Recently with all my unexpected car/DMV troubles, I ended up having to pay $800 total in about a week and a half. Because I was not expecting this, I was definitely not prepared. I didn’t have enough money! Soooo, I had to do one of the things I hate the most: ask my dad for money. He offered to help me out a little, but he wouldn’t pay for everything, even though it would leave me extremely hard-pressed for money. He did, however, give me $50 to go out and open a savings account with right away. He said to put a little bit of money in the account every month, so that eventually I should have at least $1,000 saved for “emergency situations” like the one I encountered.
In The Book of Virtues, Abraham Lincoln wrote this letter to his stepbrother, John D. Johnston, who had written Lincoln that he was “broke” and “hard-pressed” on the family farm in Coles County, Illinois, and needed a loan. Lincoln’s offer of a matching grant, as we call it today, was recognition that “this habit of uselessly wasting time, is the whole difficulty,” and that getting into the habit of working was far more important to Johnston than getting a loan.
“Dear Johnston:
Your request for eighty dollars, I do not think it best to comply with now. At the various times where I have helped you a little, you have said to me, “We can get along very well now,” but in a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again. Now this can only happen by some defect in your conduct. What the defect is, I think I know. You are not lazy, and still you are an idler. I doubt whether since I saw you, you have done a good whole day’s work, in any one day. You do not very much dislike to work, and still you do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it.
This habit of uselessly wasting time, is the whole difficulty; it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your children, that you should break this habit. It is more important to them, because they have longer to live, and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it, easier than they can get out after they are in.
You are now in need of some ready money; and what I propose is, that you shall go to work, “tooth and nail,” for somebody who will give you money for it.
Let father and your boys take charge of your things at home- prepare for a crop, and make the crop, and you go to work for the best money wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get. And to secure you a fair reward for your labor, I now promise you that for every dollar you will, between this and the first of May, get for your own labor either in money or in your own indebtedness, I will then give you one other dollar.
By this, if you hire yourself at ten dollars a month, from me you will get ten more, making twenty dollars a month for your work. In this, I do not mean that you shall go off to St. Louis, or the lead mines, or the gold mines, in California, but I mean for you to go at it for the best wages you can get close to home- in Coles County.
Now if you will do this, you will soon be out of debt, and what is better, you will have a habit that will keep you from getting in debt again. But if I should now clear you out, next year you will be just as deep in as ever. You say you would almost give your place in Heaven for $70 or $80. Then you value your place in Heaven very cheaply, for I am sure you can with the offer I make you get the seventy or eighty dollars for four or five months’ work. You say if I furnish you the money you will deed me the land, and if you don’t pay the money back, you will deliver possession-
Nonsense! If you can’t now live with the land, how will you then live without it? You have always been kind to me, and I do not now mean to be unkind to you. On the contrary, if you will but follow my advice, you will find it worth more than eight times eighty dollars to you.
Affectionately,
Your brother
A. Lincoln"
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