Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.

“Of Seditions and Troubles” tells rulers how to prevent rebellion. Among the remedies is removing its “matter”, which Bacon identifies as “much poverty and much discontentment”. A nation grows rich by commodities, manufacture and carriage: “if these three wheels go, wealth will flow as in a spring tide.” But wealth must not stay where it lands: “good policy is to be used that the treasure and moneys in a state be not gathered into few hands. For otherwise a state may have a great stock, and yet starve.” Then comes the line, in which muck means manure: heaped up it is useless, spread over the fields it feeds them.

The essay belongs to the enlarged edition of the Essays that Bacon published in 1625, a year before his death. He had been Lord Chancellor of England until his fall in 1621, when he admitted taking gifts from litigants, and spent his last years writing.

The homely comparison still serves in debates on inequality and philanthropy: money does good only when it circulates.

Essays, “Of Seditions and Troubles”, 1625

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