Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/59

Rh This leads us to the grand truth of the science, which is that, cæteris paribus, the better living others make, the more they help us to make ours. Not the better living they get, but the better living they make. It is not necessary to express in terms the difference between getting and making a living. A pauper does not make his living, but he gets it, notwithstanding. The same is true of people who beat their creditors. We see the difference quite plainly here. Yet if we tried to define it so that we should never have to revise our definition, we should probably be led into one of those time-wasting and brain-wasting quibbles which have been the bane of political economy. All we need do is to emphasize the word "make," when we repeat, as we can not too often repeat, that the better living others make, the more they help us to make ours; and the better living we make, the more we help others to make theirs.

There is another correlative truth, sometimes crossing and sometimes paralleling this one, that the more carefully human beings husband their means, the more they help one another in acquiring means. A careful study of the nature of capital helps us to appreciate this truth. This is not the place to enter into that study. Suffice it here to say generally that others help us most when they work and save. They help us when they only work, and they help us when they only save, but they help us most when they both work and save. And we them in like manner.

Hence it is easier to make a living in an industrious, frugal community than in a lazy, thriftless one. Hence, also, the profit to the community of the labor of convicts, paupers, and other persons in state custody. Hence the great advantage of having the world's work so divided and arranged that the weak as well as the strong can find something to do.

One other general truth, with many important special applications, must be stated here. If those who do much work, and get and squander the full reward of their labor, help us much in making a living; and if those who do much work, and, getting a good reward, save a portion of it, help us still more; those help us still more who, doing much work, are content or forced by necessity to accept a small reward. It always pays to hire a man, or trade with a man, who, considering its real worth, puts a small value upon his labor, and is satisfied with a small reward for it. Such a man may be too generous for his own good, but not for the good of those who deal with him. For, of course, the extreme limit of help in making a living which anybody could afford us would be to make it for us out-and-out gratuitously.

Undue help may cause us to relax our efforts, or to make reckless use of our opportunities, so that in the end we may be worse off; but that does not make it any the less help. We may misuse any blessing we enjoy.

But we must remember all the time that the practical object of any