Wealth & Money Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s joke lands like a barbed compliment to sobriety: the drunkard isn’t just stingy, he’s ideologically offended by responsible living. The line flips the usual moral hierarchy. Charity is typically framed as a virtue withheld by vice; here, vice imagines itself as the guardian of purity, refusing to “waste” money on the scandal of self-improvement. The humor comes from the drunkard’s warped accounting, where food, clothing, and education register as indulgences as suspect as drink.

The intent is satiric, but not merely at the drunkard’s expense. Butler is needling the way people rationalize selfishness by inventing a principled objection to the very outcomes society claims to want. The subtext is that moral posturing is elastic: we can always find a story that makes our appetites sound like ethics and other people’s needs sound like corruption. “They would only eat it” is especially sharp because it treats basic survival as frivolous consumption, a linguistic trick that makes deprivation seem virtuous and care seem wasteful.

Context matters: Butler wrote in a Victorian world that publicly prized respectability while privately running on hypocrisy, class anxiety, and suspicion of the poor. His drunkard echoes a familiar Victorian stereotype (the feckless, self-defeating debtor) while also caricaturing a more respectable voice: the taxpayer or moralist who balks at relief because the recipients might use it to become less controllable - better fed, better dressed, better educated. The laugh is the door Butler uses to walk you into an ugly recognition: sometimes the real addiction is to keeping other people down.