That curious, shrewd, underlying instinct, common to all ages, which takes
shape in proverbs recognized this long ago. Who knows when it was first
said of a man laying up money, "He lays by for a rainy day"? How close
the parallel is between the man who, having spent on each day's living the
whole of each day's income, finds himself helpless in an emergency of
sickness whose expenses he has no money to meet, and the man who, having
no intellectual resources, no self-reliant habit of occupation, finds
himself shut up in the house idle and wretched for a rainy day. I confess
that on rainy mornings in country houses, among well-dressed and so-called
intelligent and Christian people, I have been seized with stronger
disgusts and despairs about the capacity and worth of the average human
creature, than I have ever felt in the worst haunts of ignorant
wickedness.
"What is there to do to-day?" is the question they ask. I know they are
about to ask it before they speak. I have seen it in their listless and
disconcerted eyes at breakfast.
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