The point was very well stated by a famous miser whose son has since been in Parliament (I will not say on which side).  The old man had accumulated a vast fortune, but, in the Scotch phrase, would have grudged you “the smoke off his porridge.” (He died, by the way, properly enough, through walking home in the rain because he was too mean to take a cab.) He was once asked why he was so anxious to increase his riches, since his son would probably squander them, and he replied, “If my son gets as much pleasure out of squandering my money as I have had out of saving it, I shall not mind.”  Both the hoarding and the spending, you see, were in his view equally a matter of mere selfish pleasure.

But I admit that the uncalculating spirit that lands people in debt is a more engaging frailty than the calculating spirit of the miser.  I know a delightful man who seems to have no more knowledge of the relation of income and expenditure than a kitten.  If he gets L100 unexpectedly he does not look at it in relation to his whole needs.  He does not remember rent, rates, taxes, baker, butcher, tailor.  No.  On the strength of it, he will order a new piano in the morning, buy his wife a sealskin jacket in the afternoon, and by the next day be deeper in the mire than ever, and wonder how he got there.  And there is Jones’s young wife, a charming woman, who is dragging her husband into debt with the same kittenish irresponsibility.  She will leave Jones on the pavement with a remark that suggests that she is going into the shop to buy some pins, and will come out with a request for L10 for some “perfectly lovely” thing that has caught her eye.  And Jones, being elderly, and still a little astonished at having won the affection of such a divinity, has not the courage to say “No.”

To the people afflicted with these loose spending habits I would commend the lesson of a little incident I saw in a tram on the Embankment the other evening.  There entered and sat beside me a working man, carrying his “kit” in a handkerchief, and wearing a scarf round his neck, a cloth cap, and corduroy trousers—­obviously a labourer earning perhaps 25s. a week.  He paid his fare, and then he took from his pocket a packet tied up in a handkerchief.  He untied the knot, and there came forth a neat pocket-book with pencil attached.  He opened it, and began to write.  My curiosity was too much for my manners.  Out of the tail of my eye I watched the motion of his fingers, and this is what he wrote:  “Tram 1-1/2 d.”  In a flash I seemed to see the whole orderly life of that poor labourer.  He had an anchorage in the tossing seas of this troublesome world.  He had got hold of a lesson that Lady Ida Sitwell ought to try and learn during the next three months.  It is this:  Watch your spendings.