56 
MATTER 
House 
& Garden 
THAT 
O F 
Which Is An Effort To Prove That The F inancing 
Of Life Is More Important Than Making a Fortune 
6 % 
S OME day I am going to consort with an accountant. And 
I will ask him these questions: 
“Why is it necessary for a man, when he is spending money, to 
figure up what that same money would have brought him had he 
not spent it? - ’ 
“Why is it necessary to eternally compute the matter of 6%?’’ 
A man bur s a place in the country, for example. He wants to 
live in the country, he wants to be able to leave the noise and 
bustle of the city at night and come back to the quiet place where 
he can sleep and rest in peace and where, of Sundays, he can potter 
around his garden. So he invests several thousand dollars—but 
forthwith begins to compute a loss of 6%! 
I am wondering if pleasure and health aren't worth more than 
six per cent: if the reminiscence of happy days isn't a return bigger 
than any interest money can bring. Perhaps the accountant can say: 
There was the case of my friend Gilford. 
G ILFORD came into my world the night I fell among brokers. 
Thev were pouchy men who wore silk hats, rode in limousines 
and could eat filet whenever they wanted to. They also smoked good 
cigars. I enjoyed their cigars. But even more I enjoyed their 
conversation. It was perfectly unintelligible, yet it was interesting. 
After they had tired of markets and margins they fell to talking 
about the ways the}' spent their money. Brokers do that some¬ 
times, even the best of them. Mind you. they didn't come out in 
the open about it, they didn't boast—they spoke covertly and made 
hints, and I saw giddy visions of these cousins of Croesus who had 
so much pelf that they could afford to spurn it. 
One went in for Rolls Royces; another remarked that a wife and 
family were expensive luxuries. Gilford, a little fellow with rosy 
Jieeks confessed he spent $10,000 last year on his garden. 
We started up. “On a garden? Winter Garden or. .. . ?” 
“No, flower garden.” 
“And what did your investment yield you?” 
“Flowers.” 
“That all?” 
“That's all I wanted. " 
Now, had he said his investment yielded him a high grade of 
vegetables that he marketed at a good profit, no one would 
have been surprised. But flowers—pretty things to look at and 
sniff, fragile things that fade before dawn! 
Of course, no one understood Gilford. I he idea of a man 
spending $10,000 a year for flowers does not enter into the cal¬ 
culations of most men. Little wonder that he blushed to see his 
heart uncovered. But he was proud of it, at the same time. If the 
market didn t play tricks, he expected to spend more next year. 
Before the night was over a different atmosphere pervaded 
the circle. It was as though a cleansing air had blown in from 
across stretches of lawn and woodland. On the way up the street 
one of them confided in half-ashamed sort of way, “That man 
Giltord makes me look like a piker. He gets so much out of life.” 
I he point wherein Gilford differed from all the rest was in his 
complete refusal to balance pleasure and health against money. He 
refused to spoil the good times he was having by computing how 
much it cost. Gilford was not a 6% man. He wasn't satisfied with 
getting a paltry 6% out of his life. He looked on life as a 
100% investment—and you saw it in his color and his eve. 
Gilford had been playing partners with Nature that year. He 
had invested $10,000 in the firm. To be sure, he was drawing a 
staggering profit in pleasure and health. But 6%! What did 
6% mean to him? He was playing for bigger stakes! 
1 hat is the way he looked at everything about the place. He 
had one fortune to invest—and that was his life, and he planned 
to invest it where it would bring the biggest returns. He had 
written his philosophy all over the place. You read it in the 
flowers, in the velvet lawns, in the clean-kept paths. You saw it 
in the stalwart limbs of the oaks and the swaying elms wrote it on 
the sky. It came as a voice from every bush and bower. Your 
ears rang with the motto: “It is more important to make life than 
make a fortune.” 
M EN are divided into these two classes—the 6% and the 
100%: men who balance their books with figures and men 
who balance them with flowers. One cannot draw 7 all money and 
all health from the same investment. Something must be charged 
off against life and flowers, against the warmth of sunshine and 
the cool of rain, against sunsets and drifting clouds and the wind 
through the trees. 
Perhaps the day will come when a man will figure up his health 
and pleasure in the same way he now figures on money. How much 
can he invest? How much dare he spend? He will sit down and 
calculate if a flower garden is a good investment and if the sight 
of long shadows through the trees will bring their worth in pleasure 
to his eyes. 
These are matters that the world would call sill}' and sentimental, 
yet they are the very foundation of life and living. They w T ere 
the things men once worshipped. 
A'hat is 6% compared to them? 
This editorial , first published in January, 1917, brought 
quite a number of requests for copies of that issue. Un¬ 
fortunately the number was long since exhausted and we were 
unable to supply these copies. One prominent Cleveland 
firm did us the honor of reprinting it in a booklet for its 
private holiday greeting of 1922-23. This and the requests 
for copies emboldened us to repeat it 
