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+Project Gutenberg's The Economic Functions of Vice, by John McElroy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Economic Functions of Vice
+
+Author: John McElroy
+
+Release Date: March 25, 2010 [EBook #31768]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ECONOMIC FUNCTIONS OF VICE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger (Images obtained from the Google Books Project)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ECONOMIC FUNCTIONS OF VICE
+
+
+By John McElroy
+
+
+WASHINGTON, D. C.
+
+Published by The National Tnbune
+
+Copyright, 1906
+
+
+     "Are God and Nature then at strife,
+     That Nature lends such evil dreams?
+     So careful of the type she seems,
+
+     So careless of the single life."
+
+                 ------
+
+     "And the individual withers,
+     and the world is more and more."
+
+     --Tennyson.
+
+
+[Transcriber's Note: Numbers in the text enclosed by curly
+brackets indicate the page numbers in the printed book. DW]
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ECONOMIC FUNCTIONS OF VICE
+
+FOR some inscrutable reason which she has as yet given no hint of
+revealing, Nature is wondrously wasteful in the matter of generation.
+She creates a thousand where she intends to make use of one.
+
+Imbued with the maternal instinct, the female cod casts millions of eggs
+upon the waters, expecting them to return after many days as troops of
+interesting {7} offspring. Instead, half die embryotic gadi are almost
+immediately devoured by spawn-eaters, hundreds of thousands perish in
+incubation, hundreds of thousands more succumb to the perils attending
+ichthyic infancy, leaving but a few score to attain to adult usefulness
+and pass an honored old age with the fragrance of a well-spent life in
+the country grocery.
+
+The oak showers down 10,000 acorns, each capable of producing a tree.
+Three-fourths of them are straightway diverted from their arboreal
+intent through conversion into food by the provident squirrel and
+improvident hog. Great numbers rot uselessly upon the {8} ground, and
+the few hundred that finally succeed in germinating grow up into dense
+thickets, where at last die strongest smothers out all the rest like an
+oaken Othello in a harem of quercine Desdemonas.
+
+                     ------
+
+THIS is the law of all life, animal as well as vegetable. From the
+humble hyssop on the wall to the towering cedar of Lebanon, from the
+meek and lowly amoeba--which has no more character or individuality than
+any other pin-point of jelly--to the lordly tyrant {9} man, the rule is
+inevitable and invariable.
+
+Life is sown broadcast only to be followed almost immediately by a
+destruction nearly as swift. Nature creates by the million apparently
+that she may destroy by the myriads. She gives life one instant only
+that she may snatch it away the next. The main difference is that the
+higher we ascend the less lavish is the creation and the less sweeping
+the destruction.
+
+Thus, while probably but one fish out of a thousand reaches maturity, of
+1,000 children born 604 attain adult age; that is, Nature flings aside
+999 out of every 1,000 fish as useless for {10} her purposes, and two
+out of every five human beings.
+
+                    ------
+
+MANY see in this relentless weeding out and destruction of her inferior
+products a remarkable illustration of the wisdom of Nature's methods.
+What would they think of a workman so bungling that two-fifths of the
+products of his handicraft were only fit for destruction?
+
+The "struggle for existence" is a murderous scramble to get rid of this
+vast surplusage. The "survival of the fittest" is the success of the
+minority in {11} demonstrating that the majority are superfluous. It is
+the Kilkenny-cat episode multiplied by infinity. It will be remembered
+that the whole trouble arose from the common belief that two cats were a
+surplus of one for the Kilkenny environment.
+
+Darwin's theory recognizes in this super-fecundity of nature a most
+potent adjunct for improvement He says, in fact, that the impossibility
+of providing subsistence for more than a fraction of the multitudinous
+creation causes a mortal struggle in which the weaker and inferior are
+exterminated and only the stronger and superior survive. These in turn,
+have offspring like the leaves {12} of the forest, which in like turn
+are winnowed out by alien enemies and reciprocal extermination, and
+thus the process goes on with the sanguinary regularity of the King
+of Dahomey's administration of the internal economy of his realm. The
+benignity of this method of arranging the order of things is not so
+apparent as a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
+Animals might desire.
+
+                    ------
+
+BUT our opinion of this law is not cared for. It is academic and
+superfluous. The main importance {13} attaches to the recognition of the
+fact that it is a law.
+
+Its application to society is obvious: Since the propagation of human
+beings goes on with entire recklessness as to the quality of the product
+and the means of subsistence, some strong corrective is absolutely
+necessary to establish limits to populations and to secure the continued
+development of the race.
+
+If every begotten child lived to the average age of 40, in a very few
+years there would not be standing room on the earth for its people.
+
+Even with such limited propagators as the elephant, each female of which
+produces but six offspring in her bearing {14} period of 90 years, we
+are told that if the species had no parasitic or other enemy it would
+only be 740 years until elephants would overrun the earth.
+
+Where then should we assign limits to the productiveness of the
+750,000,000 human females on the globe, each of whom is capable of
+producing 20 children in her 30 years of bearing?
+
+If, too, every child had the same chance of life without reference to
+its mental and physical fitness to live, humanity would soon become a
+stagnant slough of vicious vitality. There are only food and room for
+the best, and as the development of the race demands {15} it, only
+the best survive and continue the work of propagation. The rest are
+destroyed.
+
+                    ------
+
+BY the "best" is understood those having that harmony of mental and
+physical development which brings them most nearly into accord with
+Nature's laws.
+
+                    ------
+
+BELOW the human stratum superabundant generation is neutralized by the
+simple device of having {16} every organism prey upon some other one.
+In her 10 years of fruitful life the female cod lays 50,000,000 eggs.
+If nothing thwarted the amiable efforts of herself and offspring to
+multiply and replenish, they would shortly pack the ocean as full as a
+box of sardines.
+
+While, however, giving one female the desire and capacity to produce
+50,000,000 lives, nature has given other animals the desire and capacity
+to annihilate most of those 50,000,000 lives.
+
+So all through the animal kingdom it is nearly a neck-to-neck race
+between production and extermination.
+
+Life is a universal and unceasing {17} struggle, between the eaters and
+the eaten.
+
+                    ------
+
+MAN alone is practically exempt from what is apparently an invariable
+
+condition of all other forms of animal life. While he preys upon a
+myriad of created things, there is no created thing that preys on him
+and assists in keeping his excessive produc tiveness within the limits
+of subsistence. Most significant of all, not even a parasite wages
+destructive warfare against him. That is, if we except from the
+classification the doctors' latest explanation {18} of the cause
+of everything, from pneumonia to laziness--the modest but effective
+bacillus. The bacillus, however, is much more a condition than a
+parasite.
+
+This absence of destructive enemies must be compensated for in some way,
+and it is accomplished by making vicious inclinations the agents to weed
+out the redundant growths and to select for extermination those
+which are inferior, depraved, weak, and unfit for preservation or
+reproduction.
+
+If five human beings are procreated where there is present room and
+provision but for three, how are the surplus {19} two to be picked out
+and exterminated?
+
+Of course each one of us feels entirely competent to pick out in his own
+community the persons who could be best spared, but public opinion is
+at present hostile both to any practical plan of making the necessary
+thinning out, and also to lodging the power of selection in the hands of
+those of us best calculated for the duty.
+
+                    ------
+
+APPARENTLY the surplus ones relieve us from embarrassment on this score
+by selecting to exterminate {20} themselves. Their methods of suicide
+cover a wide range of expedients but all are very effective.
+
+And most beneficent of any of the facts connected with this subject
+is that each of those chosen for extermination embraces his fate with
+positive eagerness, under the delusion that he is about to enhance his
+own happiness.
+
+Immoderate use of stimulants and the varied excesses and vital errors
+which are grouped under the general head of "dissipation," a "love of
+pleasure," or the still {21} more expressive phrase "a short life and
+a merry one," etc., are favorite ways of self-annihilation and leave
+little to be desired in the completeness with which they do their work.
+
+English statisticians formerly estimated that if a man drank beer in
+large quantities it took him 21.7 years to kill himself, which period
+the whisky-drinker shortened to 16.1 years.
+
+Closer study and wider knowledge have materially changed these
+conclusions, to the great detriment of beer. For once, and upon one
+point, the physicians of the world have agreed. American, English, and
+German doctors say with one voice that the most {22} hopeless patient
+who comes into their hands is the soaked, crapulous, beer-drinker.
+"Point out a gray-haired beer-drinker," they challenge, and challenge in
+vain. Gray-haired whisky-drinkers may be found, but not the others.
+
+Starch in every stage of decay, carried by the all-penetrating alcohol,
+surcharges the tissues with putrefaction, and makes the tumid veins a
+forcing-ground for bacteria. Thus the beer-drinker's slight cold becomes
+at once pneumonia, or inflammatory rheumatism, or Bright's disease, and
+his life flickers out like a candle in a gusty passage.
+
+Intemperance being among the milder vices kills slowly. Sexual sins slay
+{23} more rapidly, and the criminal grades of vice do their work with a
+swiftness in proportion to their flagrancy. The Psalmist says, "bloody
+and deceitful men shall not live out half their days," but police
+records will show that David materially overrates the average. "One
+quarter their days" would approach much nearer exactness.
+
+                    ------
+
+RETURNING to the major premise that the "survival of the fittest" means
+the selection and preservation of those individuals who are most nearly
+in harmony with the conditions {24} of their environment, and that the
+progress of the race or species involves the destruction of the weaker
+or the inferior who are not in such harmony, the conclusion follows that
+any aberration toward vice shows such discordance in the individual
+with the laws of his environment as marks him as inferior, weak, and
+obstructive of the race's development
+
+Vice is not so much a cause as an effect--precisely as disease is a
+symptom. Vice does not make a nature weak or defective: a weak and
+defective nature expresses its weaknesses and defects in vice, and that
+expression brings about in one way and another {25} the sovereign remedy
+of extermination.
+
+                    ------
+
+MUCH is said of the devastation of our fairest and brightest by the
+Drink Demon. This is mainly nonsense. It was more nearly true in former
+generations, when intemperance was an almost universal vice. As
+
+Hamlet says:
+
+     "it is a custom
+     More honor'd in the breach than the observance.
+     This heavy-headed revel east and west
+     Makes us traduced and tax'd of other nations:
+     They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase
+     Soil our addition."
+
+{26} Morals has made wonderful progress since then, in all directions,
+and heavy drinking has been more and more restricted to those who are
+
+"Marked cross from the womb and perverse."
+
+With few exceptions every one who goes to perdition by the alcohol route
+would reach that destination by some other highway if the alcohol line
+were not running.
+
+Every man whose sloth or improvidence has brought himself and his family
+to beggary, every thieving tramp upon the highways, every rascal in the
+penitentiary, every murderer upon the gallows, hastens to plead "whisky
+brought {27} me to this!" because he knows that such a plea will bring
+him a gush of sloppy sympathy unobtainable by other means.
+
+Whisky makes no man lazy, shiftless, dishonest, false, cowardly or
+brutal. These must be original qualities with him. If he has them he
+will probably take to whisky--though not inevitably--which then does the
+community the splendid service of hurrying him along to destruction, and
+of abridging his infliction upon the public. {28}
+
+                    ------
+
+PEOPLE who have done much in the way of reforming drunkards have been
+astonished to find how little real manhood remained after eliminating
+whisky from the equation. They had supposed the manhood to be only
+obscured, and were disheartened to find how frequently it happened to be
+demonstrated that there never was enough of it to pay for the trouble of
+"saving the victim of intemperance." Like the cherubim before the throne
+of God, the Temperance orators "con- tinually do cry," the burden of
+their song being that hundreds of thousands are annually slain by the
+monster Intemperance. {29} Quite singularly these figures are probably
+not exaggerated. Myriads of times kindly-hearted physicians write in the
+death certificate "pneumonia," "heart-failure," "diabetes," etc., when
+truth demands "beer" or "whisky."
+
+                    ------
+
+BUT what of this?
+
+Is it not merely Nature sweeping out her overcrowded workshop? Ridding
+her laboratory of misfits, defectives, and rejects? Into her junk pile
+alcohol whisks away daily thousands of thieves, gamblers, prostitutes,
+loafers, "sports," spongers, swindlers, {30} and others of the criminal
+and quasi-criminal classes. Over their moldering clay the daisies bloom
+in sweet oblivion of
+
+     "The sins and crimes
+     Done in their days of nature."
+
+Upon these alcoholism accommodatingly performs the office of judge and
+executioner, cutting their careers off at an average of five years,
+which, without this interposition, would possibly be extended to 20 or
+30. The certainty and celerity with which it ferrets out and destroys
+these classes gives it strong advantages over the ordinary processes of
+destruction.
+
+It was exceedingly unfortunate for {31} the community that the leaders
+of the James and Younger gangs were temperate men. Had it not been so,
+their careers, instead of extending over 20 harassing years, would have
+been cut short inside of five. Uncontrollable predilection for whisky,
+and the society of strange women brought about the destruction of nearly
+all of the band who from time to time were slain by each other's hands
+or those of justice. Temperance and chastity in a rascal of any kind
+mean an immense amount of mischief to the community. Fortunately
+they are quite rare. {32} THE rapid spread of Prohibition is full
+of suggestion. The grain fields of Kansas and Texas are periodically
+devastated by the green bug. When the green bugs are at their worst a
+parasite appears which sweeps them off, and the wheat growers have a
+respite. Then, having destroyed their provender, the parasites starve,
+and the green bugs have a chance to grow again until the parasites
+overtake them in the hour of their triumph and power.
+
+Will the suppression of the alcoholic scavenger allow the criminals and
+quasi-criminals to multiply like the green bugs? {33}
+
+                    ------
+
+DURING the ages of terrible oppression of the European peoples which
+culminated in the French Revolution, the main amelioration of the
+hardships endured was found in the vices of the oppressors. The sword of
+the duelist, quarreling over women, the picturesque horrors of delirium
+tremens, and the loathsome mal de Naples continually swept away
+hecatombs of tyrant lordlings and frequently obliterated whole families.
+In fact no aristocratic family ever withstood these adverse influences
+very long. Extinction came as promptly and as certainly as the curculio
+to the ripening plum. The student of French and English {34} history is
+continually astonished at the brief time in which noble names remain in
+view. They rise to dizzy eminence on one page, and on the next go down
+to oblivion. One rarely finds the name of a century or two ago mentioned
+in any of the European news of to-day. Mr. Freeman, the eminent English
+historian, says, conclusively, that in spite of the perennial vaunt of
+ancestors who "came over with the Conqueror," and of Tennyson's musical
+mendacity about the "daughter of an hundred Earls," the families who can
+trace back to even so recent a date as the reign of the Stuarts are
+very rare. {35} Frequently hundreds of years elapsed before the historic
+titles were "revived" to gild some parvenu. Since then these families
+have been kept up only by intermarriages with later parvenus.
+
+The royal family itself has been repeatedly on the point of extinction,
+and the continuity of the line only maintained by extraordinary efforts.
+
+                      ------
+
+IDLENESS, luxury, and more or less flagrant debauchery have done their
+appointed work in removing the deteriorated forms of human life {36}
+from the world, that their room might be had for more acceptable
+growths.
+
+                    ------
+
+SOCIETY has been most aptly likened to a vat of good wine, which is scum
+and froth at the top, dregs and sediment at the bottom, and good, pure,
+clear liquor in the middle. Vice does admirable work in skimming away
+the supernatant scum and in drawing off the dregs and settlings.
+
+Unceasing fermentation seems to be a condition necessary to the health
+of society. The humblest work incessantly to lift themselves into the
+ranks of {37} the middle-classes, the middle-classes strive as earnestly
+to make themselves plutocrats, aristocrats, and lordlings. This ambition
+for worldly advancement is one of society's most powerful adjuncts
+for good. When a man at last reaches the social summit he desists
+from further efforts at improvement. He becomes like a man who after
+struggling forward to reach the head of the procession refuses to march
+another step. Some vice, mayhap merely over-eating, is likely to remove
+him and secure the ground for another man to come to the front, who
+is also removed summarily when he becomes obstructive. If the
+fortune-builder is {38} not thus removed, his children are subject to
+attack.
+
+Were it not for this, the upper stratum of society would speedily
+become so crowded that ascent to it would be impossible, all healthful,
+ambitious motive be taken away from the middle and lower classes,
+stagnation follow, and society perish from congestion.
+
+                    ------
+
+HISTORY is full of illustrations of the benefits of vice in assisting to
+shape the destinies of Nations and peoples. Take, for example, the {39}
+Bourbons whose stupidity and tyranny have passed into a proverb. In
+the last century their worse than worthless personalities filled nearly
+every throne in southern Europe. They seemed to breed like wolves in
+a famine-stricken land, and their fangs were at every people's throat
+Fortunately they had vices. Wine and lechery did what human enemies
+could not and the pack of wolves rotted away like a flock of diseased
+sheep. The mortality was so regular that for a long time French kings
+were succeeded by their grand-sons and great-grandsons, their sons all
+burning themselves out before the time came for ascending the throne.
+{40} The unutterably vile life of Louis XV. was terminated by the
+smallpox communicated to him in the course of a most disgraceful amour.
+His grandson, who succeeded him, had no destructive vices, and so
+the people were compelled at last to resort to the guillotine to rid
+themselves of him. The vast problem for the French in 1790 would have
+been greatly simplified if Louis XVI. had been a shortlived debauchee
+like his father and two brothers. The healthy German blood of his Saxon
+mother corrected some-what the virus in the Bourbon veins, and he lived
+to become an intolerable cumberer and obstructive.
+
+                    ------
+
+{41} The only Bourbon still remaining on a throne is the King of Spain,
+and his teeth are on edge from the sour grapes of unchastity which his
+fathers and mothers ate.
+
+Like his grandmother, the notorious Isabella II, his father, aunts,
+and cousins, and indeed every one of the Bourbons, he is a sad physical
+weakling.
+
+The physicians politely term "scrofulous diathesis" the syphilitic taint
+of the Bourbon blood. In his grandmother it showed itself in a repulsive
+cutaneous disease which she tried to ameliorate or cure in a truly
+Bourbon-ish way, by having her underclothing {42} previously worn by a
+nun of high repute for piety.
+
+Alfonso's XIII.'s father burned himself out at the age of 28. His aunts
+and kinsmen all had some one or more of scrofula's varied physical
+degradations and deformities, and went out from time to time like
+ill-made candles.
+
+Though the hopes of his race and the peace of his country depend upon
+Alfonso's life, all the care given him in his boyhood could do no more
+than slightly mitigate the ancestral blight.
+
+                    ------
+
+{43} A FEW years ago the people of Holland were threatened with a most
+serious calamity. Depraved heredity, unwise sexual selection, or some
+other primal cause had resulted in the production, as the Prince of
+Orange--the Crown Prince--of an individual of a weak, inferior, and
+depraved nature. His was such a nature as on a throne becomes a fountain
+of numberless oppressions and evils, and rarely fails to goad the
+unhappy subjects into rebellion, attended with the usual frightful loss
+of life and property and vast sorrows. Fortunately he had destructive
+vices. The appetite for these led him to Paris. A few years of riot
+and {44} debauchery sapped away the dangerous life of "Lemons," as his
+worthless boon-companions named him, and he died as the fool dieth. The
+only harm he was able to do was the indirect damage of a bad example,
+and the good people of the Netherlands were rid of a possible Louis XV.
+at no greater cost than that of some years of extravagant life in the
+French capital. His father's evil excesses and penchant for pretty
+ballet-girls left as his only successor a young not over-strong girl,
+who thus far has failed to produce an heir to the throne, to the deep
+disappointment of such of her people as love royalty. Holland will,
+therefore, {45} in all probability, glide into a republic without the
+usual sanguinary convulsions attending such transitions.
+
+                    ------
+
+IT is the story of the Ages--old when the Pyramids were yet young; new to
+every generation. Hannibal's victorious army found the "soft delights of
+Capua" far more deadly than Roman swords. That famous "Winter in Capua"
+wrecked the invaders, saved Rome, and ruined Carthage.
+
+                    ------
+
+{46} IN conspicuous contrast to the royal and aristocratic families just
+alluded to are the houses of Hohenzollern and Savoy.
+
+A thrifty burgher of Nuremberg, eager to get into the landed aristocracy
+on any terms, foreclosed a mortgage on a stretch of most unpromising
+sand and swamp around Brandenberg. It was of so little worth as to be
+frequently spoken of as "the sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire," The
+Hohenzollerns
+
+attacked this uninviting problem with real German thrift and tenacity.
+They resolved to make their swamps and sand barrens productive like
+the rich lands of their neighbors. {47} Flinching from no drudgery
+themselves, they would allow none of their people to do so. Every
+Hohenzollern son and daughter was brought up to unsparing hard work,
+severe economy, plain food and coarse clothing, with a rigid code of
+morals.
+
+At the time when the example of Louis XIV. was debauching every German
+princeling into having a showy court with a pretentious palace and a
+tinseled retinue, all wrung from the poor peasantry, the King of Prussia
+was running his court after the manner of a close-fisted, land-gaining
+German farmer.
+
+Cabbages that could not be sold {48} were served on the royal tables in
+order to save a few thalers for the support of the army, and add to the
+war chest.
+
+The shabby appointments of the palace were the derision of Europe. The
+common people of Prussia had, however, a much larger share of what their
+labor produced than those of any other part of Europe. The King not
+only set a good example in making the most out of everything, but he
+personally caned lessons of industry and frugality into his people, high
+and low.
+
+There were occasionally black sheep in even such a sternly regulated
+family, but as a general rule the sons and daughters married strong,
+clean mates, {49} and strictly maintained the family traditions. A
+provision against the way ward princelings was made by which their
+possessions passed into the main house if they fell below the standard.
+So the Hohenzollerns grew, and Prussia grew from a despised sandbarren
+to be one of the Six Great Powers of Europe, and is now the head of the
+mighty German Empire. We do not have as full history of the House of
+Savoy, but we have enough to know that in much the same way, at the same
+time, and by much the same moral discipline, it arose from the lordship
+of a little stretch of mountain {50} land in the Alps to rule over
+United Italy.
+
+                    ------
+
+THE most attractive feature of this self-pruning of the objectionable
+growths in society, as said before, is that the victims destroy
+themselves under the hallucination that they are drinking the richest
+wine of earthly pleasure. When execution can be made a matter of keen
+relish to the condemned, certainly nothing is wanting on the score of
+humanity.
+
+                    ------
+
+{51} I ANTICIPATE the objection that slaying bad men by means of their
+own vicious propensities brings much misery to those connected with
+them.
+
+But then all innocent persons connected with bad men are fated to suffer
+in exact proportion to the closeness of the connection, whether the bad
+men are destroyed or not. Weak, selfish, perverted, and criminal men
+always inflict misery upon their relatives and associates. This is not
+usually intensified by their being drunkards or debauchees.
+
+It is also true that no one of Nature's methods of extinction is
+pleasant {52} to those connected with the victim. The thief or thug,
+prematurely dying with delirium tremens, is certainly quite as bearable
+a sight to those before whose eyes it may come as the spectacle of a
+virtuous man, the sole support of his family, slowly wasting away with
+consumption in spite of all that loving service and agonizing sympathy
+can do to retain for him a life that is of so much value.
+
+                    ------
+
+TO the next objection that the practice of vice is not invariably
+suicidal, since many rascals live to attain as {53} green an old age
+as the most righteous, it is sufficient to say that plentiful as these
+exceptions may occasionally seem, their proportion to the whole number
+is at least as small as that of the exceptions to any other general law
+of biology.
+
+The policeman on the next corner will bear decided testimony that the
+number of scoundrels who survive their 30th year is astonishingly small,
+and he can point out any number of erstwhile troublesome members of
+the community who are ending their lives in penitentiary, poorhouse, or
+hospital at an age when well-behaved men are {54} just entering upon the
+serious business of life.
+
+It is also demonstrable that the proportion of vicious men to the
+whole population is much less to-day than at any previous period in the
+history of the race. This shows conclusively the improvement of society
+by the self-destructiveness of vice. The proportion of bad men is
+rapidly diminishing, because bad men die sooner and propagate fewer than
+good ones. {55}
+
+                    ------
+
+SCIENCE is incredulous of any relation between religion and natural
+laws. Yet it is true now as said thirty centuries ago that--
+
+     "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
+     A good understanding have they who keep his commandments."
+
+From the Ten Commandments on, all religions have been the best
+efforts of their founders and supporters to put man in accord with his
+environment. This is their essence, though too frequently obscured by
+the political, theological, and social aspects given them.
+
+While some religions are much better than others, every man gets as {56}
+good a religion and as much of it as he has capacity for. Nothing
+has been more clearly demonstrated by thousands of years of strenuous
+missionary effort than this fact.
+
+Furthermore, any religion is better than none.
+
+     "For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight,
+     His can't be wrong, whose life is in the right"
+
+                          ------
+
+RELIGION, in its primary sense of something to bind back, to bind fast,
+is a force which restrains a {57} man from acts temporarily attractive
+but eventually hurtful to himself and others.
+
+Some religions, like the Hebrew, promise in addition to spiritual
+benefits, long life, worldly success, peace, happiness, and blessings to
+the children, even to the third and fourth generations.
+
+The Brahmin and Buddhist promise a Nirvana--a dreamless rest from the
+troubles of life.
+
+The Christian and Mahometan promise an eternity of ineffable bliss.
+
+All of these are based upon the elements of moral science and, at least,
+{58} give a man a fairly reliable sailing chart for the voyage of life.
+
+Defective as many of them may be, they are the best that human
+intelligence has so far produced.
+
+Next in order but far inferior in saving power are statute laws and
+social ethics.
+
+All these influences are potent in that broad, middle ground which
+separates the best from the worst. They "pluck brands from the burning."
+
+By their means the less aberrant are brought into nearer conformity with
+Nature's stern requirements.
+
+But for the hopeless defectives,--the misfits in her tireless
+productiveness {59} --religion, laws, and society are alike weaker than
+woman's tears.
+
+They themselves sharpen the scythe of the Grim Reaper who brings the
+only remedy. {60}
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Economic Functions of Vice, by John McElroy
+
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