The Economic Functions of Vice

The Economic Functions of Vice
John McElroy.
WASHINGTON, D. C.
Published by The National Tribune.
Copyright, 1908 by John McElroy
"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.
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 offspring. Instead, half the 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
wellspent 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 ground, and the
few hundred that finally succeed in germinating grow up into dense
thickets, where at last the 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 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 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 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 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 I not cared for. It is academic and
superfluous. The main importance 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 period of 90 years, we
are told that if the species had no parasitic or