If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626), statesman, essayist, and philosopher, repeatedly warned against the moral and political dangers of avarice in early modern England, a period of expanding commerce, court patronage, and conspicuous consumption. The sentiment in this quotation aligns with Bacon’s ethical essays, where he treats wealth as a useful instrument when governed by reason and virtue, but as a corrupting force when it governs the person. Bacon’s own career—rising to Lord Chancellor and later falling amid charges of corruption—made questions of money, power, and self-mastery especially resonant in his public image and in the reception of his moral counsel.

The quotation frames money as morally neutral but psychologically and ethically dangerous: it must be kept in the role of “servant,” a means to human ends, rather than becoming a “master” that dictates choices and character. Bacon’s second sentence sharpens the paradox of possession: the miser believes he owns wealth, yet his life is organized around guarding and accumulating it, so wealth effectively owns him. The point is not an attack on prudent prosperity but on covetousness—an inward bondage where fear, desire, and status-seeking replace freedom of judgment and the capacity to use resources for public good or personal virtue.