4. _Private vices, public benefits_. Mandeville ventures to compare
society to a bowl of punch. Avarice is the souring, and prodigality the
sweetening of it. The water is the ignorance and folly of the insipid
multitude, while honour and the noble qualities of man represent the
brandy. To each of these ingredients we may object in turn, but
experience teaches that, when judiciously mixed, they make an excellent
liquor. It is not the good, but the evil qualities of men, that lead to
worldly greatness. Without luxury we should have no trade. This
doctrine is illustrated at great length, and has been better remembered
than anything else in the book; but it may be dismissed with two
remarks. (1) It embodies an error in political economy, namely, that it
is spending and not saving that gives employment to the poor. If
Mandeville"s aim had been less critical, and had he been less delighted
with his famous paradox, we may infer from the acuteness of his
reasoning on the subject, that he would have anticipated the true
doctrine of political economy, as he saw through the fallacy of the
mercantile theory. (2) He employs the term, luxury, with great
latitude, as including whatever is not a bare necessary of existence.
According to the fashionable doctrine of his day, all luxury was called
an evil and a vice; and in this sense, doubtless, vice is essential to
the existence of a great nation.
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