John McElroy

“ THE most attractive feature of this self-pruning of the objectionable growths in society, as said before, is that the victims destroy themselves under the hallucination that they are drinking the richest wine of earthly pleasure. When execution can be made a matter of keen relish to the condemned, certainly nothing is wanting on the score of humanity. ”

“ The sword of the duelist, quarreling over women, the picturesque horrors of delirium tremens, and the loathsome mal de Naples continually swept away hecatombs of tyrant lordlings and frequently obliterated whole families. In fact no aristocratic family ever withstood these adverse influences very long. Extinction came as promptly and as certainly as the curculio to the ripening plum. The student of French and English {34} history is continually astonished at the brief time in which noble names remain in view. They rise to dizzy eminence on one page, and on the next go down to oblivion. ”

“ Whisky makes no man lazy, shiftless, dishonest, false, cowardly or brutal. These must be original qualities with him. If he has them he will probably take to whisky—though not inevitably—which then does the community the splendid service of hurrying him along to destruction, and of abridging his infliction upon the public. {28}
PEOPLE who have done much in the way of reforming drunkards have been astonished to find how little real manhood remained after eliminating whisky from the equation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ MANY see in this relentless weeding out and destruction of her inferior products a remarkable illustration 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? ”

“ Vice does admirable work in skimming away the supernatant scum and in drawing off the dregs and settlings.
Unceasing fermentation seems to be a condition necessary to the health of society. The humblest work incessantly to lift themselves into the ranks of {37} the middle-classes, the middle-classes strive as earnestly to make themselves plutocrats, aristocrats, and lordlings. This ambition for worldly advancement is one of society’s most powerful adjuncts for good. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 multitudinous creation causes a mortal struggle in which the weaker and inferior are exterminated and only the stronger and superior survive. ”

“ 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 passage.
Intemperance being among the milder vices kills slowly. Sexual sins slay {23} more rapidly, and the criminal grades of vice do their work with a swiftness in proportion to their flagrancy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Uncontrollable predilection for whisky, and the society of strange women brought about the destruction of nearly all of the band who from time to time were slain by each other’s hands or those of justice. Temperance and chastity in a rascal of any kind mean an immense amount of mischief to the community. Fortunately they are quite rare. {32} THE rapid spread of Prohibition is full of suggestion. The grain fields of Kansas and Texas are periodically devastated by the green bug. When the green bugs are at their worst a parasite appears which sweeps them off, and the wheat growers have a respite. ”

“ HISTORY is full of illustrations of the benefits of vice in assisting to shape the destinies of Nations and peoples. Take, for example, the {39} Bourbons whose stupidity and tyranny have passed into a proverb. In the last century their worse than worthless personalities filled nearly every throne in southern Europe. They seemed to breed like wolves in a famine-stricken land, and their fangs were at every people’s throat Fortunately they had vices. Wine and lechery did what human enemies could not and the pack of wolves rotted away like a flock of diseased sheep. ”

“ 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. ”

“ While some religions are much better than others, every man gets as {56} good a religion and as much of it as he has capacity for. Nothing has been more clearly demonstrated by thousands of years of strenuous missionary effort than this fact.
Furthermore, any religion is better than none.
“For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, His can’t be wrong, whose life is in the right”
RELIGION, in its primary sense of something to bind back, to bind fast, is a force which restrains a {57} man from acts temporarily attractive but eventually hurtful to himself and others. ”

“ But then all innocent persons connected with bad men are fated to suffer in exact proportion to the closeness of the connection, whether the bad men are destroyed or not. Weak, selfish, perverted, and criminal men always inflict misery upon their relatives and associates. This is not usually intensified by their being drunkards or debauchees.
It is also true that no one of Nature’s methods of extinction is pleasant {52} to those connected with the victim. ”

“ This shows conclusively the improvement of society by the self-destructiveness of vice. The proportion of bad men is rapidly diminishing, because bad men die sooner and propagate fewer than good ones. {55}
SCIENCE is incredulous of any relation between religion and natural laws. Yet it is true now as said thirty centuries ago that—
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. A good understanding have they who keep his commandments.”
From the Ten Commandments on, all religions have been the best efforts of their founders and supporters to put man in accord with his environment. ”

“ TO the next objection that the practice of vice is not invariably suicidal, since many rascals live to attain as {53} green an old age as the most righteous, it is sufficient to say that plentiful as these exceptions may occasionally seem, their proportion to the whole number is at least as small as that of the exceptions to any other general law of biology. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ American, English, and German doctors say with one voice that the most {22} hopeless patient who comes into their hands is the soaked, crapulous, 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. ”

“ The common people of Prussia had, however, a much larger share of what their labor produced than those of any other part of Europe. The King not only set a good example in making the most out of everything, but he personally caned lessons of industry and frugality into his people, high and low. ”

“ The policeman on the next corner will bear decided testimony that the number of scoundrels who survive their 30th year is astonishingly small, and he can point out any number of erstwhile troublesome members of the community who are ending their lives in penitentiary, poorhouse, or hospital at an age when well-behaved men are {54} just entering upon the serious business of life. ”

“ Were it not for this, the upper stratum of society would speedily become so crowded that ascent to it would be impossible, all healthful, ambitious motive be taken away from the middle and lower classes, stagnation follow, and society perish from congestion. ”

“ Every man whose sloth or improvidence has brought himself and his family to beggary, every thieving tramp upon the highways, every rascal in the penitentiary, every murderer upon the gallows, hastens to plead “whisky brought {27} me to this!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ While he preys upon a myriad of created things, there is no created thing that preys on him and assists in keeping his excessive produc tiveness within the limits of subsistence. Most significant of all, not even a parasite wages destructive warfare against him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Copyright, 1906
“Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life.” ——— “And the individual withers, and the world is more and more.” —Tennyson.
THE ECONOMIC FUNCTIONS OF VICE
FOR some inscrutable reason which she has as yet given no hint of revealing, Nature is wondrously wasteful in the matter of generation. ”

“ They had supposed the manhood to be only obscured, and were disheartened to find how frequently it happened to be demonstrated that there never was enough of it to pay for the trouble of “saving the victim of intemperance.” ”

“ 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 Othello in a harem of quercine Desdemonas. ”