The Economic Functions of Vice | Page 4

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 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.
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.
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IDLENESS, luxury, and more or less flagrant debauchery have done their appointed work in removing the deteriorated forms of human life from the world, that their room might be had for more acceptable growths.
IT 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 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 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.
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HISTORY is full of illustrations of the benefits of vice in assisting to shape the destinies of Nations and peoples. Take, for example, the 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 grandsons and great-grandsons, their sons all burning themselves out before the time came for ascending the throne.
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 somewhat the virus in the Bourbon veins, and he lived to become an intolerable cumberer and obstructive.
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