The Locked Ledger.
I saw it in a stationer's store window, and truly it was a forbidding volume. It was massive, thick and heavy, with stout leaves and ponderous leather covers. And securely set in the edges of those covers were heavy brass hinges, which came together in a big lock. A key lay on the ledger.
When the great book was closed and the key had done its work, not the most dastardly embezzler could tamper with its records, nor could the most pertinacious Paul Pry get a glimpse of its contents.
It seemed well fitted to chronicle the trade secrets of a Morgan or a Rockefeller, figures big with fate, luminous with happy or baleful meaning. "The man who comes to own that," thought I, "will wisely keep his own counsel."
And then I thought, "Is that my kind of ledger? In this great matter of money, which at bottom is a matter of life, would I be ready to show my expense book to the wisest and holiest of men, and not blush for any item in it? And if so, would I dare go on and lay its every page before God?"
If I would not, though my only account book is a pocket memorandum and my only safe a pasteboard box, yet I am keeping a locked ledger.
But if I would, then my business is safe, for I have taken as my partner the Treasurer of the universe!
For One Hundred Dollars.
What value do you place upon your life? A New York man valued his life at $100.
He was the senior member of a firm that was running a dye-shop. An explosion of some dye-stuff set the place on fire, and the junior member dragged this man away after he had narrowly missed death in the explosion. But he happened to remember that he had left $100 in his coat in the shop. The junior partner tried to hold him, but in vain. Back he rushed into the midst of the flames for his $100, and there, half an hour later, the firemen found him, his body burned to a crisp.
You would never be so foolish? Ah, do not be so sure of that!
For there is more than one way of throwing away one's life for one hundred dollars. You may throw it away in overwork, in the dull, heavy grind that crushes the true life out of the soul. You may throw it away in mad ambition. You may throw it away in empty pleasures. You may throw it away in vice. In these ways millions of men are actually exchanging their lives for money, and for the things for which money stands in the great, gaudy catalog of worldliness.
And some of these ways are worse than fire, for that at least is a clean element of destruction.
On the Mantelpiece.
George Macdonald, I have heard, had a wise arrangement in his household. He always kept, on a convenient mantelpiece, a supply of money. The supply was renewed as it grew less, and it was never counted. All members of the family went to that mantelpiece and helped themselves. No questions were ever asked. It was the family treasury, and every member of the family—father, mother, and even each little child—was a treasurer.
I like that. It implies mutual trust. It implies trustworthiness. It implies a regard of each for the good of all. It is co-operation and brotherly love reduced to terms of every day. Why, it is practical Christianity, that Macdonald mantelpiece.
I am not sure that it would work well at once in every household. Some wives and some children get money grudgingly doled out to them, and see so little of it that they never learn how to use it. Not sharing responsibility for it, they feel nothing of that responsibility. In such pitiful homes a money education would be needed at the start.
But, bless you, my brothers, lords of the family purse, it is the only way to live!