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

by Bernard Mandeville

As pity is often by ourselves and in our own cases mistaken for charity, so it assumes the shape, and borrows the very name of it; a beggar asks you to exert that virtue for Jesus Christ’s sake, but all the while his great design is to raise your pity. He represents to your view the first side of his ailments and bodily infirmities; in chosen words he gives you an epitome of his calamities, real or fictitious; and while he seems to pray God that he will open your heart, he is actually at work upon your ears; the greatest profligate of them flies to religion for aid, and assists his cant with a doleful tone, and a studied dismality of gestures: but he trusts not to one passion only, he flatters your pride with titles and names of honour and distinction; your avarice he sooths with often repeating to you the smallness of the gift he sues for, and conditional promises of future returns, with an interest extravagant beyond the statute of usury, though out of the reach of it. People not used to great cities, being thus attacked on all sides, are commonly forced to yield, and cannot help giving something though they can hardly spare it themselves. How oddly are we managed by self-love! It is ever watching in our defence, and yet, to sooth a predominant passion, obliges us to act against our interest: for when pity seizes us, if we can but imagine, that we contribute to the relief of him we have compassion with, and are instrumental to the lessening of his sorrows, it eases us, and therefore pitiful people often give an alms, when they really feel that they would rather not.

When sores are very bare, or seem otherwise afflicting in an extraordinary manner, and the beggar can bear to have them exposed to the cold air, it is very shocking to some people; it is a shame, they cry, such sights should be suffered; the main reason is, it touches their pity feelingly, and at the same time they are resolved, either because they are covetous, or count it an idle expence, to give nothing, which makes them more uneasy. They turn their eyes, and where the cries are dismal, some would willingly stop their ears if they were not ashamed. What they can do is to mend their pace, and be very angry in their hearts that beggars should be about the streets. But it is with pity as it is with fear, the more we are conversant with objects that excite either passion, the less we are disturbed by them, and those to whom all these scenes and tones are by custom made familiar, they make little impression upon. The only thing the industrious beggar has left to conquer those fortified hearts, if he can walk either with or without crutches, is to follow close, and with uninterrupted noise teaze and importune them, to try if he can make them buy their peace. Thus thousands give money to beggars from the same motive as they pay their corn-cutter, to walk easy. And many a halfpenny is given to impudent and designedly persecuting rascals, whom, if it could be done handsomely, a man would cane with much greater satisfaction. Yet all this, by the courtesy of the country, is called charity.

The reverse of pity is malice: I have spoke of it where I treat of envy. Those who know what it is to examine themselves, will soon own that it is very difficult to trace the root and origin of this passion. It is one of those we are most ashamed of, and therefore the hurtful part of it is easily subdued and corrected by a judicious education. When any body near us stumbles, it is natural even before reflection, to stretch out our hands to hinder, or at least break the fall, which shows that while we are calm we are rather bent to pity. But though malice by itself is little to be feared, yet assisted with pride it is often mischievous, and becomes most terrible when egged on and heightened by anger. There is nothing that more readily or more effectually extinguishes pity than this mixture, which is called cruelty: from whence we may learn, that to perform a meritorious action, it is not sufficient barely to conquer a passion, unless it likewise be done from a laudable principle, and consequently how necessary that clause was in the definition of virtue, that our endeavours were to proceed from a rational ambition of being good.

Pity, as I have said somewhere else, is the most amiable of all our passions, and there are not many occasions, on which we ought to conquer or curb it. A surgeon may be as compassionate as he pleases, so it does not make him omit or forbear to perform what he ought to do. Judges likewise, and juries, may be influenced with pity, if they take care that plain laws and justice itself are not infringed, and do not suffer by it. No pity does more mischief in the world, than what is excited by the tenderness of parents, and hinders them from managing their children, as their rational love to them would require, and themselves could wish it. The sway likewise which this passion bears in the affections of women, is more considerable than is commonly imagined, and they daily commit faults that are altogether ascribed to lust, and yet are in a great measure owing to pity.

What I named last is not the only passion that mocks and resembles charity; pride and vanity have built more hospitals than all the virtues together. Men are so tenacious of their possessions, and selfishness is so riveted in our nature, that whoever can but any ways conquer it shall have the applause of the public, and all the encouragement imaginable to conceal his frailty, and sooth any other appetite he shall have a mind to indulge. The man that supplies, with his private fortune, what the whole must otherwise have provided for, obliges every member of the society, and, therefore, all the world are ready to pay him their acknowledgment, and think themselves in duty bound to pronounce all such actions virtuous, without examining, or so much as looking into the motives from which they were performed. Nothing is more destructive to virtue or religion itself, than to make men believe, that giving money to the poor, though they should not part with it till after death, will make a full atonement in the next world, for the sins they have committed in this. A villain, who has been guilty of a barbarous murder, may, by the help of false witnesses, escape the punishment he deserved: he prospers, we will say, heaps up great wealth, and, by the advice of his father confessor, leaves all his estate to a monastery, and his children beggars. What fine amends has this good Christian made for his crime, and what an honest man was the priest who directed his conscience? He who parts with all he has in his life-time, whatever principle he acts from, only gives away what was his own; but the rich miser who refuses to assist his nearest relations while he is alive, though they never designedly disobliged him, and disposes of his money, for what we call charitable uses, after his death, may imagine of his goodness what he pleases, but he robs his posterity. I am now thinking of a late instance of charity, a prodigious gift, that has made a great noise in the world: I have a mind to set it in the light I think it deserves, and beg leave, for once, to please pedants, to treat it somewhat rhetorically.

That a man, with small skill in physic, and hardly any learning, should, by vile arts, get into practice, and lay up great wealth, is no mighty wonder; but, that he should so deeply work himself into the good opinion of the world as to gain the general esteem of a nation, and establish a reputation beyond all his contemporaries, with no other qualities but a perfect knowledge of mankind, and a capacity of making the most of it, is something extraordinary. If a man arrived to such a height of glory should be almost distracted with pride, sometime give his attendance on a servant or any mean person for nothing, and, at the same time, neglect a nobleman that gives exorbitant fees, at other times refuse to leave his bottle for his business, without any regard to the quality of the persons that sent for him, or the danger they are in: if he should be surly and morose, affect to be an humourist, treat his patients like dogs, though people of distinction, and value no man but what would deify him, and never call in question the certainty of his oracles: if he should insult all the world, affront the first nobility, and extend his insolence even to the royal family: if, to maintain as well as to increase the fame of his sufficiency, he should scorn to consult with his betters on what emergency soever, look down with contempt on the most deserving of his profession, and never confer with any other physician but what will pay homage to his superior genius, creep to his humour, and never approach him but with all the slavish obsequiousness a court-flatterer can treat a prince with: If a man, in his lifetime, should discover, on the one hand, such manifest symptoms of superlative pride, and an insatiable greediness after wealth at the same time, and, on the other, no regard to religion or affection to his kindred, no compassion to the poor, and hardly any humanity to his fellow-creatures, if he gave no proofs that he loved his country, had a public spirit, or was a lover of arts, of books, or of literature, what must we judge of his motive, the principle he acted from, when, after his death, we find that he has left a trifle among his relations who stood in need of it, and an immense treasure to an university that did not want it.

Let a man be as charitable as it is possible for him to be without forfeiting his reason or good sense: can he think otherwise, but that this famous physician did, in the making of his will, as in every thing else, indulge his darling passion, entertaining his vanity with the happiness of the contrivance? when he thought on the monuments and inscriptions, with all the sacrifices of praise that would be made to him, and, above all, the yearly tribute of thanks, of reverence, and veneration that would be paid to his memory, with so much pomp and solemnity; when he considered, how in all these performances, wit and invention would be racked, art and eloquence ransacked to find out encomiums suitable to the public spirit, the munificence and the dignity of the benefactor, and the artful gratitude of the receivers; when he thought on, I say, and considered these things, it must have thrown his ambitious soul into vast ecstasies of pleasure, especially when he ruminated on the duration of his glory, and the perpetuity he would by this means procure to his name. Charitable opinions are often stupidly false; when men are dead and gone, we ought to judge of their actions, as we do of books, and neither wrong their understanding nor our own. The British Æsculapius was undeniably a man of sense, and if he had been influenced by charity, a public spirit, or the love of learning, and had aimed at the good of mankind in general, or that of his own profession in particular, and acted from any of these principles, he could never have made such a will; because so much wealth might have been better managed, and a man of much less capacity would have found out several better ways of laying out the money. But if we consider, that he was as undeniably a man of vast pride, as he was a man of sense, and give ourselves leave only to surmise, that this extraordinary gift might have proceeded from such a motive, we shall presently discover the excellency of his parts, and his consummate knowledge of the world: for, if a man would render himself immortal, be ever praised and deified after his death, and have all the acknowledgment, the honours, and compliments paid to his memory, that vain glory herself could wish for, I do not think it in human skill to invent a more effectual method. Had he followed arms, behaved himself in five-and-twenty sieges, and as many battles, with the bravery of an Alexander, and exposed his life and limbs to all the fatigues and dangers of war for fifty campaigns together; or devoting himself to the muses, sacrificed his pleasure, his rest, and his health to literature, and spent all his days in a laborious study, and the toils of learning; or else, abandoning all worldly interest, excelled in probity, temperance, and austerity of life, and ever trod in the strictest path of virtue, he would not so effectually have provided for the eternity of his name, as after a voluptuous life, and the luxurious gratification of his passions, he has now done without any trouble or self denial, only by the choice in the disposal of his money, when he was forced to leave it.

A rich miser, who is thoroughly selfish, and would receive the interest of his money, even after his death, has nothing else to do than to defraud his relations, and leave his estate to some famous university; they are the best markets to buy immortality at with little merit: in them knowledge, wit, and penetration are the growth, I had almost said the manufacture of the place: there men are profoundly skilled in human nature, and know what it is their benefactors want; and their extraordinary bounties shall always meet with an extraordinary recompence, and the measure of the gift is ever the standard of their praises, whether the donor be a physician or a tinker, when once the living witnesses that might laugh at them are extinct. I can never think on the anniversary of the thanksgiving-day decreed to a great man, but it puts me in mind of the miraculous cures, and other surprising things that will be said of him a hundred years hence; and I dare prognosticate, that before the end of the present century, he will have stories forged in his favour (for rhetoricians are never upon oath) that shall be as fabulous, at least, as any legends of the saints.

Of all this our subtle benefactor was not ignorant; he understood universities, their genius, and their politics, and from thence foresaw and knew, that the incense to be offered to him would not cease with the present or few succeeding generations, and that it would not only for the trifling space of three or four hundred years, but that it would continue to be paid to him through all changes and revolutions of government and religion, as long as the nation subsists, and the island itself remains.

It is deplorable that the proud should have such temptations to wrong their lawful heirs: For when a man in ease and affluence, brim-full of vain glory, and humoured in his pride by the greatest of a polite nation, has such an infallible security in petto for an everlasting homage and adoration to his manes to be paid in such an extraordinary manner, he is like a hero in battle, who, in feasting of his own imagination, tastes all the felicity of enthusiasm. It buys him up in sickness, relieves him in pain, and either guards him against, or keeps from his view all the terrors of death, and the most dismal apprehensions of futurity.