big cities, where people could procure money on collateral and without interest, or perhaps one could get two percent per year to provide for administrative costs. The lender-usurers are known to be very harmful to the public, and thus quite a few losses would be avoided if
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one could bypass their services. It would thus be very desirable for pious souls and kindly hearts to think seriously about effecting the auspicious foundations of which we speak.
Aside from the general convenience of free and easy loans for the people, I regard it as one of the advantages of these establishments that they would be so many known offices where one could with confidence deposit sums that one is not always in a position to place usefully, and that one sometimes finds awkward. How many misers are there who, fearing for the future, don’t dare part with their money, and who, despite their precautions, always have to fear theft, fire, pillage, &c.? How many workers, how many domestics and other isolated people are there who, having saved a small sum—ten pistoles (a hundred crowns, more or less)—do not in fact know what to do, and are with reason apprehensive about dissipating or losing it? I thus find it advantageous in all these cases to be able to deposit any sum whatsoever with certainty, and to be free to withdraw it at will. Countless sums, small and large, that today remain inactive would thereby be made to circulate throughout the public. On the other hand, the individual depositors would avoid many anxieties and swindles; moreover, they would be less liable to lend their money unsuitably or spend it foolishly. Thus, each person would recover his funds or his savings if his business was in order, and most workers and domestics would become more orderly and economizing.
This habit of economy in the smallest matters is more important to the general good than people think, and on this count we are far behind neighboring nations, which are almost all more accustomed than we are to saving and to the economizing mentality. Here we see an item that is distinctive of the English and that deserves to be reported. We are assured that in most of their big houses, there is what they call a saving-man14—that is, a careful and thrifty domestic who is on constant alert that nothing is out of place, nothing gets lost or wasted. His sole job is to wander around at all hours through the nooks and crannies of a big house, from the cellar to the attic, in the courtyards, stables, gardens, and other appendages, to put back in its place everything he finds displaced, and to bring into its pantry everything he encounters that is scattered and abandoned—all sorts of used metal,
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the ends of boards and other wood, rope, leather, candles, all sorts of rags, furniture, utensils, tools, &c.
Aside from countless small things—each of little value, though together amounting to something and being saved from loss by this economizing—he just as often saves things of value, which the masters, domestics, or workers leave out of place by forgetfulness or by whatever other reason it may be. His vigilance stirs the attentiveness of the others, and his position makes him the antagonist of mischief and the repairer of negligence.
I already indicated above that it is a question here of public savings, and that I would be touching hardly at all on the conduct of private individuals. Many people, however, have only countered me with the supposed disadvantages of totally abolishing our luxury, a charge which does not attack my thesis and which therefore goes awry. Nonetheless I will attempt to respond to the objection as if I found that it had some solid basis.
If, it is said, so many projects of reform and perfection were followed, such that on the one hand, useless expenses were abolished, and on the other, people dedicated themselves on all sides to fruitful enterprises—in a word, such that economy became fashionable among the French—one would indeed soon see our opulence noticeably increase. But what would be done with so much accumulated wealth? Moreover, most subjects, less employed in the arts of splendor, would scarcely have a share in such opulence and would no doubt languish in the midst of the general abundance.
It is easy to respond to this difficulty. If economic savings took root among us and we gave more attention to the necessities and less to superfluities, I agree that there would indeed be fewer frivolous and misplaced expenses, but there would also be many more reasonable and virtuous ones. The rich and the great, being less indebted, would be more likely to pay off their creditors. Moreover, being more powerful and more flush with cash, they would find it easier to marry off their children. Instead of placing one in marriage, they would place two, and instead of two, they would place four, so that fewer reversals of fortune and extinctions of family lines would be seen. We would pay less attention to splendor, caprice, and vanity, but more to justice, beneficence, and true glory. In a word, many fewer subjects would be employed in sterile arts, arts of amusement and frivolity, but many more in worthwhile and necessary arts. At that point, if
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there were fewer artisans of luxury and pleasure, fewer useless domestics at loose ends, there would in recompense be more cultivators and other precious instruments of true wealth.
It has been demonstrated, to whoever reflects on it, that subjects’ differences in occupation produce national opulence or scarcity—in a word, what is good or bad for society. It is perfectly well known that if someone can keep a man on a wage basis, it will be more advantageous to him to have a good gardener than to maintain an ornamental domestic. Some jobs, then, are infinitely more useful than others. And if most men were employed more intelligently and usefully, the nation would be more powerful, and individuals more comfortable.
Moreover, since the habitual practice of savings would produce, at least among the rich, a superabundance of goods that are almost never seen here, a noticeable relief for the people would ensue, in that the lower classes would then feel less anxiety and would be less crushed by the great. Let the wolf cease to be hungry and he will no longer ravage the sheepfolds.
Be that as it may, the proposals and actions articulated above would seem more attractive to us if bad habit, ignorance, and flabbiness had not made us indifferent to the advantages of savings, and especially if such a precious habit had not been confused, more often than not, with avarice—an error we find exemplified in the mostly unfavorable judgment in our own time toward a virtuous and disinterested citizen, the late M. Godinot, canon of Rheims.
A passionate lover of agriculture, he dedicated all the leisure left over from his official duties to the study of natural science and rural pastimes. He was especially fond of perfecting the cultivation of vines, and even more the making of wines, and he soon found the art of making them so superior and so perfect that he later furnished them to all the potentates of Europe.15 That gave him the means to accumulate, in the course of a long life, prodigious sums of money. This Christian philosopher meditated for a long time over the noblest and worthiest use of his beneficence.
Moreover, he lived in the greatest simplicity, in the faithful and constant practice of visible savings, which even seemed excessive. Thus, common
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minds, who judge only by appearances, and who did not understand his grand designs, regarded him for many years with merely a sort of contempt. And they continued on in the same vein until, educated and completely won over by the useful establishments and constructions by which he decorated the city of Rheims, and especially by the immense projects he undertook at his own expense to bring abundant and salubrious water there which had been lacking before, they—along with the rest of France—finally lavished him with the praise and admiration they could no longer refuse to his generous patriotism.16
Such a splendid model will doubtless touch the hearts of Frenchmen, encouraged as well by the example of many societies established in England, Scotland, and Ireland—societies concerned solely with economizing views, which annually make substantial gifts out of their own funds to husbandmen and
