THE ECONOMIC FUNCTION OF VICE. 737 



sary to the health of society. The humhlest work incessantly to lift 

 themselves into the ranks of the middle classes. The middle classes 

 strive as earnestly to make themselves plutocrats, aristocrats, and lord- 

 lings. This passion for worldly advancement is one of society's most 

 powerful engines for good. When a man at last reaches the social 

 summit, he desists from further efforts at improvement, or, if this 

 period comes too late in life, his children do it after him. He be- 

 comes like a man who has struggled forward to the head of a proces- 

 sion, and then refuses to march another step. Some vice speedily 

 removes him, and clears the ground for another man to come to the 

 front, who is also removed summarily when he becomes obstructive. 

 Were it not for this, the upper stratum of society would speedily be- 

 come 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 carcasses 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 ene- 

 mies could not. The pack of wolves rotted away like a flock of dis- 

 eased sheep. The mortality was so great 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 small-pox, communicated to him in the course of a most dis- 

 graceful amour. His grandson, who succeeded him, had no destructive 

 vices, and so the people were compelled at last to resort to the guillo- 

 tine to rid themselves of him. The vast problem before the French 

 in 1T90 would have been greatly simplified if Louis XIV had been a 

 short-lived debauche 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 obstructive. 



The only Bourbon still remaining on a throne is the King of Spain, 

 with whom the race, as a royal family, will probably become extinct. 

 His teeth are on edge from the sour grapes of unchastity which his 

 fathers ate. Like his mother, the notorious Isabella II, his sisters and 

 cousins, and indeed every one of the Bourbons, the scrofula, into 

 which the ancestral syphilitic taint has been modified, has made of 

 him a mass of physical decay. In his mother it has shown itself in a 

 very disgusting cutaneous disease, which she has for years tried to 

 ameliorate or cure, in a truly Bourbonish way, by wearing the under- 

 clothing of a nun of high repute for piety. His sisters and kinsmen 

 vol. xxn. 47 



