Part 6

Stop short of envying the rich, even if penniless yourself. A philosophical reflection as to the causes of your bad fortune, together with a resolve to mend it by a more enlightened course, is your only remedy.

Stop, however, yet shorter of the vulgar, pigheaded notion that money, even by the ton-weight, can be everything without moral or intellectual backing. If this were so, wealth would be more glorious than wisdom, which happily, it is not.

Stop before parting with money, even to an insignificant amount, without some sort of equivalent. This rule need not render you either parsimonious or uncharitable, since even alms-giving brings a return in the consciousness of having yielded to a kindly impulse.

Stop before cultivating a hoarding spirit, and remember that, logically, as between the miser and the spendthrift, the latter has the best of the bargain. For, while the spendthrift has the selfish satisfaction of squandering his fortune in his own person, the miser is the dupe of his own self-denial, for the benefit of others who come after him.

Stop, however, before emulating the spendthrift any more than the miser. If there is never any love for the scheming parsimony of the one, neither is there ever any gratitude for the thoughtless largesse of the other.

Stop, and reflect well, before borrowing money under any circumstances. To an honest man, indebtedness is ever a double torture--self-torture in the haunting possibility of not being able to keep his word, and the torture of imagining what, in that case, will be thought of him.

Stop, dead, before borrowing money that you are not sure of being able to repay. As for the man who borrows without the intention to repay, he is even worse than a professional thief, and as fully deserving of social ostracism.

Stop before becoming that unmitigated bore, a chronic borrower. He is at best a pitiful creature, shunned even when commiserated, and the strongest ties of friendship cannot long withstand the wrench of his proximity.

Stop, even before lending money to a friend, and reflect that non-liquidation must cost you your money, and may cost you--your friend.

Stop, however, if you mean to grant a request for a loan, and grant it freely. To produce it as if extracting a wisdom-tooth, or accompany it with a stereotyped moral lecture on the hardness of the times, etc., is much like placing his request on a level with mendicancy.

Stop short--indeed, as abruptly as you please--of lending money to a known profligate or spendthrift. The proverbial blood from a turnip may be sooner expected than genuine thankfulness for an accommodation from such a source, and the probability is that he will secretly laugh at you for a fool.

Stop, however, and reflect well before adopting a general and irrevocable rule of never lending money under any circumstances. Many eminent men, the reverse of hard-hearted, have conscientiously adopted this rule, but whether it is the best, as the world goes, is a question.

Stop before compromising with such a rule by offering as a gift that which is entreated as a loan. This is the course usually pursued by the eminent men alluded to above; but such a proffer is always humiliating, and often insulting.

Stop before running in debt, even for groceries or beer, for that for which you can pay on the spot. It is a pernicious habit that must steadily engender looser and looser notions about money matters.

Stop before adopting honesty as your standard merely on the immorally aphoristic grounds of its being the best policy. True integrity should stand on its merits, win or lose; whereas any shrewd rascal would be honest on occasion, if satisfied that he would make by it.

Stop, rather, and fortify your uprightness on the broad grounds, “that honesty is not only the deepest policy, but the highest wisdom; since however difficult it may be for integrity to get on, it is a thousand times more difficult for knavery to get off.”

Stop before cultivating an inordinate desire to get rich in haste. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it will develop into a species of frenzy that must over-reach and defeat its aims.

Stop, rather, and understand that in speculation, the prizes of the few are only rendered possible by the ruin of the many.

Stop before setting up financial comets--that is suddenly-rich men--as your exemplars. The exceptional boldness, or unscrupulousness which constituted their open sesame to dazzling fortune, may but fling wide, for the mediocre imitator, the doors of poverty or of the state prison.

Stop when you have achieved a comfortable competence, and devote yourself to the rational enjoyment thereof. To be stacking up dollars and securities to the last gasp is worse than making a hell on earth; since it is a perversity so obtuse as to imagine that as heaven which is in truth a hell.

Stop, and remember, that the accumulation of wealth, as a sole pursuit, is a diseased passion, just as much as is the craving for strong drink, or for the excitement of gambling.

Stop, therefore, in the headlong race for money, and so intersperse that pursuit with knowledge and unselfish deeds, with moral and intellectual recreations, as shall render it the chief means, rather than the chief end, of a useful existence.

In Guarding Against Bad Habits.

Stop before cultivating an inordinate self-conceit, and remember that real worth is mostly modest, while those persons are the vainest who have the least to be vain of.

Stop before contracting a habit of exaggeration. This is the stock-in-trade of the cheap penny-a-liner, while the strength of the true historian lies in conscientious statement.

Stop short of fancying that such exaggeration can impress others with your imaginative powers. Were this true, the grimaces of a baboon might be ascribed to emotional fine frenzy.

Stop before contracting the habit of lying, even in a harmless way. But this fault is as naturally the outgrowth of extravagance or looseness of statement, as is the noxious weed of the miscellaneous muck that stimulates it into useless being.

Stop short of listlessness in word, look and deed. A perfunctory person is never in demand, and Rip Van Winkle only indemnified society in sleeping out his twenty years.