The Economic Functions of Vice.

by John McElroy.

FOR some inscrutable reason which she has as yet given no hint of revealing, Nature is wondrously wasteful in the matter of generation.

She creates a thousand where she intends to make use of one.

Imbued with the maternal instinct, the female cod casts millions of eggs upon the waters, expecting them to return after many days as troops of interesting {7} offspring. Instead, half die embryotic gadi are almost immediately devoured by sp.a.w.n-eaters, hundreds of thousands perish in incubation, hundreds of thousands more succ.u.mb to the perils attending ichthyic infancy, leaving but a few score to attain to adult usefulness and pa.s.s an honored old age with the fragrance of a well-spent life in the country grocery.

The oak showers down 10,000 acorns, each capable of producing a tree.

Three-fourths of them are straightway diverted from their arboreal intent through conversion into food by the provident squirrel and improvident hog. Great numbers rot uselessly upon the {8} ground, and the few hundred that finally succeed in germinating grow up into dense thickets, where at last die strongest smothers out all the rest like an oaken Oth.e.l.lo in a harem of quercine Desdemonas.

THIS is the law of all life, animal as well as vegetable. From the humble hyssop on the wall to the towering cedar of Lebanon, from the meek and lowly amoeba--which has no more character or individuality than any other pin-point of jelly--to the lordly tyrant {9} man, the rule is inevitable and invariable.

Life is sown broadcast only to be followed almost immediately by a destruction nearly as swift. Nature creates by the million apparently that she may destroy by the myriads. She gives life one instant only that she may s.n.a.t.c.h it away the next. The main difference is that the higher we ascend the less lavish is the creation and the less sweeping the destruction.

Thus, while probably but one fish out of a thousand reaches maturity, of 1,000 children born 604 attain adult age; that is, Nature flings aside 999 out of every 1,000 fish as useless for {10} her purposes, and two out of every five human beings.

MANY see in this relentless weeding out and destruction of her inferior products a remarkable ill.u.s.tration of the wisdom of Nature's methods.

What would they think of a workman so bungling that two-fifths of the products of his handicraft were only fit for destruction?

The "struggle for existence" is a murderous scramble to get rid of this vast surplusage. The "survival of the fittest" is the success of the minority in {11} demonstrating that the majority are superfluous. It is the Kilkenny-cat episode multiplied by infinity. It will be remembered that the whole trouble arose from the common belief that two cats were a surplus of one for the Kilkenny environment.

Darwin's theory recognizes in this super-fecundity of nature a most potent adjunct for improvement He says, in fact, that the impossibility of providing subsistence for more than a fraction of the mult.i.tudinous creation causes a mortal struggle in which the weaker and inferior are exterminated and only the stronger and superior survive. These in turn, have offspring like the leaves {12} of the forest, which in like turn are winnowed out by alien enemies and reciprocal extermination, and thus the process goes on with the sanguinary regularity of the King of Dahomey's administration of the internal economy of his realm. The benignity of this method of arranging the order of things is not so apparent as a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals might desire.

BUT our opinion of this law is not cared for. It is academic and superfluous. The main importance {13} attaches to the recognition of the fact that it is a law.

Its application to society is obvious: Since the propagation of human beings goes on with entire recklessness as to the quality of the product and the means of subsistence, some strong corrective is absolutely necessary to establish limits to populations and to secure the continued development of the race.

If every begotten child lived to the average age of 40, in a very few years there would not be standing room on the earth for its people.

Even with such limited propagators as the elephant, each female of which produces but six offspring in her bearing {14} period of 90 years, we are told that if the species had no parasitic or other enemy it would only be 740 years until elephants would overrun the earth.

Where then should we a.s.sign limits to the productiveness of the 750,000,000 human females on the globe, each of whom is capable of producing 20 children in her 30 years of bearing?

If, too, every child had the same chance of life without reference to its mental and physical fitness to live, humanity would soon become a stagnant slough of vicious vitality. There are only food and room for the best, and as the development of the race demands {15} it, only the best survive and continue the work of propagation. The rest are destroyed.

BY the "best" is understood those having that harmony of mental and physical development which brings them most nearly into accord with Nature's laws.

BELOW the human stratum superabundant generation is neutralized by the simple device of having {16} every organism prey upon some other one.

In her 10 years of fruitful life the female cod lays 50,000,000 eggs.

If nothing thwarted the amiable efforts of herself and offspring to multiply and replenish, they would shortly pack the ocean as full as a box of sardines.

While, however, giving one female the desire and capacity to produce 50,000,000 lives, nature has given other animals the desire and capacity to annihilate most of those 50,000,000 lives.

So all through the animal kingdom it is nearly a neck-to-neck race between production and extermination.

Life is a universal and unceasing {17} struggle, between the eaters and the eaten.

MAN alone is practically exempt from what is apparently an invariable

condition of all other forms of animal life. While he preys upon a myriad of created things, there is no created thing that preys on him and a.s.sists in keeping his excessive produc tiveness within the limits of subsistence. Most significant of all, not even a parasite wages destructive warfare against him. That is, if we except from the cla.s.sification the doctors' latest explanation {18} of the cause of everything, from pneumonia to laziness--the modest but effective bacillus. The bacillus, however, is much more a condition than a parasite.

This absence of destructive enemies must be compensated for in some way, and it is accomplished by making vicious inclinations the agents to weed out the redundant growths and to select for extermination those which are inferior, depraved, weak, and unfit for preservation or reproduction.

If five human beings are procreated where there is present room and provision but for three, how are the surplus {19} two to be picked out and exterminated?

Of course each one of us feels entirely competent to pick out in his own community the persons who could be best spared, but public opinion is at present hostile both to any practical plan of making the necessary thinning out, and also to lodging the power of selection in the hands of those of us best calculated for the duty.

APPARENTLY the surplus ones relieve us from embarra.s.sment on this score by selecting to exterminate {20} themselves. Their methods of suicide cover a wide range of expedients but all are very effective.

And most beneficent of any of the facts connected with this subject is that each of those chosen for extermination embraces his fate with positive eagerness, under the delusion that he is about to enhance his own happiness.

Immoderate use of stimulants and the varied excesses and vital errors which are grouped under the general head of "dissipation," a "love of pleasure," or the still {21} more expressive phrase "a short life and a merry one," etc., are favorite ways of self-annihilation and leave little to be desired in the completeness with which they do their work.

English statisticians formerly estimated that if a man drank beer in large quant.i.ties it took him 21.7 years to kill himself, which period the whisky-drinker shortened to 16.1 years.

Closer study and wider knowledge have materially changed these conclusions, to the great detriment of beer. For once, and upon one point, the physicians of the world have agreed. American, English, and German doctors say with one voice that the most {22} hopeless patient who comes into their hands is the soaked, c.r.a.pulous, beer-drinker.

"Point out a gray-haired beer-drinker," they challenge, and challenge in vain. Gray-haired whisky-drinkers may be found, but not the others.

Starch in every stage of decay, carried by the all-penetrating alcohol, surcharges the tissues with putrefaction, and makes the tumid veins a forcing-ground for bacteria. Thus the beer-drinker's slight cold becomes at once pneumonia, or inflammatory rheumatism, or Bright's disease, and his life flickers out like a candle in a gusty pa.s.sage.

Intemperance being among the milder vices kills slowly. s.e.xual sins slay {23} more rapidly, and the criminal grades of vice do their work with a swiftness in proportion to their flagrancy. The Psalmist says, "b.l.o.o.d.y and deceitful men shall not live out half their days," but police records will show that David materially overrates 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 {24} of their environment, and that the progress of the race or species involves the destruction of the weaker or the inferior who are not in such harmony, the conclusion follows that any aberration toward vice shows such 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--precisely as disease is 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 and another {25} the sovereign remedy of extermination.

MUCH is said of the devastation of our fairest and brightest by the Drink Demon. This is mainly nonsense. It was more nearly true in former generations, when intemperance was an almost universal vice. As