A Jolly by Josh | Page 3

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 has sometimes let his affairs be managed on this plan, but that need not enter into this case; for you and I are both of us intelligent beings, observers after a fashion, and we intend to plan things out a bit and see what