Each may occupy a different position in human life, now up, now down, changing place at every moment, yet fulfilling laws which oft confound the deepest philosophy. To-day may see one basking in the brilliant sunshine of a Syrian sky: to-morrow may behold him sunk in deep, dark, dank recesses where the smiles of plenty, still less the cheering radiance of luxury, may never reach. One hour may witness the bubble of circumstance bear him quickly from the gloom beneath to the sparkle and glitter above: the next the bubble has burst, and memory alone can tell his story of poverty and distress.

Why one globule of the sea reflects the warm glow of the sun upon its surface, and another, otherwise just like it, must rest far below, with the weight of countless tons of its fellows pressing upon it; or why one drop in the vast ocean of humanity is borne serenely with the current, rejoicing in the pleasures of life, with every want supplied, and another must agonize beneath the scorching sun, overtasked with his own labors and bearing besides the burdens of others, is beyond the ken of the scientist or the logic

of the political economist to explain. No solution can be given for the problem of such relations, other than can be found in what seems to be an axiom of nature, that because an ocean must be made up of globules of water, some are therefore below and perform a heavier duty than those which by the same necessity must be above, or that because a community must be made up of individuals, some must necessarily occupy superior and others inferior positions.

This necessity does not grow out of the normal condition of man; for that is agriculture, limited, too, to the supply of the bare necessaries of life, and that agriculture performed with the rudest implements fashioned by the laborers themselves. Such labor, it may easily be seen, furnishes the foundation of all values. Its institution caused the necessity for tools to carry it on to advantage, and for these materials in wood and metals were required, which opened new avenues of want, till the great and diversified machinery of human labor has been set in motion in all its varieties. It will be unnecessary to follow up the dependence of one branch of industry upon another, or their relative importance to the whole. Sufficient for the purposes now in hand is a glance at the whole, to show that from any or all money can be made by individuals, by labor in or around this multiplicity of elementary occupations.

Here may be a fitting place to inquire by what