The Economic Functions of Vice | Page 4

John McElroy
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?
* * *

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
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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
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