THE ECONOMIC FUNCTION OF VICE. 735 



temperance, being among the milder vices, kills slowly. Sexual sins 

 slay more rapidly, and the higher grades of vice do their work with 

 a swiftness proportioned to their flagrancy. The Psalmist says, 

 " Bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days," but 

 police records will show that David materially overstates the average. 

 " One quarter their days " would approach much nearer exactness. 



Returning to the major premise, that the " survival of the fittest " 

 means the selection and preservation of those individuals who are most 

 nearly in harmony with the conditions of their environment, and that 

 the progress of the race or species involves the destruction of the 

 weaker and inferior, who are not in such harmony, the conclusion 

 follows that any aberration toward vice shows such a discordance in 

 the individual with the laws of his environment as marks him as 

 inferior, weak, and obstructive of the race's development. 



Vice is not so much a cause as an effect not so much a disease 

 as a symptom. Vice does not make a nature weak or defective : a 

 weak and defective nature expresses its weaknesses and defects in 

 vice, and that expression brings about, in one way or another, the sov- 

 ereign remedy of extermination. 



Temperance agitators fill our ears continually with wails as to how 

 the " demon Alcohol is yearly dragging down to dishonorable graves 

 hundreds of thousands of the brightest and fairest of our land." This 

 is supreme nonsense. With very few exceptions, every one who goes 

 to perdition by the Alcohol route would reach that destination by some 

 other highway, if the Alcohol line were not running. 



Every man whose sloth or improvidence has brought himself and 

 his family to beggary, every thieving tramp upon the highways, every 

 rascal in the penitentiary, every murderer upon the gallows, hastens 

 to plead, "Whisky brought me to this ! " because he knows that such a 

 plea will bring him a gush of sloppy sympathy not obtainable by any 

 other means. But whisky makes no man lazy, shiftless, dishonest, 

 false, cowardly, or brutal. These must be original qualities with him. 

 If he has them, he will probably take to whisky though not inevi- 

 tably which then does the community the splendid service of hurry- 

 ing him along to destruction, and of abridging their infliction upon 

 the public. People who have done much in the way of reforming 

 drunkards have been astonished to find how little real manhood re- 

 mained after eliminating wdiisky from the equation. They have sup- 

 posed the manhood to be only obscured, and have been disheartened 

 to find how frequently it happens to be demonstrated that there was 

 never enough of it to pay for the trouble of "saving the victim of 

 intemperance." 



If, as the temperance agitators insist, " intemperance is yearly 

 dragging a hundred thousand of the men and women of our country 

 down to the grave," then a love of scientific truth compels the state- 

 ment that intemperance, while doing some harm, as is usually the case 



