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

by Bernard Mandeville

Would you banish fraud and luxury, prevent profaneness and irreligion, and make the generality of the people charitable, good, and virtuous; break down the printing-presses, melt the founds, and burn all the books in the island, except those at the universities, where they remain unmolested, and suffer no volume in private hands but a Bible: knock down foreign trade, prohibit all commerce with strangers, and permit no ships to go to sea, that ever will return, beyond fisher-boats. Restore to the clergy, the king and the barons their ancient privileges, prerogatives, and professions: build new churches, and convert all the coin you can come at into sacred utensils: erect monasteries and alms-houses in abundance, and let no parish be without a charity-school. Enact sumptuary laws, and let your youth be inured to hardship: inspire them with all the nice and most refined notions of honour and shame, of friendship and of heroism, and introduce among them a great variety of imaginary rewards: then let the clergy preach abstinence and self-denial to others, and take what liberty they please for themselves; let them bear the greatest sway in the management of state-affairs, and no man be made lord-treasurer but a bishop.

But by such pious endeavours, and wholesome regulations, the scene would be soon altered; the greatest part of the covetous, the discontented, the restless and ambitious villains, would leave the land; vast swarms of cheating knaves would abandon the city, and be dispersed throughout the country: artificers would learn to hold the plough, merchants turn farmers, and the sinful overgrown Jerusalem, without famine, war, pestilence, or compulsion, be emptied in the most easy manner, and ever after cease to be dreadful to her sovereigns. The happy reformed kingdom would by this means be crowded in no part of it, and every thing necessary for the sustenance of man, be cheap and abound: on the contrary, the root of so many thousand evils, money, would be very scarce, and as little wanted, where every man should enjoy the fruits of his own labour, and our own dear manufacture unmixed, be promiscuously wore by the lord and the peasant. It is impossible, that such a change of circumstances should not influence the manners of a nation, and render them temperate, honest, and sincere; and from the next generation we might reasonably expect a more healthy and robust offspring than the present; an harmless, innocent, and well-meaning people, that would never dispute the doctrine of passive obedience, nor any other orthodox principles, but be submissive to superiors, and unanimous in religious worship.

Here I fancy myself interrupted by an Epicure, who, not to want a restorative diet in case of necessity, is never without live ortolans; and I am told that goodness and probity are to be had at a cheaper rate than the ruin of a nation, and the destruction of all the comforts of life; that liberty and property may be maintained without wickedness or fraud, and men be good subjects without being slaves, and religious though they refused to be priest-rid; that to be frugal and saving is a duty incumbent only on those, whose circumstances require it, but that a man of a good estate does his country a service by living up to the income of it; that as to himself, he is so much master of his appetites, that he can abstain from any thing upon occasion; that where true Hermitage was not to be had, he could content himself with plain Bourdeaux, if it had a good body; that many a morning, instead of St. Lawrence, he has made a shift with Fronteniac, and after dinner given Cyprus wine, and even Madeira, when he has had a large company, and thought it extravagant to treat with Tockay; but that all voluntary mortifications are superstitious, only belonging to blind zealots and enthusiasts. He will quote my Lord Shaftsbury against me, and tell me that people may be virtuous and sociable without self-denial; that it is an affront to virtue to make it inaccessible, that I make a bugbear of it to frighten men from it as a thing impracticable; but that for his part he can praise God, and at the same time enjoy his creatures with a good conscience; neither will he forget any thing to his purpose of what I have said, page 66. He will ask me at last, whether the legislature, the wisdom of the nation itself, while they endeavour as much as possible, to discourage profaneness and immorality, and promote the glory of God, do not openly profess, at the same time, to have nothing more at heart, than the ease and welfare of the subject, the wealth, strength, honour, and what else is called the true interest of the country? and, moreover, whether the most devout and most learned of our prelates, in their greatest concern for our conversion, when they beseech the Deity to turn their own as well as our hearts, from the world and all carnal desires, do not in the same prayer as loudly solicit him to pour all earthly blessings and temporal felicity, on the kingdom they belong to?

These are the apologies, the excuses, and common pleas, not only of those who are notoriously vicious, but the generality of mankind, when you touch the copy-hold of their inclinations; and trying the real value they have for spirituals, would actually strip them of what their minds are wholly bent upon. Ashamed of the many frailties they feel within, all men endeavour to hide themselves, their ugly nakedness, from each other, and wrapping up the true motives of their hearts, in the specious cloak of sociableness, and their concern for the public good, they are in hopes of concealing their filthy appetites, and the deformity of their desires; while they are conscious within of the fondness for their darling lusts, and their incapacity, bare-faced, to tread the arduous, rugged path of virtue.

As to the two last questions, I own they are very puzzling: to what the Epicure asks, I am obliged to answer in the affirmative; and unless I would (which God forbid!) arraign the sincerity of kings, bishops, and the whole legislative power, the objection stands good against me: all I can say for myself is, that in the connection of the facts, there is a mystery past human understanding; and to convince the reader, that this is no evasion, I shall illustrate the incomprehensibility of it in the following parable.

In old heathen times, there was, they say, a whimsical country, where the people talked much of religion, and the greatest part, as to outward appearance, seemed really devout: the chief moral evil among them was thirst, and to quench it a damnable sin; yet they unanimously agreed that every one was born thirsty, more or less: small beer in moderation was allowed to all, and he was counted an hypocrite, a cynic, or a madman, who pretended that one could live altogether without it; yet those, who owned they loved it, and drank it to excess, were counted wicked. All this, while the beer itself was reckoned a blessing from Heaven, and there was no harm in the use of it; all the enormity lay in the abuse, the motive of the heart, that made them drink it. He that took the least drop of it to quench his thirst, committed a heinous crime, while others drank large quantities without any guilt, so they did it indifferently, and for no other reason than to mend their complexion.

They brewed for other countries as well as their own, and for the small beer they sent abroad, they received large returns of Westphalia-hams, neats tongues, hung-beef, and Bologna sausages, red-herrings, pickled sturgeon, caviar, anchovies, and every thing that was proper to make their liquor go down with pleasure. Those who kept great stores of small beer by them without making use of it, were generally envied, and at the same time very odious to the public, and nobody was easy that had not enough of it come to his own share. The greatest calamity they thought could befal them, was to keep their hops and barley upon their hands, and the more they yearly consumed of them, the more they reckoned the country to flourish.

The government had many very wise regulations concerning the returns that were made for their exports, encouraged very much the importation of salt and pepper, and laid heavy duties on every thing that was not well seasoned, and might any ways obstruct the sale of their own hops and barley. Those at helm, when they acted in public, showed themselves on all accounts exempt and wholly divested from thirst, made several laws to prevent the growth of it, and punish the wicked who openly dared to quench it. If you examined them in their private persons, and pryed narrowly into their lives and conversations, they seemed to be more fond, or at least drank larger draughts of small beer than others, but always under pretence that the mending of complexions required greater quantities of liquor in them, than it did in those they ruled over; and that, what they had chiefly at heart, without any regard to themselves, was to procure great plenty of small beer, among the subjects in general, and a great demand for their hops and barley.

As nobody was debarred from small beer, the clergy made use of it as well as the laity, and some of them very plentifully; yet all of them desired to be thought less thirsty by their function than others, and never would own that they drank any but to mend their complexions. In their religious assemblies they were more sincere; for as soon as they came there, they all openly confessed, the clergy as well as the laity, from the highest to the lowest, that they were thirsty, that mending their complexions was what they minded the least, and that all their hearts were set upon small beer and quenching their thirst, whatever they might pretend to the contrary. What was remarkable, is, that to have laid hold of those truths to any ones prejudice, and made use of those confessions afterwards out of their temples, would be counted very impertinent, and every body thought it an heinous affront to be called thirsty, though you had seen him drink small beer by whole gallons. The chief topics of their preachers, was the great evil of thirst, and the folly there was in quenching it. They exhorted their hearers to resist the temptations of it, inveighed against small beer, and often told them it was poison, if they drank it with pleasure, or any other design than to mend their complexions.

In their acknowledgments to the gods, they thanked them for the plenty of comfortable small beer they had received from them, notwithstanding they had so little deserved it, and continually quenched their thirst with it; whereas, they were so thoroughly satisfied, that it was given them for a better use. Having begged pardon for those offences, they desired the gods to lessen their thirst, and give them strength to resist the importunities of it; yet, in the midst of their sorest repentance, and most humble supplications, they never forgot small beer, and prayed that they might continue to have it in great plenty, with a solemn promise, that how neglectful soever they might hitherto have been in this point, they would for the future not drink a drop of it, with any other design than to mend their complexions.