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

by Bernard Mandeville

This is no panic fear, and the reader will not imagine my apprehensions ill grounded, if he considers what an army of petty tyrants I have to cope with, that all either actually persecute with birch, or else are soliciting for such a preferment. For if I had no other adversaries than the starving wretches of both sexes, throughout the kingdom of Great Britain, that from a natural antipathy to working, have a great dislike to their present employment, and perceiving within a much stronger inclination to command than ever they felt to obey others, think themselves qualified, and wish from their hearts to be masters and mistresses of charity schools, the number of my enemies would, by the most modest computation, amount to one hundred thousand at least.

Methinks I hear them cry out, that a more dangerous doctrine never was broached, and Popery is a fool to it, and ask what brute of a Saracen it is that draws his ugly weapon for the destruction of learning. It is ten to one but they will indict me for endeavouring, by instigation of the prince of darkness, to introduce into these realms greater ignorance and barbarity, than ever nation was plunged into by Goths and Vandals since the light of the gospel first appeared in the world. Whoever labours under the public odium, has always crimes laid to his charge he never was guilty of, and it will be suspected that I have had a hand in obliterating the Holy Scriptures, and perhaps affirmed, that it was at my request that the small Bibles, published by patent in the year 1721, and chiefly made use of in charity schools, were, through badness of print and paper, rendered illegible; which yet I protest I am as innocent of as the child unborn. But I am in a thousand fears; the more I consider my case, the worse I like it, and the greatest comfort I have is in my sincere belief, that hardly any body will mind a word of what I say; or else, if ever the people suspected that what I write would be of any weight to any considerable part of the society, I should not have the courage barely to think on all the trades I should disoblige; and I cannot but smile, when I reflect on the variety of uncouth sufferings that would be prepared for me, if the punishment they would differently inflict upon me was emblematically to point at my crime. For if I was not suddenly stuck full of useless pen knives up to the hilts, the company of stationers would certainly take me in hand, and either have me buried alive in their hall, under a great heap of primers and spelling-books, they would not be able to sell; or else send me up against tide to be bruised to death in a paper mill, that would be obliged to stand still a week upon my account. The ink-makers, at the same time, would, for the public good, offer to choke me with astringents, or drown me in the black liquor that would be left upon their hands; which, if they joined stock, might easily be performed in less than a month; and if I should escape the cruelty of these united bodies, the resentment of a private monopolist would be as fatal to me, and I should soon find myself pelted and knocked on the head with little squat Bibles clasped in brass, and ready armed for mischief, that, charitable learning ceasing, would be fit for nothing but unopened to fight with, and exercises truly polemic.

The digression I spoke of just now, is not the foolish trifle that ended with the last paragraph, and which the grave critic, to whom all mirth is unseasonable, will think very impertinent; but a serious apologetical one I am going to make out of hand, to clear myself from having any design against arts and sciences, as some heads of colleges and other careful preservers of human learning might have apprehended, upon seeing ignorance recommended as a necessary ingredient in the mixture of civil society.

In the first place, I would have near double the number of professors in every university of what there is now. Theology with us is generally well provided, but the two other faculties have very little to boast of, especially physic. Every branch of that art ought to have two or three professors, that would take pains to communicate their skill and knowledge to others. In public lectures, a vain man has great opportunities to set off his parts, but private instructions are more useful to students. Pharmacy, and the knowledge of the simples, are as necessary as anatomy or the history of diseases: it is a shame, that when men have taken their degree, and are by authority intrusted with the lives of the subject, they should be forced to come to London to be acquainted with the Materia Medica, and the composition of medicines, and receive instructions from others that never had university education themselves; it is certain, that in the city I named, there is ten times more opportunity for a man to improve himself in anatomy, botany, pharmacy, and the practice of physic, than at both universities together. What has an oil shop to do with silks; or who would look for hams and pickles at a mercers? Where things are well managed, hospitals are made as subservient to the advancement of students in the art of physic, as they are to the recovery of health in the poor.

Good sense ought to govern men in learning as well as in trade: no man ever bound his son apprentice to a goldsmith to make him a linen draper; then why should he have a divine for his tutor to become a lawyer or a physician? It is true, that the languages, logic and philosophy, should be the first studies in all the learned professions; but there is so little help for physic in our universities that are so rich, and where so many idle people are well paid for eating and drinking, and being magnificently, as well as commodiously lodged, that bar books, and what is common to all the three faculties, a man may as well qualify himself at Oxford or Cambridge to be a Turkey merchant, as he can to be a physician; which is, in my humble opinion, a great sign that some part of the great wealth they are possessed of is not so well applied as it might be.

Professors should, besides their stipends allowed them by the public, have gratifications from every student they teach, that self-interest, as well as emulation and the love of glory, might spur them on to labour and assiduity. When a man excels in any one study or part of learning, and is qualified to teach others, he ought to be procured, if money will purchase him, without regarding what party, or indeed what country or nation he is of, whether black or white. Universities should be public marts for all manner of literature, as your annual fairs, that are kept at Leipsic, Frankfort, and other places in Germany, are for different wares and merchandises, where no difference is made between natives and foreigners, and which men resort to from all parts of the world with equal freedom and equal privilege.

From paying the gratifications I spoke of, I would excuse all students designed for the ministry of the gospel. There is no faculty so immediately necessary to the government of a nation as that of theology, and as we ought to have great numbers of divines for the service of this island, I would not have the meaner people discouraged from bringing up their children to that function. For though wealthy men, if they have many sons, sometimes make one of them a clergyman, as we see even persons of quality take up holy orders, and there are likewise people of good sense, especially divines, that from a principle of prudence bring up their children to that profession, when they are morally assured that they have friends or interest enough, and shall be able, either by a good fellowship at the university, advowsons, or other means to procure them a livelihood: but these produce not the large number of divines that are yearly ordained, and for the bulk of the clergy, we are indebted to another original.

Among the middling people of all trades there are bigots who have a superstitious awe for a gown and cassock: of these there are multitudes that feel an ardent desire of having a son promoted to the ministry of the gospel, without considering what is to become of them afterwards; and many a kind mother in this kingdom, without consulting her own circumstances or her child’s capacity, transported with this laudable wish, is daily feasting on this pleasing thought, and often before her son is twelve years old, mixing maternal love with devotion, throws herself into ecstasies and tears of satisfaction, by reflecting on the future enjoyment she is to receive from seeing him stand in a pulpit, and, with her own ears, hearing him preach the word of God. It is to this religious zeal, or at least the human frailties that pass for and represent it, that we owe the great plenty of poor scholars the nation enjoys. For, considering the inequality of livings, and the smallness of benefices up and down the kingdom, without this happy disposition in parents of small fortune, we could not possibly be furnished from any other quarter with proper persons for the ministry, to attend all the cures of souls, so pitifully provided for, that no mortal could live upon them that had been educated in any tolerable plenty, unless he was possessed of real virtue, which it is foolish and indeed injurious, we should more expect from the clergy than we generally find it in the laity.

The great care I would take to promote that part of learning which is more immediately useful to society, should not make me neglect the more curious and polite, but all the liberal arts, and every branch of literature should be encouraged throughout the kingdom, more than they are, if my wishing could do it. In every county, there should be one or more large schools, erected at the public charge, for Latin and Greek, that should be divided into six or more classes, with particular masters in each of them. The whole should be under the care and inspection of some men of letters in authority, who would not only be titular governors, but actually take pains at least twice a-year, in hearing every class thoroughly examined by the master of it, and not content themselves with judging of the progress the scholars had made for the themes and other exercises that had been made out of their sight.

At the same time, I would discharge and hinder the multiplicity of those petty schools, that never would have had any existence had the masters of them not been extremely indigent. It is a vulgar error, that nobody can spell or write English well without a little smatch of Latin. This is upheld by pedants for their own interest, and by none more strenuously maintained than such of them as are poor scholars in more than one sense; in the mean time it is an abominable falsehood. I have known, and I am still acquainted with several, and some of the fair sex, that never learned any Latin, and yet kept to strict orthography, and write admirable good sense; where, on the other hand, every body may meet with the scribblings of pretended scholars, at least such as went to a grammar school for several years, that have grammar faults and are ill spelled. The understanding of Latin thoroughly, is highly necessary to all that are designed for any of the learned professions, and I would have no gentleman without literature; even those who are to be brought up attorneys, surgeons, and apothecaries, should be much better versed in that language than generally they are; but to youth, who afterwards are to get a livelihood in trades and callings in which Latin is not daily wanted, it is of no use, and the learning of it an evident loss of just so much time and money as are bestowed upon it. When men come into business, what was taught them of it, in those petty schools is either soon forgot, or only fit to make them impertinent, and often very troublesome in company. Few men can forbear valuing themselves on any knowledge they had once acquired, even after they have lost it; and, unless they are very modest and discreet, the undigested scraps which such people commonly remember of Latin, seldom fail of rendering them, at one time or other, ridiculous to those who understand it.