With an inherited ruling passion, and reason helpless to restrain it, we should be altogether the creatures of fate on Pope's hypothesis, if he had not furnished reason with a last resource, which, as is evident from several parallel passages, was chiefly suggested to him by the works of his contemporary, Mandeville. This shallow thinker put forth a system of morality and political economy in his Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits. The book, which was philosophically weak, attracted much notice at the time from the liveliness of his coarse illustrations, the vigorous ease of his inaccurate style, and the cynical parade of his licentious doctrines. He had the folly to imagine that commerce could only flourish when the wealth of a nation was consumed by the idle, the sensual, the luxurious. Hence, he argued that their wasteful vices were a national gain. This was his political economy. His morality consisted in denying the reality of virtue. He held that every apparent virtue was prompted by an underlying frailty, and that all ostensible goodness was the false mask worn over inward weaknesses. The indignation his system provoked induced him subsequently to throw in some qualifying phrases, but his faint, and always equivocal concessions, are forms of speech, and did not prevent his repeated avowal that genuine virtue had no existence on earth. "I often," he says, "compare the virtues of good men to your large China jars; they make a fine show, but look into a thousand of them, and you will find nothing in them but dust and cobwebs."[843]