The Caledonian

American Wastefulness.

From the Springfield Republican.

Wise men and Christian men get advantage out of misfortunes. "Sweet are the uses of adversity," to those who appreciate and improve the lessons it teaches, and, if the present suspension of business activity and the consequent embarrassment & distress shall impress its appropriate lessons upon the people, its results may produce great and permanent blessings. There is one aspect of our American life that always strikes foreigners with surprise. It is the wastefulness that everywhere prevails, and which is the result doubtless of a long series of years of plenty and prosperity. We talk economy and a portion of the people practice the virtue. But the general fact is that among all classes and conditions economy is something yet to be learned. In every branch of business there is great waste of materials, in housekeeping a waste of the means of living, and in the means of amusement and recreation a lavish expenditure that is absolutely reckless.

It has been said that a Frenchman can live luxuriously on what an Englishman throws away. But the English are far ahead of us in domestic economies, and we have no doubt there are many American families, who have never entertained the thought that they were living extravagantly, in whose kitchens enough might be saved by proper economy of materials and better modes of cooking, to supply the tables of other families who are likely to suffer for the simplest means of subsistence. And this is not true of the rich alone, but of the middling classes, and in numerous instances of those who depend on their daily labor for their daily bread. There are thousands of industrious mechanics and day laborers in our cities, who have been accustomed to the receipt of from ten to twenty dollars a week for their labor, and have spent it as fast as earned and perhaps a little faster. A few weeks of idleness places them among beggars, and makes them quiet sufferers or desperate plunderers of their more thrifty neighbors. These men might have saved from one third to one half of their daily earnings when business was good, and they would now have enough on hand to go through the crisis independent of assistance from others and with no temptation to crime. These men certainly have a lesson to learn from their present distress, and it will be well for them if they recollect and practice upon it all their lives. No able bodied mechanic who has good work and wages for years, should be ashamed of himself if to become a pauper by a few weeks or months of compulsory idleness. Nothing but wastefulness and utter want of forethought could have brought him to such degradation. But he has only drifted with the current and copied the prodigality that has pervaded all classes of society alike.

It would be easy to go into the details of this general wastefulness, and point out a thousand particulars in which retrenchment is possible with no loss of substantial comfort and in many instances with improved health and happiness. Look at New York! Thousands of desperate men are parading the streets of that city, threatening riot and plunder if they are not supplied with work, and yet to-day in that city more than enough money will be spent at the lager beer saloons and low tippling shops to supply every destitute family in the city with sufficient and comfortable food—and this money comes, nine-tenths of it, from the pockets of the very laboring classes who are reduced to beggary by a few weeks loss of employment. Surely there is a lesson in facts like these. Cut off the drain upon the resources of the community made by vicious and hurtful excesses, and more than enough will be saved to supply all the destitute with fuel and bread.—Here is an opening for economy that very many men would find a personal advantage every way, in improving.

It has been said that those who have ample means should not retrench their expenditures at such a time as this, because by so doing they take from others employment and subsistence. But there may be economy with the most liberal expenditure, and a retrenchment of wastefulness will save means for charity to the poor. Waste benefits nobody. It is a dead loss to the whole community, and is therefore a wrong to all that suffer for that which is thrown away by want of proper care.

Let economy, then, be one of the lessons that all classes, from the richest to the poorest, shall learn from the present hard times, and the hard times shall not be without their advantages to us all.