Wealth & Money Quote by Henry Fielding

Fielding turns moral instruction into a social insult, and that is the point. “Rogue” is the obvious charge: wealth without charity isn’t merely ungenerous, it’s predatory, a quiet kind of theft from the social world that made the fortune possible. But he sharpens the blade with “fool,” a word that hits harder in polite society because it attacks the rich man’s self-image: not his wallet, but his judgment.

The slyness sits in “perhaps” and “no difficult matter to prove.” Fielding adopts the pose of the reasonable man, as if he’s offering a modest hypothesis when he’s really laying a trap. If you’re rich and uncharitable, he implies, the evidence will convict you quickly; your life already contains the proof. It’s courtroom language repurposed for etiquette, turning private vice into a public case.

Context matters: Fielding wrote in an 18th-century Britain where new money and old rank were jostling, where charity wasn’t just benevolence but reputation-management and civic glue. He’s not praising saintliness; he’s defending the social bargain that lets inequality persist without constant rebellion. Charity becomes a kind of interest payment on privilege.

The intent, then, is corrective and satirical. Fielding frames charity as enlightened self-interest: refuse it and you aren’t just immoral, you’re strategically incompetent. In his world, the rich man who hoards isn’t a tragic villain; he’s an embarrassment who doesn’t understand what money is for.