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.

5. The origin of society.  Mandeville’s remarks on this subject are the best he has written, and come nearest to the accredited views of the present day.  He denies that we have any natural affection for one another, or any natural aversion or hatred.  Each seeks his own happiness, and conflict arises from the opposition of men’s desires.  To make a society out of the raw material of uncivilized men, is a work of great difficulty, requiring the concurrence of many favourable accidents, and a long period of time.  For the qualities developed among civilized men no more belong to them in a savage state, than the properties of wine exist in the grape.  Society begins with families.  In the beginning, the old savage has a great wish to rule his children, but has no capacity for government.  He is inconstant and violent in his desires, and incapable of any steady conduct.  What at first keeps men together is not so much reverence for the father, as the common danger from wild beasts.  The traditions of antiquity are full of the prowess of heroes in killing dragons and monsters.  The second step to society is the danger men are in from one another.  To protect themselves, several families would be compelled to accept the leadership of the strongest.  The leaders, seeing the mischiefs of dissension, would employ all their art to extirpate that evil.  Thus they would forbid killing one another, stealing one another’s wives, &c.  The third and last step is the invention of letters; this is essential to the growth of society, and to the corresponding, expansion of law.[22]