Project Gutenberg's The Economic Functions of Vice, by John McElroy

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Title: The Economic Functions of Vice

Author: John McElroy

Release Date: March 25, 2010 [EBook #31768]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ECONOMIC FUNCTIONS OF VICE ***

Produced by David Widger (Images obtained from the Google Books Project)

THE ECONOMIC FUNCTIONS OF VICE

By John McElroy

WASHINGTON, D. C.

Published by The National Tnbune

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."

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"And the individual withers,
and the world is more and more."

--Tennyson.

[Transcriber's Note: Numbers in the text enclosed by curly
brackets indicate the page numbers in the printed book. DW]

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.
She creates a thousand where she intends to make use of one.

Imbued with the maternal instinct, the female cod casts millions of eggs
upon the waters, expecting them to return after many days as troops of
interesting {7} offspring. Instead, half die embryotic gadi are almost
immediately devoured by spawn-eaters, hundreds of thousands perish in
incubation, hundreds of thousands more succumb to the perils attending
ichthyic infancy, leaving but a few score to attain to adult usefulness
and pass an honored old age with the fragrance of a well-spent life in
the country grocery.

The oak showers down 10,000 acorns, each capable of producing a tree.
Three-fourths of them are straightway diverted from their arboreal
intent through conversion into food by the provident squirrel and
improvident hog. 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.

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