Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[190] moment to explain to her how a bank is carried on, or a joint-stock company organized. Years ago I read an admirable address by a Boston merchant, then eminent, in which he strongly urged the training of women in business habits, and the value to a husband of a wife who could understand his affairs. When I reminded his daughter the other day of this address of forty years ago, she said, with regret, “I wish he had given that instruction in his own family, but he never did.”

The mysteries of the Stock Exchange may not be an essential study, but the general principles which govern investment and income are within the reach of all. The commonplaces of this knowledge-as, that something cannot usually be obtained for nothing — that a low and certain income is better than one dangerously high — that people cannot afford to play a game they do not understand with opponents who know every move of it — that the investment of even a small property should be made in a variety of directions, so as not to have all one's eggs in one basket, as the saying is-these things are not so hard to learn. If those who yearn for a tempting speculation could once comprehend that when you lend a man $1000 at exorbitant interest, he can easily pay you that interest for a year or two out of your own money, if he can then be allowed to abscond or go into bankruptcy with the rest of it, then it