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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]
+Last Updated: August 21, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** 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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+
+<!DOCTYPE html
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+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Economic Functions of Vice, by John
+      Mcelroy.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd7; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    pre     { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+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]
+Last Updated: August 21, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ECONOMIC FUNCTIONS OF VICE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger (Images obtained from the Google Books Project)
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE ECONOMIC FUNCTIONS OF VICE
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By John McElroy
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      WASHINGTON, D. C. <br /><br /> Published by The National Tnbune <br /><br />
+      Copyright, 1906
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+
+                 &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
+
+     &ldquo;And the individual withers,
+     and the world is more and more.&rdquo;
+
+     &mdash;Tennyson.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE ECONOMIC FUNCTIONS OF VICE
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/7.jpg">{7}</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/8.jpg">{8}</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;which has no more character or individuality than any
+      other pin-point of jelly&mdash;to the lordly tyrant <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/9.jpg">{9}</a></span> man, the rule is inevitable and
+      invariable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/10.jpg">{10}</a></span> her purposes, and two out of every
+      five human beings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MANY see in this relentless weeding out and destruction of her inferior
+      products a remarkable illustration of the wisdom of Nature&rsquo;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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;struggle for existence&rdquo; is a murderous scramble to get rid of this
+      vast surplusage. The &ldquo;survival of the fittest&rdquo; is the success of the
+      minority in <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/11.jpg">{11}</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Darwin&rsquo;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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/12.jpg">{12}</a></span> 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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BUT our opinion of this law is not cared for. It is academic and
+      superfluous. The main importance <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/13.jpg">{13}</a></span> attaches to the recognition of the
+      fact that it is a law.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even with such limited propagators as the elephant, each female of which
+      produces but six offspring in her bearing <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/14.jpg">{14}</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/15.jpg">{15}</a></span> it, only the best survive and
+      continue the work of propagation. The rest are destroyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BY the &ldquo;best&rdquo; is understood those having that harmony of mental and
+      physical development which brings them most nearly into accord with
+      Nature&rsquo;s laws.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BELOW the human stratum superabundant generation is neutralized by the
+      simple device of having <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/16.jpg">{16}</a></span>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So all through the animal kingdom it is nearly a neck-to-neck race between
+      production and extermination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Life is a universal and unceasing <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/17.jpg">{17}</a></span> struggle, between the eaters and the
+      eaten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MAN alone is practically exempt from what is apparently an invariable
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;
+      latest explanation <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/18.jpg">{18}</a></span>
+      of the cause of everything, from pneumonia to laziness&mdash;the modest
+      but effective bacillus. The bacillus, however, is much more a condition
+      than a parasite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If five human beings are procreated where there is present room and
+      provision but for three, how are the surplus <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/19.jpg">{19}</a></span> two to be picked out and
+      exterminated?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      APPARENTLY the surplus ones relieve us from embarrassment on this score by
+      selecting to exterminate <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/20.jpg">{20}</a></span>
+      themselves. Their methods of suicide cover a wide range of expedients but
+      all are very effective.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Immoderate use of stimulants and the varied excesses and vital errors
+      which are grouped under the general head of &ldquo;dissipation,&rdquo; a &ldquo;love of
+      pleasure,&rdquo; or the still <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/21.jpg">{21}</a></span>
+      more expressive phrase &ldquo;a short life and a merry one,&rdquo; etc., are favorite
+      ways of self-annihilation and leave little to be desired in the
+      completeness with which they do their work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/22.jpg">{22}</a></span> hopeless patient who comes into their
+      hands is the soaked, crapulous, beer-drinker. &ldquo;Point out a gray-haired
+      beer-drinker,&rdquo; they challenge, and challenge in vain. Gray-haired
+      whisky-drinkers may be found, but not the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s slight cold becomes
+      at once pneumonia, or inflammatory rheumatism, or Bright&rsquo;s disease, and
+      his life flickers out like a candle in a gusty passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Intemperance being among the milder vices kills slowly. Sexual sins slay
+      <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/23.jpg">{23}</a></span> more
+      rapidly, and the criminal grades of vice do their work with a swiftness in
+      proportion to their flagrancy. The Psalmist says, &ldquo;bloody and deceitful
+      men shall not live out half their days,&rdquo; but police records will show that
+      David materially overrates the average. &ldquo;One quarter their days&rdquo; would
+      approach much nearer exactness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      RETURNING to the major premise that the &ldquo;survival of the fittest&rdquo; means
+      the selection and preservation of those individuals who are most nearly in
+      harmony with the conditions <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/24.jpg">{24}</a></span>
+      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&rsquo;s development
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Vice is not so much a cause as an effect&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/25.jpg">{25}</a></span> the sovereign remedy of
+      extermination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hamlet says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;it is a custom
+     More honor&rsquo;d in the breach than the observance.
+     This heavy-headed revel east and west
+     Makes us traduced and tax&rsquo;d of other nations:
+     They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase
+     Soil our addition.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/26.jpg">{26}</a></span> Morals has
+      made wonderful progress since then, in all directions, and heavy drinking
+      has been more and more restricted to those who are
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+&ldquo;Marked cross from the womb and perverse.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;whisky
+      brought <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/27.jpg">{27}</a></span> me
+      to this!&rdquo; because he knows that such a plea will bring him a gush of
+      sloppy sympathy unobtainable by other means.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;though not inevitably&mdash;which then does the
+      community the splendid service of hurrying him along to destruction, and
+      of abridging his infliction upon the public. <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/28.jpg">{28}</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;saving the victim of intemperance.&rdquo; Like the cherubim before the throne
+      of God, the Temperance orators &ldquo;con- tinually do cry,&rdquo; the burden of their
+      song being that hundreds of thousands are annually slain by the monster
+      Intemperance. <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/29.jpg">{29}</a></span>
+      Quite singularly these figures are probably not exaggerated. Myriads of
+      times kindly-hearted physicians write in the death certificate
+      &ldquo;pneumonia,&rdquo; &ldquo;heart-failure,&rdquo; &ldquo;diabetes,&rdquo; etc., when truth demands &ldquo;beer&rdquo;
+       or &ldquo;whisky.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BUT what of this?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,
+      &ldquo;sports,&rdquo; spongers, swindlers, <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/30.jpg">{30}</a></span> and others of the criminal and
+      quasi-criminal classes. Over their moldering clay the daisies bloom in
+      sweet oblivion of
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;The sins and crimes
+     Done in their days of nature.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was exceedingly unfortunate for <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/31.jpg">{31}</a></span> 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&rsquo;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. <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/32.jpg">{32}</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Will the suppression of the alcoholic scavenger allow the criminals and
+      quasi-criminals to multiply like the green bugs? <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/33.jpg">{33}</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/34.jpg">{34}</a></span> 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 &ldquo;came
+      over with the Conqueror,&rdquo; and of Tennyson&rsquo;s musical mendacity about the
+      &ldquo;daughter of an hundred Earls,&rdquo; the families who can trace back to even so
+      recent a date as the reign of the Stuarts are very rare. <span
+      class="pagenum"><a href="images/35.jpg">{35}</a></span> Frequently
+      hundreds of years elapsed before the historic titles were &ldquo;revived&rdquo; to
+      gild some parvenu. Since then these families have been kept up only by
+      intermarriages with later parvenus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The royal family itself has been repeatedly on the point of extinction,
+      and the continuity of the line only maintained by extraordinary efforts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      IDLENESS, luxury, and more or less flagrant debauchery have done their
+      appointed work in removing the deteriorated forms of human life <span
+      class="pagenum"><a href="images/36.jpg">{36}</a></span> from the world,
+      that their room might be had for more acceptable growths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unceasing fermentation seems to be a condition necessary to the health of
+      society. The humblest work incessantly to lift themselves into the ranks
+      of <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/37.jpg">{37}</a></span> 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&rsquo;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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/38.jpg">{38}</a></span> not thus removed, his children are
+      subject to attack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      HISTORY is full of illustrations of the benefits of vice in assisting to
+      shape the destinies of Nations and peoples. Take, for example, the <span
+      class="pagenum"><a href="images/39.jpg">{39}</a></span> 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&rsquo;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. <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/40.jpg">{40}</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/41.jpg">{41}</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The physicians politely term &ldquo;scrofulous diathesis&rdquo; 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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/42.jpg">{42}</a></span> previously worn by a nun of high
+      repute for piety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alfonso&rsquo;s XIII.&lsquo;s father burned himself out at the age of 28. His aunts
+      and kinsmen all had some one or more of scrofula&rsquo;s varied physical
+      degradations and deformities, and went out from time to time like ill-made
+      candles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though the hopes of his race and the peace of his country depend upon
+      Alfonso&rsquo;s life, all the care given him in his boyhood could do no more
+      than slightly mitigate the ancestral blight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/43.jpg">{43}</a></span> 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&mdash;the Crown Prince&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/44.jpg">{44}</a></span> debauchery sapped away the dangerous
+      life of &ldquo;Lemons,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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, <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/45.jpg">{45}</a></span>
+      in all probability, glide into a republic without the usual sanguinary
+      convulsions attending such transitions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      IT is the story of the Ages&mdash;old when the Pyramids were yet young;
+      new to every generation. Hannibal&rsquo;s victorious army found the &ldquo;soft
+      delights of Capua&rdquo; far more deadly than Roman swords. That famous &ldquo;Winter
+      in Capua&rdquo; wrecked the invaders, saved Rome, and ruined Carthage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/46.jpg">{46}</a></span> IN
+      conspicuous contrast to the royal and aristocratic families just alluded
+      to are the houses of Hohenzollern and Savoy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;the sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire,&rdquo; The
+      Hohenzollerns
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/47.jpg">{47}</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cabbages that could not be sold <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/48.jpg">{48}</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/49.jpg">{49}</a></span> 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
+      <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/50.jpg">{50}</a></span> land in the
+      Alps to rule over United Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/51.jpg">{51}</a></span> I ANTICIPATE
+      the objection that slaying bad men by means of their own vicious
+      propensities brings much misery to those connected with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is also true that no one of Nature&rsquo;s methods of extinction is pleasant
+      <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/52.jpg">{52}</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      TO the next objection that the practice of vice is not invariably
+      suicidal, since many rascals live to attain as <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/53.jpg">{53}</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <span class="pagenum"><a
+      href="images/54.jpg">{54}</a></span> just entering upon the serious
+      business of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/55.jpg">{55}</a></span> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      SCIENCE is incredulous of any relation between religion and natural laws.
+      Yet it is true now as said thirty centuries ago that&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
+     A good understanding have they who keep his commandments.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While some religions are much better than others, every man gets as <span
+      class="pagenum"><a href="images/56.jpg">{56}</a></span> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Furthermore, any religion is better than none.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight,
+     His can&rsquo;t be wrong, whose life is in the right&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      RELIGION, in its primary sense of something to bind back, to bind fast, is
+      a force which restrains a <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/57.jpg">{57}</a></span>
+      man from acts temporarily attractive but eventually hurtful to himself and
+      others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Brahmin and Buddhist promise a Nirvana&mdash;a dreamless rest from the
+      troubles of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Christian and Mahometan promise an eternity of ineffable bliss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All of these are based upon the elements of moral science and, at least,
+      <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/58.jpg">{58}</a></span> give a man a
+      fairly reliable sailing chart for the voyage of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Defective as many of them may be, they are the best that human
+      intelligence has so far produced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next in order but far inferior in saving power are statute laws and social
+      ethics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these influences are potent in that broad, middle ground which
+      separates the best from the worst. They &ldquo;pluck brands from the burning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      By their means the less aberrant are brought into nearer conformity with
+      Nature&rsquo;s stern requirements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But for the hopeless defectives,&mdash;the misfits in her tireless
+      productiveness <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/59.jpg">{59}</a></span>
+      &mdash;religion, laws, and society are alike weaker than woman&rsquo;s tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They themselves sharpen the scythe of the Grim Reaper who brings the only
+      remedy. <span class="pagenum"><a href="images/60.jpg">{60}</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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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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