The Economic Functions of Vice | Page 2

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 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 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 struggle, between the eaters and the eaten.
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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 productiveness 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 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 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 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 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 whiskydrinker 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 hopeless patient who comes into their hands is the soaked, crapulous, beerdrinker. "Point out a gray-haired beerdrinker," 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 forcingground for bacteria. Thus the beerdrinker'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 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