The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices, Publick Benefits

were famed for strength, riches, and refinement at the same time.

To do this, I first slightly touch upon some of the faults and corruptions with which the various professions and callings are generally charged. After that, I show that those very vices of every individual person, by skillful management, were made subservient to the grandeur and worldly happiness of the whole. Lastly, by setting forth what must necessarily be the consequence of general honesty and virtue, and national temperance, innocence, and contentment, I demonstrate that if mankind could be cured of the failings they are naturally guilty of, they would cease to be capable of being raised into such vast, powerful, and refined societies as they have been under the various great commonwealths and monarchies that have flourished since the Creation.

If you? ask me why I have done all this, cui bono? and what good these notions will produce? Truly, besides the reader’s entertainment, I believe none at all; but if I were asked what naturally ought to be expected from them, I would answer: that in the first place, the people who continually find fault with others, by reading them, would be taught to look at home, and by examining their own consciences, be made ashamed of always railing at what they are more or less guilty of themselves; and that in the next, those who are so fond of the ease and comforts, and reap all the benefits that are the consequence of a great and flourishing nation, would