The Fable of the Bees; Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits

by Bernard Mandeville

Hor. Where would have been the inconveniency of that?

Cleo. You could not have had that variety of living creatures, there is now; nay, there would not have been room for man himself, and his sustenance: our species alone would have overstocked the earth, if there had been no wars, and the common course of Providence had not been more interrupted than it has been. Might I not justly say then, that this is quite contrary and destructive to the scheme on which it is plain this earth was built? This is a consideration which you will never give its due weight. I have once already put you in mind of it, that you yourself have allowed the destruction of animals to be as necessary as the generation of them. There is as much wisdom to be seen in the contrivances how numbers of living creatures might always be taken off and destroyed, to make room for those that continually succeed them, as there is in making all the different sorts of them, every one preserve their own species. What do you think is the reason, that there is but one way for us to come into the world?

Hor. Because that one is sufficient.

Cleo. Then from a parity of reason, we ought to think, that there are several ways to go out of the world, because one would not have been sufficient. Now, if for the support and maintenance of that variety of creatures which are here that they should die, is a postulatum as necessary as it is, that they should be born; and you cut off or obstruct the means of dying, and actually stop up one of the great gates, through which we see multitudes go to death; do you not oppose the scheme, nay, do you mar it less, than if you hindered generation! Is there never had been war, and no other means of dying, besides the ordinary ones, this globe could not have born, or at least not maintained, the tenth part of the people that would have been in it. By war, I do not mean only such as one nation has had against another, but civil as well as foreign quarrels, general massacres, private murders, poison, sword, and all hostile force, by which men, notwithstanding their pretence of love to their species, have endeavoured to take away one another’s lives throughout the world, from the time that Cain slew Abel to this day.

Hor. I do not believe, that a quarter of all these mischiefs are upon record: but what may be known from history, would make a prodigious number of men: much greater, I dare say, than ever was on earth at one time: But what would you infer from this? They would not have been immortal; and if they had not died in war, they must soon after have been slain by diseases. When a man of threescore is killed by a bullet in the field, it is odds, that he would not have lived four years longer, though he had stayed at home.

Cleo. There are soldiers of threescore perhaps in all armies, but men generally go to the war when they are young; and when four or five thousand are lost in battle, you will find the greatest number to have been under five-and-thirty: consider now, that many men do not marry till after that age, who get ten or a dozen children.

Hor. If all that die by the hands of another, were to get a dozen children before they die——

Cleo. There is no occasion for that; I suppose nothing, that is either extravagant or improbable; but that all such, as have been wilfully destroyed by means of their species, should have lived, and taken their chance with the rest; that every thing should have befallen them, that has befallen those that have not been killed that way; and the same likewise to their posterity; and that all of them should have been subject to all the casualties as well as diseases, doctors, apothecaries, and other accidents, that take away man’s life, and shorten his days; war, and violence from one another, only excepted.

Hor. But if the earth had been too full of inhabitants, might not Providence have sent pestilences and diseases oftener? More children might have died when they were young, or more women might have proved barren.

Cleo. I do not know whether your mild way would have been more generally pleasing; but you entertain notions of the Deity that are unworthy of him. Men might certainly have been born with the instinct you speak of; but if this had been the Creator’s pleasure, there must have been another economy; and things on earth, from the beginning, would have been ordered in a manner quite different from what they are now. But to make a scheme first, and afterwards to mend it, when it proves defective, is the business of finite wisdom; it belongs to human prudence alone to mend faults, to correct and redress what was done amiss before, and to alter the measures which experience teaches men, were ill concerted: but the knowledge of God was consummate from eternity. Infinite Wisdom is not liable to errors or mistakes; therefore all his works are universally good, and every thing is made exactly as he would have it: the firmness and liability of his laws and councils are everlasting, and therefore his resolutions are as unalterable, as his decrees are eternal. It is not a quarter of an hour ago, that you named wars among the necessary means to carry off the redundancy of our species; how come you now to think them useless? I can demonstrate to you, that nature, in the production of our species, has amply provided against the losses of our sex, occasioned by wars, by repairing them visibly, where they are sustained, in as palpable a manner, as she has provided for the great destruction that is made of fish, by their devouring one another.