Note 18 — LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH COMIC WRITERS (continued 3)

As an instance of his general power of reasoning, I shall give his chapter entitled One Man’s Profit is another’s Loss, in which he has nearly anticipated Mandeville’s celebrated paradox of private vices being public benefits:—

‘Demades, the Athenian, condemned a fellow-citizen, who furnished out funerals, for demanding too great a price for his goods: and if he got an estate, it must be by the death of a great many people: but I think it a sentence ill grounded, forasmuch as no profit can be made, but at the expense of some other person, and that every kind of gain is by that rule liable to be condemned. The tradesman thrives by the debauchery of youth, and the farmer by the dearness of corn; the architect by the ruin of buildings, the officers of justice by quarrels and law-suits; nay, even the honour and function of divines is owing to our mortality and vices. No physician takes pleasure in the health even of his best friends, said the ancient Greek comedian, nor soldier in the peace of his country; and so of the rest. And, what is yet worse, let every one but examine his own heart, and he will find that his private wishes spring and grow up at the expense of some other person. Upon which consideration this thought came into my head, that nature does not hereby deviate from her general policy; for the naturalists hold, that the birth, nourishment, and increase of any one thing is the decay and corruption of another:

Nam quodcunque suis mutatum finibus exit,

Continuo hoc mors est illius, quod fuit ante. i.e.

For what from its own confines chang’d doth pass,

Is straight the death of what before it was.’

Vol. 1. Chap. xxi.