standard, and who is put off with this elastic virtuoso jargon. Lord Shaftesbury is doubtless a polished gentleman, but when he gives us his canons of criticism in place of a moral will, we feel that he is a rather poor substitute for St. Paul or Marcus Aurelius. Shaftesbury anticipated and endeavoured to answer this objection. He declared that political maxims, drawn from considering the balance of power, were as 'evident as those in mathematics;' and inferred that moral maxims, founded on a theory as to the proper balance of the passions, would be equally capable of rigid demonstration. The harmony of which he spoke had an objective reality. The moral sense required cultivation to catch the divine concords which run through creation; but the judgment of all cultivated observers would ultimately be the same. If a writer on music were to say that the rule of harmony was caprice, he would be talking nonsense. 'For harmony is harmony by nature, let men judge ever so ridiculously of music.' Symmetry and proportion are equally founded in nature, 'let men's fancy prove ever so barbarous, or their fashions ever so Gothic in their architecture, sculpture, or whatever other designing art. 'Tis the same case where life and manners are concerned. Virtue has the same fixed standard. The same numbers, harmony, and proportion will have place in morals; and are discoverable in the characters and affections of mankind, in which are laid the just foundations of an art and science, superior to every other of human practice and comprehension.' Shaftesbury thus vindicates his claim to be a 'realist' in his theism and his morality. Virtue is a reality, and can be discovered by all who will go through the same process of self-culture. And yet one would like to have a rule rather more easy of application than this vague analogy of music. With thy harmony, one might say, thou beginnest to be a bore to us?

2

34. This pedantic fine gentleman, whose delicacy placidly ignores the very existence of vice and misery, who finds in the cultivated taste of a virtuoso sufficient guidance and consolation through all the weary perplexities of the world, might have some real stuff in him in spite of his pedantry; but he was ill qualified to impress shrewd men of the world, or the philosophical school, which refuses to sink hard facts 2 'Soliloquy,' part iii. sec. 3.

Wit and Humour,' part iii. sec. I.

in obedience to fine-spun theories. In Germany, where sentimentalism is more congenial to the national temperament, he found a warmer reception than amongst his own countrymen. In England, the contempt for flimsy speculation, which often leads to the rejection of much that is valuable because it is not palpable and definite, brought Shaftesbury into unmerited neglect. The first critic who laid a coarse hand on his pretentious philosophy was Mandeville.

35. Bernard de Mandeville published the 'Fable of the Bees' in 1723. It consists of a doggrel poem, setting forth how a hive of bees were thriving and vicious, and how, on their sudden reformation, their prosperity departed with their vice. A comment follows, expounding his theory in detail. In subsequent editions there were added an ‘Essay on Charity and Charity Schools,' a 'Search into the Nature of Society,' and a series of dialogues upon the Fable. The 'Fable of the Bees' was presented as a nuisance by the Grand Jury of Middlesex. Mandeville became a byword with all the respectable authors of the day; and his book was attacked as a kind of pot-house edition of the arch-enemy Hobbes. Berkeley, Law, Hutcheson, Warburton, and Brown may be named amongst his most eminent opponents. To say the truth, the indignation thus excited was not unnatural. Mandeville is said to have been in the habit of frequenting coffee-houses, and amusing his patrons by ribald conversation. The tone of his writing harmonises with this account of his personal habits. He is a cynical and prurient writer, who seems to shrink from no jest, however scurrilous, and from no paradox, however grotesque, which is calculated to serve the purpose, which he avows in his preface to be his sole purpose, of diverting his readers-readers, it may be added, not very scrupulous in their tastes. Yet a vein of shrewd sense runs through his book, and redeems it from anything like contempt. Nay, there are occasional remarks which show great philosophical acuteness. A hearty contempt for the various humbugs of this world is not in itself a bad thing. When a man includes

1 See some remarks on this in Spicker's Shaftesbury.'

* The poem itself was first published in 1714. It did not excite much attention until republished with comments in 1723.

amongst the humbugs everything that passes with others for virtue and purity, it is repulsive; though even in such a case we may half forgive a writer like Swift, whose bitterness shows that he has not parted with his illusions without a cruel pang. Mandeville shares Swift's contempt for the human race; but his contempt, instead of urging him to the borders of madness, merely finds vent in a horse-laugh. He despises himself as well as his neighbours, and is content to be despicable. He is a scoffer, not a misanthrope. You are all Yahoos, he seems to say, and I am a Yahoo ; and solet us eat, drink, and be merry.

36. His view of this world is, therefore, the obverse of Shaftesbury's, of whom he speaks with bitter ridicule. Two systems,' he says, 'cannot be more opposite than his lordship's and mine.'1 'The hunting after this pulchrum et honestum'-Shaftesbury's favourite expression-' is not much better than a wild-goose chase ;'2 and, if we come to facts, 'there is not a quarter of the wisdom, solid knowledge, or intrinsic worth in the world that men talk of and compliment one another with; and of virtue and religion there is not an hundredth part in reality of what there is in appearThis is his constant tone. Mandeville speaks in the favourite character of the man of the world, whose experience has shown him that statesmen are fools, and churchmen hypocrites, and that all the beautiful varnish of flimsy philosophy with which we deceive each other is unable to hide from him the vileness of the materials over which it forms a superficial film. He will not be beguiled from looking at the seamy side of things. Man is corrupt from his head to his foot, as theologians truly tell us; but the heaven which they throw in as a consolation is a mere delusion-a cheat invented to reconcile us to ourselves. Tell your fine stories to devotees or schoolgirls, he seems to say, but don't try to pass them off upon me, who have seen men and cities, and not taken my notions from books.

37. The particular paradox which gave the book its chief notoriety is summed up in the alternative title, ' Private Vices, Public Benefits.' The fallacy which lies at the bottom of his

1 Mandeville's 'Fable of the Bees,' p. 205.

2 Ib. p. 210.

s Ib. p. 508.

1

argument is sufficiently transparent, though it puzzled many able men at the time, and frequently reappears at the present day in slightly altered forms. The doctrine that consumption. instead of saving is beneficial to labourers has a permanent popularity. Mandeville puts it in the most extravagant shape. It is,' he declares, 'the sensual courtier that sets no limit to his luxury; the fickle strumpet that invents new fashions every week; the haughty duchess, that in equipage, entertainment, and all her behaviour, would imitate a princess; the profuse rake and lavish heir, that scatter about their money without wit or judgment, buy everything they see, and either destroy or give it away the next day; the covetous and perjured villain that squeezed an immense treasure from the tears of widows and orphans, and left the prodigals the money to spend '. . . it is of these that we are in need to set all varieties of labour to work, and to procure an honest livelihood to the vast numbers of working poor that are required to make a large society.' He pronounces the Reformation to have been scarcely more efficacious in promoting prosperity 'than the silly and capricious invention of hoop'd petticoats.' 'Religion,' he adds, 'is one thing and trade is another. He that gives most trouble to thousands of his neighbours, and invents the most operose manufactures, is, right or wrong, the greatest friend to society.' Going still further, he thinks that even the destruction of capital may be useful. The fire of London was a great calamity, but if the carpenters, bricklayers, smiths,' and others set at work 'were to vote against those who lost by the fire, the rejoicings would equal, if not exceed, the complaints.'' Foolish paradoxes, it may be said, and useful at most as an extravagant statement of a foolish theory, may help to bring about its collapse. And yet the writer who propounded such glaring absurdities was capable of occasionally attacking a commercial fallacy with great keenness, and of anticipating the views of later authorities.3

1

38. Mandeville, in fact, has overlaid a very sound and sober thesis with a number of showy paradoxes which, perhaps, 2 Ib. p. 230.

Mandeville, pp. 227, 228.

See e.g. his remarks, at p. 58, upon the balance of trade; and at p. 465, on the division of labour.

he only half believed. When formally defending himself, he can represent his audacities as purely ironical. He confesses that he has used the words, 'What we call evil in this world, moral as well as natural, is the grand principle that makes us social creatures, the solid basis, the light and support of all trades without exception.'' The phrase, he admits, has an awkward sound; but had he been writing for people who could not read between the lines, he would have explained in good set terms that he only meant to argue that 'every want was an evil; that on the multiplicity of those wants depended all those mutual services which the individual members of a society pay to each other; and that, consequently, the greater variety there was of want, the greater the number of individuals who might find their private interest in labouring for the good of others; and, united together, compose one body.' The streets of London, to use his own illustration, will grow dirtier as long as trade increases; and, to make his pages more attractive, he had expressed this doctrine as though he took the dirt to be the cause, instead of the necessary consequence. The fallacy, indeed, is imbedded too deeply in his argument to be discarded in this summary fashion. The doctrine that the heir who scatters, and not the man who accumulates, wealth, really sets labour at work, was much in harmony with the ideas of the age, that even Berkeley's acuteness only suggests the answer that an honest man generally consumes as much as a knave. There is, however, a core of truth in the sophistry. Large expenditure is a bad commercial symptom, so far as it indicates that consumption is outrunning accumulation; it is good so far as it indicates that large accumulations render large consumption possible. Mandeville, confusing the two cases, attacks the frugal Dutchman, who saves to supply his future wants, and the frugal savage, who, consuming little, yet consumes all that he produces, and produces little because he has no tastes and feels no wants. As against the savage his remarks are perfectly just. The growth of new desires is undoubtedly an essential condition towards the improvement of society, and every new desire brings new evils in its train.

39. The importance of the doctrine appears in its moral 1 Mandeville, p. 246.

2 Ib. p. 251.

Preface to p. viii,