If Swift constitutionally differed from other men, we have some explanation of his strange conduct. But we must take into account other circumstances. Swift had very obvious motives for not marrying. In the first place, he gradually became almost a monomaniac upon the question of money. His hatred of wasting a penny unnecessarily began at Trinity College, and is prominent in all his letters and journals. It coloured even his politics, for a conviction that the nation was hopelessly ruined is one of his strongest prejudices. He kept accounts down to halfpence, and rejoices at every saving of a shilling. The passion was not the vulgar desire for wealth of the ordinary miser. It sprang from the conviction stored up in all his aspirations that money meant independence. "Wealth," he says, "is liberty; and liberty is a blessing fittest for a philosopher--and Gay is a slave just by two thousand pounds too little."[54] Gay was a duchess's lapdog: Swift, with all his troubles, at least a free man. Like all Swift's prejudices, this became a fixed idea which was always gathering strength. He did not love money for its own sake. He was even magnificent in his generosity. He scorned to receive money for his writings; he abandoned the profit to his printers in compensation for the risks they ran, or gave it to his friends. His charity was splendid relatively to his means. In later years he lived on a third of his income, gave away a third, and saved the remaining third for his posthumous charity,[55]--and posthumous charity which involves present saving is charity of the most unquestionable kind. His principle was that by reducing his expenditure to the lowest possible point, he secured his independence and could then make a generous use of the remainder. Until he had received his deanery, however, he could only make both ends meet. Marriage would therefore have meant poverty, probably dependence, and the complete sacrifice of his ambition.