The Fable of the Bees; Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. Bernard Mandeville

were), a great alteration has been made among the better sort of people in their equipages, entertainments, and whole manner of living.

      Those who would have it, that the frugality of that nation flows not so much from necessity, as a general aversion to vice and luxury, will put us in mind of their public administration, and smallness of salaries, their prudence in bargaining for, and buying stores and other necessaries, the great care they take not to be imposed upon by those that serve them, and their severity against them that break their contracts. But what they would ascribe to the virtue and honesty of ministers, is wholly due to their strict regulations, concerning the management of the public treasure, from which their admirable form of government will not suffer them to depart; and indeed one good man may take another’s word, if they so agree, but a whole nation ought never to trust to any honesty, but what is built upon necessity; for unhappy is the people, and their constitution will be ever precarious, whose welfare must depend upon the virtues and consciences of ministers and politicians.

      The Dutch generally endeavour to promote as much frugality among their subjects as it is possible, not because it is a virtue, but because it is, generally speaking, their interest, as I have shown before; for, as this latter changes, so they alter their maxims, as will be plain in the following instance.

      As soon as their East India ships come home, the Company pays off the men, and many of them receive the greatest part of what they have been earning in seven or eight, or some fifteen or sixteen years time. These poor fellows are encouraged to spend their money with all profuseness imaginable; and considering that most of them, when they set out first, were reprobates, that under the tuition of a strict discipline, and a miserable diet, have been so long kept at hard labour without money, in the midst of danger, it cannot be difficult to make them lavish, as soon as they have plenty.

      They squander away in wine, women, and music, as much as people of their taste and education are well capable of, and are suffered (so they but abstain from doing of mischief), to revel and riot with greater licentiousness than is customary to be allowed to others. You may in some cities see them accompanied with three or four lewd women, few of them sober, run roaring through the streets by broad day-light with a fiddler before them: And if the money, to their thinking, goes not fast enough these ways, they will find out others, and sometimes fling it among the mob by handfuls. This madness continues in most of them while they have any thing left, which never lasts long, and for this reason, by a nick-name, they are called, Lords of six Weeks, that being generally the time by which the Company has other ships ready to depart; where these infatuated wretches (their money being gone) are forced to enter themselves again, and may have leisure to repent their folly.

      In this stratagem there is a double policy: First, if the sailors that have been inured to the hot climates and unwholesome air and diet, should be frugal, and stay in their own country, the Company would be continually obliged to employ fresh men, of which (besides that they are not so fit for their business), hardly one in two ever lives in some places of the East Indies, which often would prove great charge as well as disappointment to them. The second is, that the large sums so often distributed among those sailors, are by this means made immediately to circulate throughout the country, from whence, by heavy excises, and other impositions, the greatest part of it is soon drawn back into the public treasure.

      To convince the champions for national frugality by another argument, that what they urge is impracticable, we will suppose that I am mistaken in every thing which in Remark, l. 180, I have said in behalf of luxury, and the necessity of it to maintain trade: after that let us examine what a general frugality, if it was by art and management to be forced upon people whether they have occasion for it or not, would produce in such a nation as ours. We will grant, then, that all the people in Great Britain shall consume but four-fifths of what they do now, and so lay by one-fifth part of their income; I shall not speak of what influence this would have upon almost every trade, as well as the farmer, the grazier, and the landlord, but favourably suppose (what is yet impossible), that the same work shall be done, and consequently the same handicrafts be employed as there are now. The consequence would be, that unless money should all at once fall prodigiously in value, and every thing else, contrary to reason, grow very dear, at the five years end all the working people, and the poorest of labourers (for I would not meddle with any of the rest), would be worth in ready cash as much as they now spend in a whole year; which, by the bye, would be more money than ever the nation had at once.

      Let us now, overjoyed with this increase of wealth, take a view of the condition the working people would be in, and, reasoning from experience, and what we daily observe of them, judge what their behaviour would be in such a case. Every body knows that there is a vast number of journeymen weavers, tailors, clothworkers, and twenty other handicrafts, who, if by four days labour in a week they can maintain themselves, will hardly be persuaded to work the fifth; and that there are thousands of labouring men of all sorts, who will, though they can hardly subsist, put themselves to fifty inconveniences, disoblige their masters, pinch their bellies, and run in debt to make holidays. When men show such an extraordinary proclivity to idleness and pleasure, what reason have we to think that they would ever work, unless they were obliged to it by immediate necessity? When we see an artificer that cannot be drove to his work before Tuesday, because the Monday morning he has two shillings left of his last week’s pay; why should we imagine he would go to it at all, if he had fifteen or twenty pounds in his pocket?

      What would, at this rate, become of our manufactures? If the merchant would send cloth abroad, he must make it himself, for the clothier cannot get one man out of twelve that used to work for him. If what I speak of was only to befal the journeymen shoemakers, and nobody else, in less than a twelvemonth, half of us would go barefoot. The chief and most pressing use there is for money in a nation, is to pay the labour of the poor, and when there is a real scarcity of it, those who have a great many workmen to pay, will always feel it first; yet notwithstanding this great necessity of coin, it would be easier, where property was well secured, to live without money, than without poor; for who would do the work? For this reason the quantity of circulating coin in a country, ought always to be proportioned to the number of hands that are employed; and the wages of labourers to the price of provisions. From whence it is demonstrable, that whatever procures plenty, makes labourers cheap, where the poor are well managed; who as they ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving. If here and there one of the lowest class by uncommon industry, and pinching his belly, lifts himself above the condition he was brought up in, nobody ought to hinder him; nay, it is undeniably the wisest course for every person in the society, and for every private family to be frugal; but it is the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost never be idle, and yet continually spend what they get.

      All men, as Sir William Temple observes very well, are more prone to ease and pleasure than they are to labour, when they are not prompted to it by pride and avarice, and those that get their living by their daily labour, are seldom powerfully influenced by either: so that they have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants, which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure. The only thing, then, that can render the labouring man industrious, is a moderate quantity of money; for as too little will, according as his temper is, either dispirit or make him desperate, so too much will make him insolent and lazy.

      A man would be laughed at by most people, who should maintain that too much money could undo a nation: yet this has been the fate of Spain; to this the learned Don Diego Savedra ascribes the ruin of his country. The fruits of the earth in former ages had made Spain so rich, that King Lewis XI. of France being come to the court of Toledo, was astonished at its splendour, and said, that he had never seen any thing to be compared to it, either in Europe or Asia; he that in his travels to the Holy Land had run through every province of them. In the kingdom of Castile alone (if we may believe some writers), there were for the holy war, from all parts of the world got together one hundred thousand foot, ten thousand horse, and sixty thousand carriages for baggage, which Alonso III. maintained at his own charge, and paid every day, as well soldiers as officers and princes, every one according to his rank and dignity: nay, down to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (who equipped Columbus), and some time after, Spain was a fertile country, where trade and manufactures flourished, and had a knowing industrious people to boast of. But as soon as that mighty treasure, that was obtained