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"In three days' time our Godefroid was comfortable. His increase of income exactly supplied his superfluities; his material happiness was complete. Now for happiness as a mental condition.
I refer you to the accompanying report of the Secretary for information in relation to the Navy of the United States. While every effort has been and will continue to be made to retrench all superfluities and lop off all excrescences which from time to time may have grown up, yet it has not been regarded as wise or prudent to recommend any material change in the annual appropriations.
In Pennsylvania, as it discouraged useless expense in foreign superfluities, some thought it had its share of influence in producing that growing plenty of money which was observable for several years after its publication. Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin, Part II, Works Edit. 1833, vol. ii. pp. 146-148.
And it does not go far to lessen their doubts to find that the cost which they pay is commonly turned to no more urgent or useful purpose than a conspicuously wasteful consumption of superfluities by the captains of sabotage and their domestic establishments.
Did she love George or was it all delusion, and was he less to her than mere superfluities, the fringe of life? She did love him, in spite of any passing disloyalty of thought. She felt his sterling worth and goodness, even his weaknesses had something lovable in them for her. And he had been planning, spending, working all this time to give her pleasure, and this was his reward!
In the present day, the busy retailer of other people's knowledge which he has spoiled in the handling, the restless guesser and commentator, the importunate hawker of undesirable superfluities, the everlasting word-compeller who rises early in the morning to praise what the world has already glorified, or makes himself haggard at night in writing out his dissent from what nobody ever believed, is not simply "gratis anhelans, multa agendo nihil agens" he is an obstruction.
"Hullo, Wing! didn't mean to disturb your siesta, Drummond here?" says the commander in his off-hand way, and at sound of the well-known voice Drummond, too, is on his feet in a twinkling. "Seen the papers that came in to-day?" queries the colonel, obliterating from his sentences all verbal superfluities. "Not yet, sir; any news?" "Hell to pay in Chicago, so far as heard from.
I have seen a degree of sense in the modest arrangement of one homely Belgian household, that might put to shame the elegance, the superfluities, the luxuries, the strained refinements of a hundred genteel English mansions. In Belgium, provided you can make money, you may save it; this is scarcely possible in England; ostentation there lavishes in a month what industry has earned in a year.
Everything showed thrift, economy, a practical intelligence and a Spartan disregard for personal comfort. The camp was as devoid of luxuries and superfluities as an Indian village. And on a hillside where the afternoon sun lay longest there was a sunken grave enclosed in wire. Here Mormon Joe was turning to dust, unavenged, forgotten nearly, by all save a handful.
The financial experience was described in 1786 by Henry Pendleton, a judge on the South Carolina bench, in words which doubtless would have been similarly justified in various other states: "No sooner had we recovered and restored the country to peace and order than a rage for running into debt became epidemical.... A happy speculation was almost every man's object and pursuit.... What a load of debt was in a short time contracted in the purchase of British superfluities, and of lands and slaves for which no price was too high if credit for the purchase was to be obtained!... How small a pittance of the produce of the years 1783, '4, '5, altho' amounting to upwards of 400,000 sterling a year on an average, hath been applied toward lessening old burdens!... What then was the consequence?
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