A good deal of surreptitious finger-licking and fattening would be prevented if this truth were clearly understood, that "Office without pay [or with inadequate pay] makes thieves" (German).[740] "He cannot keep a good course who serves without reward" (Italian).[741]
A man gets little thanks for losing his own.
An excuse for taking the perquisites of office, however extortionate they may be.
It is the clerk that makes the justice.
The magistrate would often be wrong in his law if he were not kept right by the clerk. "The blood of the soldier makes the captain great" (Italian).[742]
For faut o' wise men fules sit on binks [benches].—Scotch.
"For want of good men they made my father alcalde" (Spanish).[743] We do not always see the right man in the right place.
Never deal with the man when you can deal with the master.
"It is better to have to do with God than with his saints"[744] is a French proverb, which Voltaire has fitted with a droll story. A king of Spain, he tells us, had promised to bestow relief upon the people of the country round Burgos, who had been ruined by war. They flocked to the palace, but the doorkeepers would not let them in except on condition of having part of what they should get. Having consented to this, the countrymen entered the royal hall, where their leader knelt at the monarch's feet and said, "I beseech your Royal Highness to command that every man of us here shall receive a hundred lashes." "An odd petition truly!" said the king. "Why do you ask for such a thing?" "Because," said the peasant, "your people insist on having the half of whatever you give us."
M. Quitard believes that the saints referred to in the French proverb are the "frost" or "vintage saints,"[745] so called because their festivals, which occur in April, are noted in the popular calendar as days on which frost is injurious to the young green crops and to vines. The husbandmen, whose fields and vineyards were injured by the inclemency of the weather, used to hold these saints responsible for the damage they ought to have prevented, and the reproaches addressed to them might very naturally take the form perpetuated in the proverb. This is the more probable as it is recorded in the ecclesiastical annals of Cahors and Rhodez that the angry agriculturists were in the habit of flogging the images of the frost saints, defacing their pictures, and otherwise maltreating them. Rabelais asserts, with mock gravity, that, in order to put an end to these scandalous irregularities, a bishop of Auxerre proposed to transfer the festivals of the frost saints to the dog days, and make the month of August change place with April.