or purchasing business necessary to be done to procure your supplies, and provide for the home comforts, is still to be transacted. If that be to disburse three hundred dollars per annum, so much, then, is the volume of your mercantile transactions; and so of any other amount that may be named. Every dollar expended requires two persons to make the expenditure, the seller and the purchaser. The man of fortune, who spends his three thousand dollars yearly, has in this way ten times as much labor to perform as he who lays out but his three hundred dollars; and the millionaire who spends thirty thousand dollars incurs the liability to one hundred times as much labor as his fellow-man who uses but three hundred ;-provided always that in such cases the rich man attends personally, and not by stewards or agents, to the making of his many purchases. The meaning of the terms " competence" and "competency," so often heard, especially the former, is not greatly different from that of "independence." They are defined by one of the great dictionary-makers (Dr. Webster) as "property or means of subsistence sufficient to furnish the necessaries and conveniences of life, without superfluity; sufficiency; such a quantity as is sufficient;" and by another of the authorities. (Dr. Worcester) to be "such a quantity as is sufficient, without superfluity; sufficiency, especially of the means of living." The same general principles, explanations, and illustrations applicable to an independence, are equally applicable to the consideration of a competence. As a conclusion of the whole matter, none who want money need hesitate to work wherever they can procure employment in any reputable business; and if they can take with them into their work ample knowledge and superior acquirements, their services will be more valuable, though not a whit more respectable, in the great scale of political economy. Bearing this steadily in mind, and seeking to profit by it, a good foundation will be laid for success in acquiring a competence, an independence, or a fortune. CHAPTER III. CAPITAL AND LABOR. Love, therefore labor. If thou shouldst not want it for food, thou mayst for physic. It is wholesome to the body, and good for the mind; it prevents the fruit of idleness. WILLIAM PENN. If little labor, little are our gains, ANONYMOUS. Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! Bright and yellow, hard and cold, Molten, graven, hammered, and rolled; Heavy to get, and light to hold; Hoarded, bartered, bought, and sold, Stolen, borrowed, squandered, doled; Spurned by the young, but hugged by the old, Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! How widely its agencies vary,- -to bless As even its minted coins express, HOOD. HE meaning of the term labor is undoubtedly pretty well understood by the vast majority of mankind; while there are few who have not had large experience of it as a practical matter. Every calling has its special kind of labor; and even the man of fortune is not free from it, for in addition to the care of his expenditures he has also, in general, to look personally to his investments, to the collection of his income, and the like. So that all have labor of some kind to perform; and it may hence be concluded that labor is respectable, and none need be ashamed to labor who would not be ashamed to be seen spending a dollar. Only the purse-proud who have obtained money by the labor of others, and do not know the toilful processes by which wealth is secured, look down upon honest labor. The common laborer, honorably doing his day's work, stands higher in the scale of manhood and usefulness than they. "O worker of the world! to whose young arm The brute earth yields, and wrong, as to a charm; THE ODE OF LIFE. Hardly anything is held more contemptible, in the mind of an honest, hard-working man, than absolute, unproductive idleness. As one of the old English divines (Dr. Barrow) has remarked: "A noble heart will disdain to subsist, like a drone, upon others' labors; like a vermin, to filch its food out of the public granary, or like a shark, to prey upon the lesser fry; but it will rather outdo his private obligations to other men's care and toil, by considerable service and beneficence to the public; for there is no calling of any sort, from the sceptre to the spade, the management whereof, with any good success, any credit, any satisfaction, doth not demand much work of the head, or of the hands, or of both." Another of those sound old preachers, the eloquent Jeremy Taylor, has said with equal wisdom: "God provides the good things of the world to serve the needs of nature by the labors of the plowman, the skill and pains of the artisan, and the dangers and traffic of the merchant. The idle person is like one that is dead, unconcerned in the changes and necessities of the world; and he only lives to spend his time and eat the fruits of the earth. Like a vermin or a wolf, when their time comes they die and perish, and in the meantime do no good." Such are of the class to whom the witty Douglas Jerrold referred: "There are many idlers to whom a penny begged is sweeter than a shilling earned." But the man who can feel this sort of satisfaction must have the mean, groveling spirit of the willful pauper or the tramp. How much better the noble spirit of Carlyle: "Not what I have, but what I do, is my kingdom;" or of the poet Tennyson in his lines, "But well I know That unto him that works, and feels he works, A writer whose name, at least in connection with the quotation, has unfortunately been lost, expresses |