------ SOCIETY has been most aptly likened to a vat of good wine, which is scum and froth at the top, dregs and sediment at the bottom, and good, pure, clear liquor in the middle. 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. When a man at last reaches the social summit he desists from further efforts at improvement. He becomes like a man who after struggling forward to reach the head of the procession refuses to march another step. Some vice, mayhap merely over-eating, is likely to remove him and secure the ground for another man to come to the front, who is also removed summarily when he becomes obstructive. If the fortune-builder is {38} not thus removed, his children are subject to attack. 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. ------ 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. The mortality was so regular that for a long time French kings were succeeded by their grand-sons and great-grandsons, their sons all burning themselves out before the time came for ascending the throne. {40} The unutterably vile life of Louis XV. was terminated by the smallpox communicated to him in the course of a most disgraceful amour. His grandson, who succeeded him, had no destructive vices, and so the people were compelled at last to resort to the guillotine to rid themselves of him. The vast problem for the French in 1790 would have been greatly simplified if Louis XVI. had been a shortlived debauchee like his father and two brothers. The healthy German blood of his Saxon mother corrected some-what the virus in the Bourbon veins, and he lived to become an intolerable cumberer and obstructive. ------