tedly clever and prudent about money matters. But
when he comes to deal with immensely more important matters such as
life, health, and joy, he often needs a guardian. He has not yet
grasped the obvious truth that a man's fund of vitality ought to be
administered upon at least as sound a business basis as his fund of
dollars. The principal should not be broken into for living expenses
during a term of at least ninety-nine years. (Metchnikoff says that
this term is one hundred and twenty or so if you drink enough of the
Bulgarian bacillus.) And one should not be content with anything short
of a substantial rate of interest.

In one respect this life-business is a simpler thing to manage than
the dollar-business. For, in the former, if the interest comes in
regularly and unimpaired, you may know that the principal is safe,
while in the dollar-business they may be paying your interest out of
your principal, and you none the wiser until the crash. But here the
difference ceases. For if little or no vital interest comes in, your
generous scale of living is pinched. You may defer the catastrophe a
little by borrowing short-time loans at a ruinous rate from usurious
stimulants, giving many pounds of flesh as security. But soon Shylock
forecloses and you are forced to move with your sufferings to the
slums and ten-cent lodging-houses of Life. Moreover, you must face a
brutal dispossession from even the poor flat or dormitory cot you
there occupy--out amid the snows and blasts--

"Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form"

there to pay slack life's "arrears of pain, darkness, and cold."

The reason why every day is a joy to the normal child is that he fell
heir at birth to a fortune of vitality and has not yet had time to
squander all his substance in riotous or thoughtless living, or to
overdraw his account in the Bank of Heaven on Earth. Every one of his
days is a joy--that is, except in so far as his elders have impressed
their tired standards of behavior too masterfully upon him. "Happy as
a child"--the commonness of the phrase is in itself a commentary. In
order to remain as happy as this for a century or so, all that a child
has to do is to invest his vitality on sound business principles, and
never overdraw or borrow. I shall not here go into the myriad details
of just how to invest and administer one's vitality. For there is no
dearth of wise books and physicians and "Masters of the Inn,"
competent to mar