Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast.

Today's reading was edited and adapted from On the Threshold by Theodore Thornton Munger, published in 1908.

There was a time when Americans were considered a thrifty people. However, that time has long since

passed, which seems entirely natural, as thrift is more apt to be a phase than a characteristic

of the life of a nation, a habit more than a principle. Thrift pertains to details.

It is both our glory and our fault that today we are impatient of details. Our courage

prompts to risks. Our large-mindedness invites to great undertakings. Both somewhat adverse

to thrift, because great undertakings are for the few, while thrift is for all. Large

enterprises make the few rich, but the majority prosper only through the carefulness and detail of thrift.

I begin by insisting on the importance of having money.

Speculate and preach about it as we will.

The main factor in civilized society is money.

As the universe of planets need some common force-like gravitation to hold them to their place,

so society requires some dominating passion or purpose to hold its members in mutual

alliance, money supplies this end.

Without some such general moving force, society would be chaotic.

People could not work together, could achieve no common results, could have

no common standards of virtue and achievement. The famous English novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton

once said, never treat money affairs with levity.

Money is character.

And indeed character, for the most part, is determined by one's relationship to money.

Find out how one gets, saves, spends, gives, lends, borrows, and bequeaths money, and you have the character

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