When a fellow says it hain't the money but the principle o' the thing, it's th' money.

Frank McKinney “Kin” Hubbard (1868–1930) was an Indiana newspaper humorist best known for his homespun, dialect-inflected aphorisms and for the comic strip character Abe Martin. The line reflects Hubbard’s recurring theme: puncturing public pretenses with blunt common sense. In the early 20th-century Midwestern small-town milieu he wrote about, disputes were often framed as matters of “principle” or honor, even when the real stake was financial. Hubbard’s dialect spelling (“hain’t,” “o’,” “th’”) is typical of his persona-driven humor, presenting the observation as folk wisdom rather than formal moralizing.

The quip exposes a familiar rationalization: people claim they are motivated by lofty principle to avoid seeming greedy, but their persistence usually tracks the money involved. Hubbard’s humor works by collapsing the gap between stated motives and actual incentives, suggesting that “principle” is often a socially acceptable mask for self-interest. The dialect voice sharpens the effect—plainspoken and skeptical—implying that ordinary experience reliably detects hypocrisy. As an aphorism, it also comments on rhetoric in conflict: when someone insists the issue is not monetary, that insistence itself can be evidence that money is central.