The Seattle Star Newspaper, January 21, 1920, Page 10

PAGE 10 THE SEATTLE STAR—WEDNESDAY, JAN, 21, 1920. The Hand of Plenty— or the Hand of Want Which will be yours in old age? Look at YOUR hands— then look at the hands in this picture When your earning power is gone, what will YOUR hands look like? What will they hold? NOW, while you are young and strong and ambitious, is the time to think about this question and to think HARD. War or no war—high prices or low prices—good times or bad— it makes no difference. YOU and you alone are charged with the responsibility of your future. Society expects you to be self-supporting, either as a producer or a home maker. Most of us understand this rule and conform to it. But society expects something MORE. It expects the pro- ducer in the days of his productiveness to accumulate sufficient for his old age. Few of us really understand this; fewer still live up to this law of existence. The great majority of people live to old age. ONLY A FEW out of every hundred have a SINGLE DOLLAR of their own when they die. The others subsist on their relatives or on charity, or on dwindling wages from enfeebled toil. We all know these facts; we know them from childhood. You know what you must face on the shady side of 50; why not stand up manfully and prepare in the days of your earning pow- er? There are many different answers to this question, each col- ored by the personal experience of the individual, by his character and his outlook on life. Some will tell you that it is impossible; others will say it is due to the folly and extravagance of the age; the dissatisfied will declare that wages and salaries are too low. There is sufficient argument to this question to last to infinity. Most of us argue it all our lives—the REALLY SHREWD MAN takes quite a different course. He leaves the arguments to others—and SAVES. His is the hand of plenty in his declining years. We are living in the golden age of the world. There is no real want among us—there is no real want in the whole United States except by the wholly improvident, the physically unfit, ’ the very young and the very old. We live in the richest nation ever known in the history of ¢ivili- zation—a country possessed of a wealth which the citizen of a hundred years ago could not conceive and which you cannot imagine even now. We saw our country driven into a war which it did not want, financing extraordinary demands with ease, equipping an enormous fighting machine, supporting our allies with money, food and munitions, and richer today in every ma- terial and spiritual thing than ever before. But all this will be of less value to YOU than the paper and ink of this page if yours is the hand of want—shriveled, dirty, sup- plicant—in YOUR old age. For every appeal made to you to save, there are hundreds that bid for your earnings. Consider YOUR OWN INTERESTS. Spend wisely, but don’t spend ALL. We all want to make money. A great many methods of doing so are called to our attention in one way or another. All sorts of schemes for getting rich quickly are brought to your notice. You hear of fortunes won almost over night—of stupendous winnings in SPECULATIVE UNDERTAKINGS. But of the 999 who get “stung” to the one who wins, you hear NOTHING. Men who have given their lives to studying these problems are united in saying that there is only one SURE way for the average person to accumulate wealth—and that is by slow, regular, systematic SAVING. This Page Contributed by Prominent Seattle Business Concerns (COPYRIGHT)