MY OLD MAN was always on the side of the grasshopper in the celebrated case of the grashopper versus the ant.
You know how the ant is suppesed to be a most provident insect, storing up food in Summer against the vicissitudes of the Winter. A lot of other creatures do the same thing but for some reason the ant has always been given the greatest credit.
The grashopper is the one that goes singing blithely across the bright Summer with never a thought in his bean beyond the pleasures of the moment and who finds himself behind the eight-ball when the cold winds do blow. My old man liked to apply the story to the human race.
He used to say that it was a good thing we were not all ants, or money would be tightened up something awful. It would all be hoarded away in the nests of the ants. He said it was the grasshoppers of the human race that keep the wampum in circulation. He always called money wampum. He said it was probably irrelevant to the argument, but that the grasshopper had the most fun, too.
My old man agreed to the general proposition that saving is a fine thing and he often advised us to that end, though he added that it was just as a matter of parental form, the same as he advised us to have no truck with bad habits, and not because he thought it would do any good. He said money in the bank was a most wonderful idea and that the only trouble with it was you could not spend the money and have it, too.
He said that saving was entirely a matter of instinct rather than of teaching or advice and that you either had that instinct or did not have it-that in short you were either an ant or a grasshopper and he gave it as his opinion that from the shape of my head I was a grasshopper. I need scarcely add that his estimate turned out to be 100 per cent correct.
He had only one quarrel with those who had the saving instinct, or the ants. He said he could readily understand that they got just as much pleasure out of piling one dollar on top of another as the grasshopper got out of rolling similar dollars around the landscape. His quarrel was that the ants were inclined to take a superior attitude toward the grasshoppers when Winter caught up with the latter.
My old man said that a man who never drank was entitled to no credit for not drinking and on the same line of reasoning a man who never spent was entitled to no credit for not spending. He held that it required more fortitude to spend than it did to save because a spender has to be impervious to that mental pain that a saver feels in letting go of a dollar.
He said that a fellow who might be in doubt about his status as an ant or a grasshopper could always place himself early in life by analyzing his emotions after spending a gob of wampum, especially if he could not afford it. If his feeling was one of deep regret, my old man said he ought to start looking for a hill, and never mind what anybody ever said afterwards about him being close, or even a miser.
He said a fellow like that was not gaited to be a spender and what was the use of him going through life fighting his normal instinct and suffering mental anguish all the time? He said a natural born spender could have no mental sensation over his spending other than a lingering thrill.
I think my old man would have been definitely on the side of the Barbara Huttons of today. Barbara Hutton, as you are perhaps aware, is the heiress to the five-and-ten millions who has been criticized for her lavish expenditures on this and that, including husbands, but my old man would probably have given her his hearty applause.
There was a man out in our old home town who was a mighty successful business man, but who lived a life bordering on penury while amassing a considerable fortune. On his death, this fortune pased to a son, who immediately started out on a spending splurge, which developed some criticism of him around town.
My old man stood up for him as a grasshopper of merit. He said, suppose the boy had done like his father and gone on hoarding up more wampum, what good would that have done the community? He said the same people who were criticizing the son for spending had knocked the father as an old skinflint and a tightwad who had made his money out of the town and never given any of it back and here the son was spreading it everywhere and still there was complaint.
I sometimes wonder how my old man would have felt about the Administration down in Washington, the greatest spenders of all time. I am inclined to think he would have liked it, especially because it is about the first time the grasshoppers have ever been able to take anything off the ants.