Wealth & Money Quote by Charles Farrar Browne

A Victorian-sounding benediction turns, with one last clause, into a deadpan indictment of the very culture it pretends to bless. Charles Farrar Browne (better known for the Artemus Ward persona) stages the sentence like a moral instruction manual: be happy, be prudent, be respectable. Then he slips in the sabotage: "even if we have to borrow the money to do it with". The line doesn’t just joke about debt; it lampoons the performative virtue of thrift in a society already inventing new ways to finance appearances.

The intent is satirical compression. Browne mimics the cadence of civic uplift - the kind of advice you’d hear from pulpit, parlor, or penny press - and exposes its hollowness by showing how easily it accommodates contradiction. "Live within our means" is less a principle than a slogan that can be made to endorse whatever the crowd is already doing. Borrowing becomes the dirty little mechanism that keeps the dream of "responsible" happiness running.

Context matters: mid-19th-century America is industrializing, advertising is accelerating, credit is expanding, and middle-class respectability is turning into a consumer project. Browne’s joke lands because it’s not about one spendthrift; it’s about a social bargain. We want the aura of moderation without the inconvenience of actually moderating.

The subtext is sharp and modern: hypocrisy is often less scandal than accounting trick. A culture can preach restraint while building an economy - and an identity - on installment plans.