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But some perhaps may plead on their behalf, that these men keep and hoard up their wealth for their children and heirs,—to whom they part with nothing whilst they are alive; but, like those mice that live in mines and pick up and eat the golden sands and ore, you cannot come by any of that gold, till you anatomize them to find it after they are dead. But to what end, I pray, would they leave such a deal of money and a great estate to their children and heirs? That they forsooth may preserve it also for others, and those others in like manner shall hand it down to their children (just like those earthen pipes the potters make for a water-course, which retain none of the water themselves, but one pipe only conveys it to the next), till some informing false accuser or tyrant appears and cuts off, this keeper in trust, and when his breath is stopped, derives and diverts the course of his wealth into another channel; or, as they say, till some one that is the most wicked of the race devours and consumes all that those who went before him had preserved. For not only, as Euripides says, Children from slaves derived and baser blood Prove prodigal and lewd, none come to good; but it is as true of the children of the parsimonious; as Diogenes wittily abused this sort of men, when he said that it was better to be a certain Megarian’s ram than his son. For, under the pretence of training them up and instructing them, they undo and pervert them, implanting in them their own love of money and meanness of spirit, and erecting as it were a fortress for the securing their inheritance in the minds of their heirs.
