Cleo. The highest titles, and the most illustrious births, are no security against covetousness; and persons of the first quality, that are actually generous and munificent are often as greedy after gain, when it is worth their while, as the most sordid mechanics are for trifles: The year twenty has taught us, how difficult it is to find out those noble minds that despise lucre, when there is a prospect of getting vastly. Besides, nothing is more universally charming than money; it suits with every station, the high, the low, the wealthy, and the poor: whereas, honour has little influence on the mean, slaving people, and rarely affects any of the vulgar; but if it does, money will almost every where purchase honour; nay, riches of themselves are an honour to all those who know how to use them fashionably. Honour, on the contrary, wants riches for its support; without them it is a dead weight that oppresses its owner; and titles of honour, joined to a necessitous condition, are a greater burden together than the same degree of poverty is alone: for the higher a man’s quality is, the more considerable are his wants in life; but the more money he has, the better he is able to supply the greatest extravagancy of them. Lucre is the best restorative in the world, in a literal sense, and works upon the spirits mechanically; for it is not only a spur that excites men to labour, and makes them in love with it, but it likewise gives relief in weariness, and actually supports men in all fatigues and difficulties. A labourer of any sort, who is paid in proportion to his diligence, can do more work than another who is paid by the day or the week, and has standing wages.
Hor. Do not you think, then, that there are men in laborious offices, who, for a fixed salary, discharge their duties with diligence and assiduity?
Cleo. Yes, many; but there is no place or employment in which there are required or expected, that continual attendance and uncommon severity of application, that some men harass and punish themselves with by choice, when every fresh trouble meets with a new recompence; and you never saw men so entirely devote themselves to their calling, and pursue business with that eagerness, dispatch, and perseverance in any office of preferment, in which the yearly income is certain and unalterable, as they often do in those professions where the reward continually accompanies the labour, and the fee immediately either precedes the service they do to others, as it is with the lawyers, or follows it, as it is with the physicians. I am sure you have hinted at this in our first conversation yourself.
Hor. Here is the castle before us.
Cleo. Which I suppose you are not sorry for.
Hor. Indeed I am, and would have been glad to have heard you speak of kings and other sovereigns with the same candour, as well as freedom, with which you have treated prime ministers, and their envious adversaries. When I see a man entirely impartial, I shall always do him that justice, as to think, that if he is not in the right in what he says, at least he aims at truth. The more I examine your sentiments, by what I see in the world, the more I am obliged to come into them; and all this morning I have said nothing in opposition to you, but to be better informed, and to give you an opportunity to explain yourself more amply. I am your convert, and shall henceforth look upon the Fable of the Bees very differently from what I did; for though, in the Characteristics, the language and the diction are better, the system of man’s sociableness is more lovely and more plausible, and things are set off with more art and learning; yet in the other there is certainly more truth, and nature is more faithfully copied in it almost every where.
Cleo. I wish you would read them both once more, and, after that, I believe you will say that you never saw two authors who seem to have wrote with more different views. My friend, the author of the Fable, to engage and keep his readers in good humour, seems to be very merry, and to do something else, whilst he detects the corruption of our nature; and having shown man to himself in various lights, he points indirectly at the necessity, not only of revelation and believing, but likewise of the practice of Christianity manifestly to be seen in mens lives.
Hor. I have not observed that: Which way has he done it indirectly?
Cleo. By exposing, on the one hand, the vanity of the world, and the most polite enjoyments of it; and, on the other, the insufficiency of human reason and heathen virtue to procure real felicity: for I cannot see what other meaning a man could have by doing this in a Christian country, and among people that all pretend to seek after happiness.
Hor. And what say you of Lord Shaftsbury?