A Jolly by Josh | Page 3

years you are married, you will find there is no
increase in income, and you will have a lot of expensive tastes for
things which you have come to look upon as necessary; and the
increased expenses of a household will make you give up all sorts of
personal comforts. This will make you feel poor, much poorer than
Harris, for instance. As your children appear, they will in turn rob you
of more of the things you have been accustomed to. You will have to
keep a family horse and a pony, and give up trotters and boats.
I am not detailing these tragedies with the idea of painting a gloomy
future, but merely to illustrate a point of view,--a habit of mind. I might
say.
It becomes evident, then, that, in order to bring your mind to the point
of view that will make you happy, it would be well to study the case of
Harris, the happiest man you know. Perhaps you could manage to do
artificially, as it were, what nature or circumstances has done for him.
He had no prospects, but good health, good heart, and good mind. He
was perfectly delighted when he found he could earn twenty-five
hundred dollars a year, a larger sum than he had ever had; and he saved
some and spent some in new ways until he found, when he married,
that his living expenses consumed it all. His wife, expecting little, was
pleased with all she got; and, altogether, they seemed to get, in a large
measure, the objects for which we strove and fought the war of 1776.
From the start you were differently placed. You became accustomed to
gratifying your desires: you had little purpose in your actions; and,
accordingly, you have now the habit of looking on each wish, whether
of long standing or momentary, as something you might as well gratify.
My second conclusion I will jump to now, without filling in the

intermediate steps leading up to it; namely, that, to attain happiness, it
is necessary to cultivate the custom of restraining your impulse to
gratify your every desire.
To illustrate this, I will carry out my threat of proving it up from the
other side. You have often in your yachting experiences seen the yachts
belonging to the Goulds, Vanderbilts, and other men of great wealth.
These men feel it necessary to own ships almost as large and expensive
to operate as ocean steamers. They build houses that cost several
hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they give balls that would ruin
men of moderate wealth, while their weddings are likely to cost in the
neighborhood of a million dollars in decorations, gifts, and expenses.
The deduction from this is that the ability of man to spend is only
limited by the length of his purse, and a man's desire to spend has no
such limits.
The conclusion to be drawn from this is that you have got to curb your
desires unless you are unusual in one of two respects, either in your
money-getting ability or in your lack of imagination for inventing new
desires. In any case you can eliminate these possibilities. Now,
admitting that at some point you have got to curb your desires, why not
do it at a point near Harris's, which will leave you in a more
comfortable frame of mind in regard to your money matters, rather than
Perry's, who does not have all he wants, and is discontented, or
Vanderbilt, who would consider himself ruined if he had to live on ten
thousand a year?
I know that you may think that you cannot come to Harris's point of
view, as your points of view have always been horizontally opposite,
he looking up to a sum upon which you look down. But never mind. I
am suggesting that we do reach that point, nevertheless, or, if not that
point, that we shall use our intellects, and, with a view to expediency,
select a point it would be wise to reach.
I assert that we have now an intellectual problem before us. The
question is what scale of expenditure we shall use and what proportion
of our desires, etc., shall we curb.

The usual hand-to-mouth method is to go ahead, do what we want until
we are "up against it" and have to economize, and then for a while do
without some of the more important things which we find we cannot
afford, having already spent our money on things of lesser importance.
This is the lazy man's way, the one who does not care to do his thinking,
and chooses to let circumstances make his course rather than wisdom.
The system seems to have some points of merit, and it is whispered that
even Uncle Sam