p. 112Bad Husbands (Continued)

When you will have passed this gate (of Fortune), another inclosed space extends beyond it: do you perceive at its outskirts these magnificently attired women?—Yes, who are they?—Their names are Intemperance, Pleasure, Avarice, and Flattery.—But why are they stationed there?—They are watching for all those who have received any gifts from Fortune.—And what do they do next?—When these favorites of fortune approach, these women dance with joy, embrace these men, praise and flatter them, and urge them to stay where they now are,—holding out to them the promise of a life of ease, without suffering or sorrow. As soon as any one of these men, fascinated by the witcheries of these women, surrenders himself to Pleasure, the life he leads seems to him at first to be most delightful; but very soon these delights appear to him to be empty delusions. Indeed, as soon as he awakes from his intoxicating dream, he sees that while he was enjoying his visionary bliss, both his goods and his person have been utterly wasted. Hence, having now dissipated all that he had received from Fortune, he becomes the slave of these female tyrants, who force him to obey them in all things, to perpetrate all manner of enormities;—such as to become a forger, a profaner of holy things, a perjurer, traitor, highwayman,—an embodiment, in one word, of all the vices. And when he has consummated all iniquity, they hand him over to Justice.

CEBES, Prospect of Human Life.

Cebes, one of the most illustrious of the disciples of Socrates, has left us but a few fragments of composition. Even these, however, suffice to show, as do the writings of Xenophon and Demosthenes, the influence of the great Athenian’s teaching on the mind and heart of the disciple.

In the “Prospect of Human Life”¹1Generally appended to the editions of Epictetus. he uses the Oriental form of allegory to point out, as in a vast picture, the pernicious influences that turn the multitude of men aside from the path of virtue and true wisdom, render them the slaves of Error, Passion, and Vice, and lead them to endless pain. Imposture sits with Wise Experience at the very gate of Life (the author describes the false Philosophy of his age and country together with the errors and vices which tyrannized over the then heathen world). Turning aside from the latter, which warns every human being what path to take in order to find the great teacher, Truth, and to arrive with his aid at lasting felicity, the blind and blundering multitude crowd around the lofty seat of Imposture, drink of her poisoned cup, are given over to error and ignorance, to vain opinion, and vicious enjoyment.

We are now concerned with such of the crowd as blind Fortune has loaded with her favors;—for the reality which was before the mental and bodily vision of the Athenian, Cebes, differs in no essential point from that which meets the eye of the religious philosopher in the nineteenth century of Christian civilization.

We have been studying a few types of the bad husband; a few more, belonging to classes neither less numerous, nor less interesting, remain to be considered in this chapter. Cebes makes men loaded with the gifts of Fortune come beneath the influence of “Intemperance, Pleasure, Avarice, and Flattery;” we shall reverse this order, leaving the intemperate husband to crown the sad list of home-destroyers, and begin with such as may be classed under the head of “Flattery,” or, rather, of Vanity.

Weak Ambition

In the companion book to the present work²2“The Mirror of True Womanhood,” pp. 123, 124, 125, 126. we spoke of the love of display as one of the most dangerous enemies of the wife and mistress of the home,—of vanity, which nourishes this foolish ambition, as the path to dishonor.

This sort of weak ambition,—of vanity, rather,—is by no means uncommon among our men, not alone among such as rise to affluence and position without possessing anything like mental cultivation, but more especially among the educated who have risen into wealth and fame by dint of personal effort, and thanks to their superior culture.

It will not be considered as an invidious distinction, if we here say that, in the community in which the author lives and over which his observation has ranged with special care, a large proportion if not a very large majority of such husbands, were natives of the New England States. There, the pride taken by the people in making common-school education embrace so many branches elsewhere reserved for the college, the university, or the art school, has begotten in a multitude of young people an ambition and an aptitude to rise to eminence as professors of pure science, or as civil engineers and inventors. Every day one sees some New-England boy thus forcing himself by talent and genius into the front rank of industry and fortune. It is to their cases, and to others like them, that our animadversions more particularly apply.

How the Weakly Ambitious are Ensnared

A young man so reared and highly gifted marries while he is obscurely struggling to rise. His wife is one of these pretty, bright, well-educated, and attractive New-England girls to be met with all over the land, in town and country. She is, at the time of their union, quite her husband’s equal in every respect, very often his superior in birth and fortune. As theirs has been truly a love-match, their home-life is a most blissful one so long as the husband’s battle for distinction and success lasts. She is, during these years of struggle, and often of poverty, not only the loving wife, the tender mother, and thrifty manager of the home, but also and especially her husband’s companion, counselor, friend, and consoler, sustaining him when discouraged by failure and opposition, and cheering him on to face and vanquish every obstacle, till at length he triumphs.

He triumphs; fame and fortune now smile upon him, capitalists place unlimited means at the disposition of the successful inventor, or court association with one whose practical genius has outstripped in a given direction the science and skill of the most popular manufacturers or speculators.

With success comes a new ambition, new wants, new habits, new aims and tendencies. He finds himself transferred from his obscure native town and his modest abode to the great metropolis, where alone that rare plant, Genius, can find a congenial soil and atmosphere. He must have either splendid apartments at the most fashionable hotel in which to receive becomingly the men of wealth and position who seek his alliance or his acquaintance; and, next, he must, as his fortune rises still higher, have a brilliant mansion of his own. Besides, the fruit of his genius, he is told, must not be confined to his own country; it will also thrive in foreign lands and obtain the patronage of foreign governments and peoples.

And thus, he finds himself, step by step, carried upward by the wave of success to a world quite different from that in which he has hitherto moved. And with himself, his wife and children have been suddenly lifted into the dazzling world of wealth, fashion, pleasure, and unbounded vanity.

The wife, brought up in the simplicity and severity of a New-England country home, does not take kindly to very many of the ways of this fashionable and dazzling world, with whose incense her husband is intoxicated. She is “too puritanical” in the estimation of her husband’s associates, and too “countrified” in the judgment of their elegant wives. Still, these condescend to patronize her and court her acquaintance as a part of the homage due to her companion,—the rising man.

Thus, by degrees and insensibly, the husband is led to look down upon his wife, to consider her as inferior to his new position, if not to himself. So love dies out in the intellect before it is killed in the heart. Should it so happen that, in his business trips abroad, his wife should accompany him, the result most probably will be to make him contrast unfavorably her quiet, simple, homely tastes with the wit, the brilliancy, the grace to be met with in women of the upper middle class in European capitals. Nor is it unlikely that he will become acquainted, while there, with the deplorable laxity of opinion, entertained on the matrimonial relations by the Voltairian husbands of these women. And so, while his mind is poisoned by anti-christian principles current among the very men he most admires, the pure love of his early youth and later manhood is daily losing all hold on his heart.

How open is an ambitious or a vain man so disposed, to the poisonous suggestions of an unprincipled acquaintance to whom he looks up with deference! or to the wiles of a still more unprincipled woman, lying in wait for a husband like him, shaken in his fidelity to his lawful wife, and unconsciously yearning for a companion more suited to his improved fortunes, his brilliant associations, and his newly born taste for high life and its pleasures!

For,—and many a true-hearted wife knows it to her cost,—there is, unfortunately, in our great cities no lack of women whose sole aim in life is to insnare some such wealthy victim, whose fortune shall minister to their unslaked thirst for pleasure and display, utterly reckless the while of the faithful hearts they may break, of the misery and desolation they may bring to homes hitherto blessed with all domestic virtue and happiness!

Men fired by ambition, blinded by passion, are but ill suited to cope with the wiles and witchery of some

To men fallen into bondage to such clever and wicked women, the cup of misery to be drained thenceforward is all the more deep and bitter, that they retain some conscience, and remember how innocent and worthy of all love is the wife they have forsaken. Such men dare not sue for a separation in the courts, and they scorn to use the abominable facilities for divorce furnished by men who are the disgrace of the legal profession, and sanctioned by local legislation that perverts all the holiest purposes of law. They profit by the forsaken and outraged wife’s horror of publicity, to screen their own shame beneath the insecure veil of half-secrecy, and give her name to the seducer. Thus they drag from one foreign city to another their secret with them, and with the guilty secret they drag about the sure pledge of the retribution that must overtake them.

Retribution

The public have not forgotten the sudden and tragic ending of more than one of these scandalous careers,—scandalous at least in the unblushing effrontery with which a brilliant fortune was lavished in unholy gratifications, even when that fortune itself had not been acquired by means which honest men abhor. We remember how the shadow of the divine hand long hung above the home of the profligate, who flattered himself with impunity because Vanity Fair did not discard himself and his accomplice, and who saddened religious hearts by the spectacle of crime successful, unpunished, and apparently secure in its happiness: but the bolt from heaven fell at length, and the home of the criminal, the place of his burial, and his very name, were,—like those spots where, in Pagan Rome, the lightning had fallen on a guilty head,—inclosed and held forever ground that no human foot should tread upon.

Let us believe it most firmly,—though the Almighty Father and Judge of mankind does allow individuals as well as communities to flourish while they most shamefully abuse their free will, and seemingly defy and deride His most patient justice,—that Justice shall have its day for the nation and for the man, as surely as to the longest, longest Arctic night succeeds the dawn of God’s sun in the heavens.

Two instances stare us in the face as we write; one of a man who abandoned the young and admirable wife of his youth, having fallen beneath the charms of some Lamia.

He loathed the serpent in whose coils he was fast bound, as much as he had once loved and respected the spotless bride he had first taken to his parents’ home. The fear of discovery and the terrors of his own cowardly conscience followed him in his dark ways while on his native soil, and pursue him now abroad like the fabled Furies of the ancients, attached night and day to the footsteps of the man who had profaned the altar of his own home-sanctuary and quenched with his own hand the sacred fire on his hearth. Men who do not divine the secret of that once happy home left desecrated and darkened forever, or who cannot read the agony of the wretched husband’s breast, will applaud his genius and minister to his vanity: the world which only worships success, fame, and fortune, may crowd nightly the saloon in which the false wife queens it with the children of her guilt around her, while the true wife far away gives up her whole existence to good works, and her heart to the one hope of God’s mercy. But not one day of intoxicating success ends for that faithless husband, but he says with agony in his heart of hearts as he lays his head on his sleepless pillow,

“O to-day and the day to come after!”

Ambition, Infidelity, and Nemesis

The other instance, one of swift and terrible retribution, was but little if at all spoken of in the public press, or in the gossip and scandal-loving world for which our daily press caters. A beautiful wife, in every way but one the superior of her unworthy husband, had been discarded by him for one far her inferior in graces of mind and charms of person,—simply because the wife was extremely young and modest, while her rival was passionate, and well experienced in all the ways of Vanity Fair.

The former was induced by her wily husband to travel abroad and to remain for years in European capitals under the tuition of the best masters, in order to complete,—as her husband said,—her early education, and thus to enable her to shine on her return at the head of the establishment he was meanwhile creating for her. The persons who accompanied the artless girl were in the pay of her unprincipled husband, and instructed to expose her inexperience to the most terrible dangers. Her unsuspecting innocence as well as the pure love which filled her heart for her husband, served as a twofold shield against even the thought of temptation. And she returned to her husband doubly accomplished,—we need not say, and a thousand times more worthy of the love of one so utterly worthless.

She found her husband waiting for her, not in the splendid home of which he had so often written to her,—and which she was never to set foot in,—but at a quiet hotel, where apartments were ready for her. There was in his manner a something that fell chillingly on her young heart, and a mystery in the atmosphere with which he skillfully surrounded her, that she was afraid to penetrate. He was,—he said,—obliged to go suddenly to Europe on very urgent business, and her coming home unexpectedly and without timely warning, had only anticipated by a few weeks their meeting in Paris.

She did not believe all this; for she had discovered of late many little things in her husband’s conduct and letters which made her suspect both his good faith and his veracity. And now, being told that she was to remain behind while he went abroad, and that she was to remain in her present lodgings without so much as attempting to visit the lordly mansion of which he had written so much, she was thoroughly roused, and accused her husband of deceiving her for some purpose she feared to understand.

He became enraged, and in his rage threw off the mask he had worn with so ill a grace. He plainly told her he loved her no longer, and that he loved another. He threatened her with instant separation, if she made any resistance to his will. If she made up her mind to bear with the inevitable he would settle the new mansion on her with a liberal annuity. If not, and if she chose to defy him, he had those in his pay who would swear to such conduct of hers while abroad, as should secure him a decree of divorce from her, and leave her penniless with a dishonored name.

She heard no more. A death-like swoon followed the revelation of her husband’s unspeakable baseness. For several days the wretched and forsaken wife lay between life and death, and then came a brain-fever. Meanwhile the husband had left for Europe, having sent his paramour and her child in another vessel a few days before he set sail himself.

Several months elapsed ere the poor young creature’s slow convalescence allowed her to think seriously or speak of her forlorn condition. A sealed letter from her husband had been placed in the hands of his lawyer, renewing the offers made on that memorable day when she found that her idol was vile clay. She spurned both the offer and the advice of the lawyer, and, as her parents had come to her in her extremity, she told to them her tale briefly and simply, affirming at the same time, that if her father could only accompany her, she would follow her husband and unmask his villany wherever she happened to find him.

The letter left with the lawyer she retained for this purpose. Her father, whose brave spirit she inherited, consented readily. His modest fortune was sufficient to enable him to meet their expenses, and he would willingly expend it all to vindicate the honor of his child, and to punish her unworthy husband. So, they both set out firmly bent on prosecuting their purpose to the bitterest ending.

They learned on their arrival in London that he was negotiating with one of the continental governments the sale of a valuable patent of his own. In that capital the young wife had spent a most agreeable autumn and winter, had been presented at court by the minister representing her own country, and had made many friends among the highest aristocracy. For, in truth, her beauty, sprightliness, and many accomplishments had gained her all the more admiration that they were accompanied and heightened by childlike simplicity and genuine modesty.

Her husband, emboldened by the reports of her deathly sickness and tedious convalescence, had everywhere introduced her rival as his lawful wife; and, by some providential permission they were both to be presented at court on the day after the arrival of our travelers in the capital. There had been a change in the legation, and to the new minister her husband and herself were total strangers. The injured wife instantly adopted her plan of action. She drove without a moment’s delay with her father to the hotel of a nobleman, into whose family circle she had formerly been more than once admitted, and laid before him her wrongs, and what was to happen on the morrow.

He was much struck by the sad change wrought by grief and sickness in the lovely girl who had endeared herself to his family, and at once took a fatherly interest in her case. Yes! he would present her and her father at court on the morrow, and take care that they should have precedence of the false husband and his companion in guilt. They must, however, preserve a strict incognito and the most inviolable secrecy. The nobleman meanwhile sought the prime minister, and laid the matter before him in confidence. He warmly espoused the side of the injured wife and her father, and took other measures for punishing and exposing her dastardly husband. The beautiful stranger was remembered by many courtiers and noble ladies in the royal antechambers, and greeted with genuine cordiality as she leaned on the arm of her noble friend. The presentation was made, and then came the turn of her unsuspecting husband, who was waiting in another room. Suddenly, as his name was called out for the first time, and he and his paramour were advancing in answer to the call, a high officer of court appeared, and openly accused the culprit of presenting another woman as his wife, whereas at that moment his lawful wife and her father were standing in the Presence Chamber conversing with royalty.

We need not pursue in detail the story of the guilty pair. He was allowed to escape,—most probably at the solicitation of his kind-hearted father-in-law. He disappeared forever from public notice, either having capped all his crimes with suicide, to avoid the reprobation of the world on whose breath he lived, or to escape the avenging pangs of his own conscience. The woman to whom he had sacrificed honor, home, and happiness, was indebted to her generous rival for her liberation from prison. She never returned to her native land. As to the young wife herself, we shall leave her to the tender care of her parents and the obscurity in which she chose to bury a life devoted solely to the good of others.

The Mirror of True Companionship and Felicity

From this class of husbands we must not part without holding up, for one moment at least, the mirror of another life and another home,—as an incentive to the inviolable fidelity and constant devotion which are characteristic of all true men, and which should be the special attribute of the man to whom God has given genius, and with it the obligation of shining example. Men such as those whose aberrations we have been describing, have it in their power to do so much for the loved and loving companion of their early years,—just as the faithful wives of such men have a wealth of wisdom and of tenderness to bestow on their husbands amid the noonday glare and the golden evening of their later life!

Let us glance at a home, happily still bright and warm after more than half a century of wedded bliss and united literary labor. Surely, the man who rises to universal fame by his pen and his pencil, may well stand as a peer to the great inventor, and in his home-life serve as a model to the intellectual toilers of both hemispheres.

After Fifty Years

September 20, 1874

The beautiful friendship, the close companionship in labor and trial, in honor and obscurity, and the abiding trust reposed by each of the wedded souls in the other,—all so touchingly and gracefully alluded to in this affecting tribute of a husband to a wife after fifty years of the closest union,—must serve as a fitting close to the instruction we have been giving, and a no less apt preface to what we are about to say.

The Secret Husband

There are husbands who fail grievously in a point of duty as well as of deep interest to themselves,—and make it a rule to conceal from their wives their business transactions and troubles, thereby depriving themselves of counsel which would have saved them from ruin.

We are not speaking here, of course, of professional men, lawyers, physicians, and others, who are intrusted with secrets that concern the honor and vital interests of families or individuals,—or of statesmen bound to inviolable secrecy in matters relating to the public service. The violation of secrecy in any such matter is always a grievous sin. Nor is a husband intrusted with such weighty matters in any way justified in betraying them even to his wife, under the pretext that “husband and wife should never have secrets for each other.” This only holds in the matters which concern their own affairs, and in which each has an undoubted right to know both the favorable and unfavorable sides.

Women are gifted with extraordinary wisdom and sagacity. They see at a glance the hidden reason of things; seize with unerring certainty principles and consequences that escape the eye of man, distracted as he is by preoccupations from which the female mind is happily free.

We have, among other memorable examples of the blessed influence of female counsels both in domestic and in public affairs, that of St. Margaret of Scotland. Not only did her advice induce her husband Malcolm Canmore to make of his court and household a model for every Scottish home, but she made of Scotland a center for European commerce in a warlike and barbarous age, fostered at home all the arts of peace, founded colleges, churches, missionary establishments, and promoted agriculture, manufactures, and the fine arts. Her husband did nothing without her consent,—and when he followed his own judgment and that of his headlong nobles in opposition to her,—as in the war which cost him his life,—he had always reason to rue it.

Even so was it with St. Louis, King of France. The wonderful wisdom which his mother displayed both in the administration of the kingdom during his minority and in his own education, caused him to consult her ever afterward on all matters of moment. And he trained his queen, Marguerite of Provence, to be, like his mother, his constant and principal adviser. Thus, when taken prisoner with his sick knights in Egypt, he would accept no terms of ransom from the Saracens that had not been sanctioned by the queen, who was in Palestine. And when the infidels expressed their astonishment at his deference for a woman, his proud answer was, that the woman “was his lady and his companion.”

Were a more recent instance required in persons of royal station, we should remind our readers of the determination of Queen Isabella, the Catholic, to pawn her crown jewels in order to pay the expenses of the momentous expedition which discovered America. King Ferdinand and the entire royal council had set their faces against the scheme. But the Spirit of God moved the heart of the Queen as He had the soul of Christopher Columbus, and of her might be said what the poet has sung of her illustrious servant:

To business men, as well as to others, there are difficulties which a woman’s ready wit and deft fingers will unravel, when men’s self-sufficient and slow wisdom would only perplex matters and render them inextricable. If the husbands to whom we address ourselves be the true men we believe them, they will follow the example of the great statesman and heroic soldier-king, St. Louis, and make of his wife, the mother of his children, “his lady and companion,” to be consulted before and above all persons on earth, because more interested than the whole world in giving him good advice, and often far more able to do so than any one living person.

How many admirable women have we known, dear reader, wedded to men whom a stupid prejudice about women’s radical unfitness for business kept from ever opening their mind to their companions, till the tidings of their common ruin burst upon them, like a sudden deluge sweeping fortune, home, and everything before it! If the wife had been made acquainted, step by step, with her husband’s embarrassments, it is ten to one, but she had found a sure way out of them; or, had not that been possible, she would have taken wise precautions against the evil day. But what a cruel wrong is done to her judgment, her heart, her home, and her dear ones, when she is kept studiously in the dark till fortune, home, and happiness are swept away from her as by a flood coming down on them in the night!

We say this much on a very practical subject, and pass to one of still greater practical importance;—the shiftlessness of some husbands, the greed and avarice of others, and the prodigality of still another class. We can only devote a few short paragraphs to each.

The Shiftless Husband

The world knows of very many such; and by the world, which worships success and honors the thrift that leads to it, the idle and shiftless head of a family is treated with universal and merited contempt.

That in European lands, where some men are born to wealth and high rank, there should be found many who, in anticipation of their inherited honors and riches, indulge in a life of ease, and never learn the value of work done for its own sake, or the blissful reward which attends application to healthful study and to self-improvement, as well as the self-approbation of a conscious devotion to the welfare of others,—is a matter of course.

In England, with its hereditary nobility, its landed gentry, and its entailed estates, if there be found among the privileged classes one man who spends his youth in utter idleness and ignorance of all ennobling pursuits, there are at least ten who devote their whole time to labor for the good of others much more than for the cultivation of their own intellectual powers or the development of their material resources. The heirs to a great title or to splendid ancestral wealth, are for the most part to be seen among the most laborious of the public servants, or the most industrious promoters of local enterprise and industry. It is the strength of England that her aristocracy, whether of rank or of wealth, thoroughly understand the meaning of Noblesse oblige, and will not allow themselves or their sons to lose the leadership of the country by listlessness, indolence, or incapacity to manage their own estates and the interests of their county, as well as the affairs of the nation.

The young man who dawdles and dreams till a coronet drops on his empty head, or unlimited wealth relieves him of debt and permits him to indulge his sloth or his sensuality, is the exception among his peers, as he is their scorn.

But that in a country like America, where every son of the soil is free to be the architect of his own fortune and fame, and the creator of his own greatness,—there should be found men to say to themselves and others, that “a gentleman is not born to work,”—sounds like a practical absurdity. Yet have we seen such un-American Americans, and heard them proclaim this new code of gentility to their own children as well as to others.

Of course these are no true men; on the contrary, they disgrace the very name of manhood, and are either totally ignorant of what constitutes manliness, or affect to ignore it in their utter abjection. For a man, to vindicate his claim to the essential attributes and the simplest virtues of manhood, must do the work of a man, and display in the performance of his life-work the qualities which make up what all denominate manliness.

Unmanly Men

In the face of these plain truths, that a creature calling himself a man should take on himself the duties of a husband, undertake to provide a home for the wife he has chosen, and to feed and educate the beings who call him father,—while consuming his days in sloth, trusting to the provision made for him by his parents to supply all their wants and to furnish him the means of gratifying his own low inclinations and appetites,—without ever seriously endeavoring to add to this provision by his own personal labor, and looking forward to the death of some rich relative for some legacy that may stand between himself, his wife, his children, and starvation,—is simply monstrous!

These unmanly men neither dig, nor plow, nor sow, nor reap; the rising and the setting of God’s sun does not mean for them the beginning of labor, and of rest after labor; the seasons come and go for them without teaching any practical lesson or furthering any useful purpose. They are like the foul and cowardly birds of the Dismal Swamp, that have neither the strength nor the energy to hunt down a living prey, but look out for the animals that perish in the treacherous and pestilential waste, and then perch themselves on the surrounding trees, watching patiently the progress of decomposition, and whetting their hungry beaks for the auspicious moment.

These ignoble birds of prey that are evermore speculating upon what death may bring them, seem gifted only with an unlimited faculty of consuming what they never toiled for, of wasting what they have not husbanded or garnered up.

To appeal to the reason, the conscience, the sentiments of these men, were as bootless as to preach to a flock of vultures. Either the guilty neglect of the parents who educated them,—or, rather, who left them to grow up without training or discipline of any kind,—is to be considered as the prime cause of their own degradation and of the misery they bring on others; or the habit, indulged from boyhood, of expecting to inherit the wealth of others, killed in themselves all desire of self-improvement, and prevented the formation of the blessed virtues of self-reliance, self-respect, and independent exertion.

Where these men are shiftless and helpless without being intemperate and dissolute,—the evil, comparatively, is tolerable to the poor wife left to depend on her labor for the bread of her children, as well as for that which feeds the worthless husband. We have seen these miserable husbands pass from stalwart manhood to robust old age, perfectly satisfied with themselves, as vain of their quality of gentlemen and of their privileged exemption from labor, as the peacock that airs his plumage on the housetop and displays his brilliant colors to the admiring sun, while his female is indefatigable in some remote walk of the garden or the forest in purveying for her tender brood,—anxious only that her lordly mate shall not cross her path or persecute their common progeny.

Leave we the despicable tribe of shiftless husbands; they resemble the wretched multitude whom Dante met with outside the walls of Hell, unworthy of the society of either the Blessed or the Damned:

Grasping and Avaricious Husbands

It is a sacred duty for the head of a family to make suitable provision for his household, for the husband to place at his wife’s disposal the fruits of his thrift, as it is her duty to dispense it prudently within the home: it is the bounden obligation of both to lay up for their dear ones and for their own old age. Thus providence and economy are among the first virtues enjoined on parents. We omit all mention here of the duties of hospitality and charity.

Equally opposed to the wise forethought which urges a parent to labor and lay up for his dear ones, and to prudent generosity which should guide himself and his companion in the use of their store,—are greed in acquiring, avarice in retaining, and prodigality in wasting what God gives for such definite and holy purposes.

It is a virtue,—a blessed one too,—to be industrious and indefatigable in providing against the present and the future need; it is no less a virtue to be moderate in using for one’s personal comforts or wants, generous in meeting the necessary demands of family life according to one’s condition, and generous as well in giving hospitality, and in meeting the requirements of religion, charity, and patriotism. There are men who, while they bestow liberally for all these various purposes, what they have labored hard to acquire, are still careful not to leave the home they have either built up themselves or inherited, without abundant means for maintaining its splendor after their own day.

But what shall we say of fathers of families who make of the labor of amassing riches, not a means for the happiness of their families,—but an end? who earn and hold money, not for the purpose of using it for the comfort of their dear ones or their own, but simply for its own sake,—to have it, to own it, to make it grow, and grow, and grow forever,—like a tree bearing golden fruit that no one,—nor themselves, nor others,—may either gather, touch, or taste, in this life or the life to come?

It cannot, in the gold-seeking and worshiping age in which we live, be too strongly insisted on, that money is a means to an end, not the end itself,—a means of making life happy and honorable, of helping others toward usefulness, honor, and happiness; but not in itself an end, so that the possession and the hoarding of money should be for itself alone, without aiming at anything beyond that.

Hence the absurdity and the guilt of so giving one’s self up to making money, that in doing so, one forgets conscience, health, the claims of one’s family, the needs of the poor, and every other generous and useful purpose which money is calculated to promote.

It is not so unfrequent a thing to hear, in this great city of New York, of some wretched creature who died of sheer want in a garret or some filthy corner, deprived of all human aid, of all the comforts of society and religion, of all the consolations of earth and heaven, reputed in life abjectly poor, and most industrious in having others believe so, and yet dying worth thousands!—thousands that will profit nobody, nor the wretched soul gone to its account, and which was not created to make money for money’s sake, nor even the poor of the neighborhood whom not a penny of it shall ever reach, nor the unknown family and relatives whom the miserable hoarder forsook or forgot, in order to indulge this solitary and absorbing passion of adding little to little without cessation.

Meanness, Greed, Cruelty, and Misery

One home we cannot but think of with unalloyed grief, for it touched us nearly. The wife, of gentle blood, uncommon beauty, and goodness greater than her beauty, was wooed and won by a man her equal in birth and almost her equal in age,—a young and brilliant officer high in favor with the government. She brought him a fortune which more than sufficed to support them handsomely, but which was allowed to accumulate till her dying day, while his own yearly income went far beyond the expenses of their household. Seven children were born to them, not one of whom ever inherited any share of the fortune of either parent.

His absorbing passion, almost from the first year of their wedded life, was to accumulate money, fearful,—as he often expressed it to his familiars (friends he had none),—lest his children should some day be left penniless. Unfortunately the marriage settlement gave him the sole management of their joint property; nor did he rest satisfied till his wife had been bullied and persecuted into making over her property to him in his own absolute right.

She was not an extravagant, nor even a worldly woman. She was conscientious, solidly pious, fond of her home and devoted to her children,—a woman whose qualities should have made any husband happy, and could have adorned any station.

He never allowed her to dispose of a single dollar of the revenue of her own property, nor even to regulate the expenses of her household; no, not so much as to purchase what was necessary for the table. He was his own caterer; went daily to market with the first light of morning; and disdained not to haggle with fishwoman and butcher, till he had shamed them to his own terms, buying rarely any but the cheapest fish or the poorest meat.

He half-starved his children, making up in liberal sleep what he refused them in substantial and necessary diet, and he starved their souls as well. For he would not allow them to be educated up to their condition; nor would he permit them to associate with those of their own class,—being unwilling that their raiment should be superior to their spare diet or their scanty schooling.

He would have his wife,—whom he shockingly ill-treated,—dismiss her servants, and attend to the household work as well as the education of her children. But she at length rebelled against a tyranny and a brutality become the more intolerable, that the unmanly husband had taken to solitary tippling after the daily official duties were over, and never went to bed sober.

At length his violence forced her to take refuge with her nearest relative far away. She never recovered from his latest ill-usage. The children, one after another, were driven from their most unhappy home; the father married his cook, and died leaving to her and her children the little he possessed at the time. For by a just retribution of fortune, his accumulated wealth had been vested in ruinous ventures, and was swept beyond his reach, leaving him the most wretched and one of the vilest of men.

The Spendthrift Husband

Of this very numerous class we need only discuss one or two varieties;—the others are so much akin to the intemperate and the debauchee,—that we shall not consider them separately.

There are spendthrifts who are not addicted to the odious vices begotten of sensuality. Their wasteful extravagance has its source in other, higher, and more refined tastes. The reckless indulgence of these tastes, however, works a no less fatal ruin to the family substance and home.

There are husbands, whose sole purpose in life is to make their wealth the means of outshining their neighbors: men troubled with an inordinate amount of vanity, and with very little brains; who are utterly unable to calculate their own resources, and spend without ever stopping to consider how much they are unable to spend.

Many of our readers will recall William Dorritt, Esquire, “the Father of the Marshalsea,” gifted with but two faculties,—the heartless vanity that accepted the services and liberality of strangers as well as the boundless devotion of his own child as the homage due to his own transcendent superiority, and the blind prodigality with which his inherited wealth was squandered for the mere purpose of eclipsing others and asserting his own gentility. Of course, vanity being always mean, this arrogant self-assertion, in the hour of ill fortune will condescend to beg and to borrow, and in the hour of prosperity will basely ignore the friends whose purse and hand were ever the most open; and equally, of course, this purse-proud meanness will make itself most prominent at the very height of good fortune, by tyrannizing over dependants, browbeating all persons of equal or inferior rank, and by cringing like an Oriental slave to superior rank or ability.

These men, even when not afflicted with this morbid vanity, cannot keep out of debt; for they cannot refuse themselves any of the beautiful and costly things which strike their fancy. This is the least odious form of extravagance,—the passion for books, for objects of art, or for other costly hobbies. It tends, none the less, to ruin the happiness and independence of the home, and to imperil its very existence. For, this extravagant and uncontrollable fondness for things which are above one’s means, keeps the husband continually in debt, deprives the wife and children, not only of the comforts and enjoyments belonging to their condition, but frequently of the bare necessaries of life.

Such men are in reality overgrown children, who ought to be kept in perpetual tutelage; who are incapable of managing their own affairs. Their extravagant tastes are but a higher and more refined sensuality, just as ruinous as the drunkard’s proclivities.

The extravagant, however, can be made amenable to reason; for their brain is not habitually crazed with drink and their intellectual powers weakened or obliterated by beastly indulgence. They can understand that indebtedness is slavery; that to take from the most urgent needs of one’s family what is expended on mere intellectual or artistic pleasure is a grievous wrong.