The butcher's waste filled my
mother's soul with dismay. If I bought a scuttle of coal at the corner
grocery, the coal that missed the scuttle, instead of being shovelled up
and put back into the bin, was swept into the street. My young eyes
quickly saw this; in the evening I gathered up the coal thus swept away,
and during the course of a week I collected a scuttleful. The first time
my mother saw the garbage pail of a family almost as poor as our own,
with the wife and husband constantly complaining that they could not get
along, she could scarcely believe her eyes. A half pan of hominy of the
preceding day's breakfast lay in the pail next to a third of a loaf of
bread. In later years, when I saw, daily, a scow loaded with the garbage
of Brooklyn householders being towed through New York harbor out to sea,
it was an easy calculation that what was thrown away in a week's time
from Brooklyn homes would feed the poor of the Netherlands.
At school, I quickly learned that to "save money" was to be "stingy"; as
a young man, I soon found that the American disliked the word "economy,"
and on every hand as plenty grew spending grew. There was literally
nothing in American life to teach me thrift or economy; everything to
teach me to spend and to waste.
I saw men who had earned good salaries in their prime, reach the years
of incapacity as dependents. I saw families on every hand either living
quite up to their means or beyond them; rarely within them.
Pages:
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449