Now the man who makes the laws is in one sense like the man who has learnt how to become invisible. I do not mean that he can break the laws with impunity, but he can see to it that he has no incentive to break them. Thus we have the majestic impartiality of the modern law which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep in doorways. He can also, as Thrasymachus points out, ensure that, so long as others keep them, his own power will be automatically safeguarded. And, since the law is at once the prop and the mirror of the public opinion of the community, and, since the public opinion of the community is in matters of conduct at once the guardian and the arbiter of conventional morality, we may further say that the habit of acting in a way of which the public opinion of the community approves will be found to conduce to the maintenance of the _status quo_, and hence to the interests of those whom the _status quo_ suits. In the early eighteenth century Bernard Mandeville revived and elaborated the doctrine of Thrasymachus. Society was devised by skilful politicians for their own advantage. This they hoped chiefly to secure by the spread of what was called morality. Addressing themselves, therefore, to men’s pride, they pointed out that man had always considered himself to be superior to the brute beasts. Yet, if he indulged his passions as soon as he conceived them and gave way alike to sensual desire and violent rage, wherein did his superiority consist? Surely in order to demonstrate their superiority men must learn to master their appetites and restrain their passions. The plain man listened to the words of the flatterer, and, aspiring to live the higher life, transformed himself from a savage into a clerk. The process is known as civilization. Tamed by his own conceit, man was now fit to live in society. As a social animal he regards as virtuous every action on the part of others by which the society to which he belongs is benefited, and stigmatizes as vicious the indulgence of private appetites irrespective of the public good. But the skilful politicians who had planned the thing from the beginning had taken good care to ensure that the good of society should be identical with their own advantage. Uncivilized man is ungovernable man, but man tamed and tractable, with the bees of social virtue and social service buzzing in his citizen’s bonnet, is at once the prop and the dupe of unscrupulous governments. “From which”, as Mandeville says, “it is evident that the first rudiments of morality broached by skilful politicians to make men useful to each other as well as tractable, were chiefly contrived that the ambitious might reap the more benefit from, and govern vast numbers of them with the greater ease and security.”