Economy, English Versus American
True economy involves personal sacrifice and careful effort to save small amounts.
When Thomas Hughes, author of “Tom Brown at Oxford,” who had experience in American concerns in his endeavor to plant an English colony in Tennessee, was in Boston a few years ago, he was asked, according to the Boston _Post_, why it was that cooperative distribution which had proved so successful in England, had never succeeded in America. “Simply,” he said, “because you Americans do not know what economy is in the sense in which people practise it in England. Many a workingman at home will walk two miles to the cooperative store with his basket on his arm, and do it in his bare feet at that, to save a shilling on his weekly purchase. No American mechanic would do that.”