War & Peace Quote by Samuel Butler

Money isn’t just a tool in Butler’s line; it’s a predator that keeps evolving to match the human animal. Calling it “the last enemy” twists the old biblical cadence (“the last enemy… is death”) into something more modern and more humiliating: we don’t merely fear money’s absence, we organize whole lives around its chase, its shortage, its symbolism. Butler’s phrasing lands because it treats money as an invasive thought-form, not an external object. It’s “always on the brain,” a parasitic refrain that persists as long as our mental machinery is “in reasonable order” - meaning: if you’re lucid, you’re monetized.

The subtext is slyly accusatory. Butler isn’t describing a few greedy people; he’s indicting the basic operating system of society. “While there is flesh” collapses economics into biology: you can’t eat ideals, you can’t rent a room with virtue. The line “money or the want of money” admits both sides of the trap. Having it doesn’t free you from thinking about it; lacking it turns thought into panic. Either way, the mind is conscripted.

Context matters: Butler wrote in the long shadow of Victorian capitalism, when industrial wealth, speculative finance, and class discipline remade “moral character” into a kind of balance sheet. As a poet and satirist of respectable hypocrisy, he understands money as the invisible theology of modern life - the doctrine you obey even when you claim not to believe.