Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 April 1875 — Providence and Improvidence. [ARTICLE]

Providence and Improvidence.

This is a subject which cannot' be too often touched upon. Between extravagance and meanness, reckless waste and “ the good old gentlemanly vice” of ‘avarice, lies that middle term of providence, which like all middle terms, issd difficult to hit with precision, and is so valuable when hit. Indeed, providence is one of the essentials of self-respect ; just as no man who is improvident—flush with money to-day, run dry to morrow; now “ treating” all his friends like Fortunatus playing at a general hospitality, now borrowing from the poorest, with no difference in reality between him and a roadside beggar—can understand the meaning of the term or know in the smallest degree wherein true self-respect consists. Ambpg the impossibilities of human action is that of doing any substantial good to the improvident. No amount of money short of a perpetual shower of gold filtering through all the pores of their expenditure would keep them well provided. Set them on their legs as often as one may, they are sure to topple over again into the muddy misery whence they have been placed; and all their debts discharged in the spring have repeated themselves, maybe with additions, by the autumn. No lessons of hard experience make any impression on them. If the way by which they travel has led them twenty miles into the heart .of a morass, or to the brink of a precipice, they nevertheless go along it with eyes willfully blinded and minds of false tran-> quillity for the twenty-first. The rule of life by which they have their being is that of sell-indulgence, and whether it brings them to ruin or not they persist in following it. Small wonder, then, as human nature is constituted—but to be deplored all the same—that their friends grow tired of this perpetual help which never aids, of this incessant rescue which neves saves. It is trying to ladle out the ocean with a spoon, they say, to fill up a quaking moss with barrowfuls of garden mold, to extinguish a raging fire with sheets of brown paper. The improvident grumble lustily. Helped more than anyone else, they have more complaints to make against the coldness of triends and the cruelty of the world than anyone else; and when they have exhausted the patience and the means of those who have put themselves to all sorts of trouble, and denied themselves all sorts of gratifications to assist them, they offer themselves as objects of universal commiseration on the plea of their pressing need and the selfish in-, difference of society. If all this is true of the improvident, the exact converse may be said of the provident. No man’s fortune is so safe from harm that he may not at times.be reduced to the lowest ebb, and that by no fault or folly of his own. The battle j of life must needs bring temporary dis- i aster to all the fighters, however strong. ! To those who are secure there is na-bauTe I at all. Out in the press and the struggle, even the bravest, the most wary, may be j brought to their knees. Sickness,, with loss of actual funds in hand, and of the potential by loss of work—misfortune of that irresponsible kind against which no diligence can provide and no astuteness can foresee—the unexpected ruin of agents necessarily trusted, as one’6 lawyer, one’s trustee, one’s banker, and the like—all these are hard Slows which may fall upon the cleverest, the boldest, and overwhelm them so that there shall be no recovery without help; but with that help their entire reinstatement, on a

firmer basis and a higher level than before. . '——v ■ 1 This help brings with it no sense of humiliation, because it is only help, not almsgiving. Seeing that they must of necessity refund this loan, give back this aid if they would still be of those who respect themselves and Clhim respect from others, the provident are self-deny-ing, careful, industrious; and so, by grace of conscience, greatness of self-control, justify their friends’trust in them, and make that temporary aid no permanent loss to the aider and of permanent good to themselves. —Humane Journal.