Europeans frequently and curiously remark upon the American's prodigality of ready money. The small change which they part with so reluctantly the American flings about with a fine mediæval profusion. The manner of life of the average well-to-do person in this country permits of it. The average man who earns ten or twenty thousand a year invests none of it. He installs his family in a rented house in the city in winter. Several servants are kept; the children are sent to expensive schools. All the family dress well, eat rich food, and indulge in costly amusements. In summer they either travel abroad, live in a hotel at a watering place, or rent again. The man's whole income is at his disposal to spend every year. None of it is deducted to be safely stored in property. When his daughters marry he expects their husbands to be solely responsible for their future, and if they do not succeed in marrying wealth, why so much the worse for them. When his sons begin their career he looks to them to be self-supporting almost from the first, and not to undertake the responsibilities of a family until they are able to bear such a burden without aid from him. He cannot assist them without materially altering his own scale of living, which he is naturally loath to do. At his death the income generally ceases in large part, and his widow, and such children as may still be unplaced in life, are obliged to relinquish the rented houses and the way of life to which they have been used.
To a Frenchman such an existence would seem as uncertain and disturbing as is generally supposed to be that of a person who has built upon the crust of a volcano. He could not contemplate with equanimity the thought of chaos overtaking the ordered existence of his family upon his demise. _Après nous le deluge_ seems to him the insouciance of a maniac, or of a monster of selfishness. Daily expenditure is regulated within a limit which permits of a constant investment of a margin. When his daughter marries he insures in her carefully guarded dower that she shall continue her existence on somewhat the same scale to which she has been accustomed, and, in case of premature widowhood or accident of fortune, she and her children shall not be called upon to face the desperate strait of absolute pennilessness. He may deny her in her girlhood many of the indulgences common to her American prototype, but he denies himself at the same time in saving to insure the security and comfort of her future. The French father would think it terrible that a tenderly nurtured daughter should be suddenly thrust into abject dependence upon a husband who may possibly abuse the power given him by that circumstance, nor would he be more satisfied to think that she should, during her first years of married life, while still young and encountering the strain of motherhood, be called upon to face narrow means and a perilously uncertain financial condition.