Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, in the midst of a fairly grim autobiography, tells this story. There was a man living near him in one of the D.P. (Displaced Persons) camps after the war who borrowed ten dollars from him, and assured him that he had a package coming from a relative any day and would positively pay him back the next week. At week’s end, he had an excuse for not paying, and the next week, he had an even better one, and so it went on for almost a year.
Finally one day, the man came up to Wiesenthal with a ten dollar bill in his hand and said, “My visa has just come through. I’m leaving for Canada tomorrow. Here’s the ten dollars I owe you.” And Wiesenthal waved him away and said, “No, keep it. For ten dollars, it’s not worth changing my opinion of you.”
Some humor in that but when you think about it, what a bad bargain. The lender not only lost the ten dollars, but also had to carry an unprofitable inventory of resentment. Acquitting the man would have been worth far more to him than the measly ten bucks.