Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/38

 34 form of saving which the majority of our working classes can practise is the art of useful expenditure upon themselves and their families. Their incomes are too small to bear any other form of thrift. The reason why so many of those who practise thrift—meaning by that, saving—are unattractive and even repulsive, is that they have not spent enough on themselves to allow their personalities to grow. They have been banking not real savings but capital which they ought to have spent on their personal development. They are hampering their own growth by choosing to remain under-nourished—especially in mind. The true practice of thrift for a man with a family and thirty shillings per week as an income, is not niggardly saving but wise expenditure. Such expenditure would increase the volume of demand for productive labour, but it would not put an end to unemployment or to slack times and sickness. During these times the thriftless man will suffer most, because he has probably destroyed his nerve and skill and is unreliable to boot, and because he is exposed straight away to the full blast of the cutting wind of adversity. But the temperate man is also discharged, and if he may be rarely seen in unemployed marches, he is found by those who know how to seek him in his seclusion, before a cold grate and an empty home. The cause of poverty is social; but personal conduct often determines whether this man or that is to be the victim and how deep the poverty is to be.

Statistics on such an intricate subject as