Avarice

As there is much difference between avarice and money, since the one desires, the other is desired, so between philosophy and wisdom.

He teaches me to reckon, and lends my fingers to avarice, rather than teach me that these computations have nothing to do with the matter, that a man is not happier whose estate wearies the accountants;

How far will you extend the bounds of your estates?

and as the love of wealth is a passion of wider influence, being often even the primary motive by which ambition itself is awakened, that also demanded constitutional restrictions, at least as forcible, to operate upon the individuals who composed a government.

By the confidence derived from representation, united with the power of a sovereignty in the government over property, avarice is enabled to draw from the people all they can possibly spare.

Yet pecuniary fanaticism or exclusive privileges, can abhor a resort to force, and admire a resort to fraud for the same purpose.

But avarice is a vehement opinion about money, as though it were greatly to be sought, clinging and deeply implanted;

For when money has been coveted, and reason has not at once been applied, like a certain Socratic medicine, to heal that desire, the evil penetrates into the veins and clings in the inward parts, and there arises a disease and sickness, which, when inveterate, cannot be plucked out;

that inhospitality is a vehement opinion that a guest is greatly to be fled, and that clinging and deeply implanted;

let avarice, too, seem of a great mind—it broods over heaps of gold and silver, farms whole estates that bear the names of provinces, and under single overseers holds wider bounds than those the consuls drew by lot;