Wealth & Money Quote by William Blake

Blake doesn’t let poverty wear the easy mask of inevitability. The line is a trap for the sentimental reformer and the complacent moralist at once: if hardship automatically produced crime, he argues, then honesty would be statistically impossible. By pointing to “many honest people” who suffer worse and still don’t steal, he refuses a tidy economic determinism. That refusal is the point. Blake is less interested in balancing a ledger of social causes than in exposing the spiritual and psychological machinery that turns deprivation into rationalization.

The sting is in his pivot: “want of money” belongs to “the miser’s passion,” not the thief’s. Blake reclassifies motive. The thief isn’t driven by need but by a hungry relationship to possession itself, a corrupted imagination that confuses money with life, power, or entitlement. “Distress” becomes an alibi, not an origin story. Underneath is Blake’s recurring suspicion that institutions that pretend to diagnose vice often end up excusing it in ways that preserve their own worldview. If thieving is just poverty, the system can stay intact; we can pity and punish without questioning what kind of society trains desire into greed.

Context matters: Blake wrote against an England where enclosure, urban misery, and punitive law made “the poor” both a social problem and a spectacle. His provocation isn’t anti-poor; it’s anti-reductionist. He insists on moral agency while still implying a deeper societal sickness: a culture that worships accumulation breeds both the miser and the thief, twin expressions of the same counterfeit religion of money.