Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 August 1893 — The Prevailing Stupidity. [ARTICLE]

The Prevailing Stupidity.

The misfortunes of Mr. Onesime Mathieu, who put $1,200 in a rubber shoe which he hid so securely that he was tho only person who could not find it, his quest for it and the arrest of a man charged with converting to his own use the strange receptacle and its contents, were told in the Transcript yesterday. They point a moral, and for anybody but Mr. Mathieu they adorn a tale. The moral is that people who will not trust banks with their money have unlimited confidence in rubber shoes, old coffee-pots, and stoves. A few weeks ago a very aged and very penurious woman, a resident of a New Jersey town, where she dwelt alone with her conscience and seventeen cats, was taken sick, and on a search of her house being made by the friends who rallied round her, mopey and valuables to a considerable amount were found in a rusty old coffee-pot on the top shelf of a cupboard. Quite recently two maiden ladies in Maine, or Michigan, or Minnesota, it matters not which, forgot that they kept their money in a stove and started a tire on a chilly day, to the immediate reduction of their available cash assets.

A few years ago a hotelkeeper In Southern Massachusetts thought it was the part of wisdom to save up gold. He had quite a golden store, together with a comfortable quantity of greenbacks, under his feather bed when his hotel burned down. The gold melted, but the greenbacks went up in smoke, and, as they did not lea.ve their numbers or other means of identification behind them, were a total loss. Possibly the fact that no one ever heard of a rubber shoe or coffee pot or cook stove plundering a bank aud running off to Canada may make them favorites with those who are chronically distrustful, as otherwise the preference for them as places of deposit for money is quite inexplicable. The use of money by a good many heavy capitalists, who think themselves very smart in adding to to financial distrust and distress by putting it away in safe-deposit tins, is not much brighter, for they are only lengthening out their loss of interest all the while.—Boston Transcript.