"What maintains one vice would bring up two children." "Many littles make a mickle." "Fools make feasts and wise men eat them." "It is foolish to lay out money in a purchase of repentance." "Silks and satins, scarlet and velvets put out the kitchen fire." "When the well is dry, they know the worth of water." "Pride breakfasted with Plenty, dined with Poverty, and supped with Infamy."[101] What Franklin has depicted with greatest force and eloquence, is the humiliation attached to debts, a sad consequence of the want of economy. There is a kind of pride which is not that of Rome and Sparta, nor of the courts and the great, but which has not the less its price. "He that goes a borrowing, goes a sorrowing. Alas! think well what you do when you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty. If you cannot pay at the time, you will be ashamed to see your creditor; you will be in fear when you speak to him; you will make poor, pitiful, sneaking excuses, and by degrees come to lose your veracity, and sink into base, downright lying. _For lying rides upon Debt's back._ A free-born man ought not to be afraid to see or speak to any man living. But poverty often deprives a man of all spirit and virtue. _It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright._" We should then avoid so to subject ourselves to material things as not to dare make use of them, which is avarice; or to spend them foolishly and thus render ourselves dependent upon men, which is prodigality. Economy lies between the two, and it is one of the virtues upon which Aristotle has most successfully established his theory of the golden mean. Kant, however, does not agree with him on this point. "For," says he, "if economy is a just medium between two extremes, then should we, in going from one vice to the opposite vice, have to pass through virtue: the latter then would be nothing more than a lesser vice." According to Kant, it is not the _measure_ but the _principle_ which may serve to distinguish a vice from a virtue: the one is distinguished from the other not quantitatively, but specifically. The two vices, extremes themselves, prodigality and avarice, namely, are opposed to each other, not only in degree, but in kind. What is prodigality? "It is," says Kant, "to procure means of livelihood with a view to the enjoyment only." What is avarice? "To acquire and preserve these means in view of possession only, interdicting one's self the enjoyment thereof." These two qualities, it is seen, do not only differ from each other in the more or the less, but in their very nature. There would remain next to ask, what is the quality of economy, and that is just what Kant does not tell us. In default of it, it might be formulated thus: "to acquire and preserve the means of livelihood, not for the sake of possession or enjoyment, but for present or future need." Only there remains still the difficulty of distinguishing need from enjoyment.