Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/286

 hundred doggerel lines, such as splenetic, misanthropic Swift was writing, such as iconoclastic Samuel Butler in "Hudibras" had written to tickle the anti-Puritan fancy of the last age. The pacifists and preachers and little Englanders and the societies for the reformation of morals were actively engaged in their perennial, millennial business, and Mandeville tossed among them a satirical skit, playing inoffensively with the idea that when ambition and enterprise are replaced by frugality, meekness, temperance, and long-suffering, society will cease to "bloom" and expand as it does when its animating ideals are stirring and aggressive.

For nine years Mandeville studied men and meditated on the contrast between what we might call "Christian idealism" and the actual way of the world. He came to the conclusion that all mankind talks about one objective: the kingdom of heaven, and bends the major part of its efforts toward reaching another objective: the power and the glory of this earth. He inquired why people worked at such cross-purposes, and I don't think he quite adequately solved that problem.

But he inquired thoroughly into the reason why the great majority of mankind actually find their pleasure in the pursuit of power and glory. He traced our civilization as it is back to its roots in the savage animal nature—into lust and fear and pride and vanity. His contemporary, Swift, coming on those same roots, became morbid and nasty over them, and was finally driven mad by the discovery. But Mandeville had the phlegm of a physician, and the special sort of robust clean-mindedness of which physicians are capable. He could cut open a patient and grope among his viscera or converse with his excrements, and yet think none