CAPITAL AND ABSTINENCE. 529 



thoug-li it is true that abstinence consists not only in putting 

 one's self on short commons in the matter of food but in deny- 

 ing one's self any enjoyment of consurj^ption, no matter what, 

 still the ways in which a rich man, growing richer, can find 

 any gratification in really consuming goods is very limited. 



He may, indeed, spend his whole income very easily, and 

 find gratification in so doing ; but spending money is one 

 thing, consuming goods (in the sense of using them up and 

 destroying them) is another. Most of the spending is mere 

 transfer of possession or change of form. If a man loses liis 

 money in gamblhig, the money merely changes hands. If he 

 spends it in pictures, furniture, and so on, he is merely 

 changing his wealth from one shape into another. The 

 quantity of goods that the most reckless spendthrift really 

 consumes (in the destructive sense) is very small. 



But it will be said the poorer classes in any highly 

 organised community such as ours must practise actual 

 abstinence, or at any moment, through sickness, accident, loss 

 of employment or of vital power, they will assuredly find 

 themselves in dire straits. No doubt ; but this abstinence 

 enjoined on the labourer is not designed to add to the exist- 

 ing mass of accumulations, but only to ensure his having 

 something to consume when he is not in a position to earn 

 anything ; and he is not much given to abstaining for either 

 reason. 



Human nature is so constituted that, as a general rule, 

 men will not deliberately make short commons shorter still in 

 order to provide against a remote and problematical con- 

 tingency ; for life is uncertain, and the contingency therefore 

 will always be problematical. 



Those (and they are many) who hold that the only, or at 

 any rate the chief, hope of bettering the labourer's condition 

 is by encouraging him to restrict his already scanty indul- 

 gences in order to provide against sickness or old age, 

 apparently fail to realise that this is not bettering his condition 

 at all, but only changing the period of his deprivation, spread- 

 ing it over his youth when his powers of enjoyment are 

 keenest, instead of postponing it to a later period which lie 

 may never live to see. 



What the labourer wants, and what the Philanthropist and 

 the Reformer want for him, is not a greater pinch in the 

 present as insurance against a w^orse pinch still in a doubtful 

 future, but the improvement of his condition now ; the power 

 not to save more, but to consume more. 



