the
tactics of the game, but his grand invention was the form or type
of admissions that you should strive to obtain, and the effective
manipulation of them when you had got them.

An example will show the nature of this help, and what it was worth.
To bring the thing nearer home, let us, instead of an example from
Plato, whose topics often seem artificial to us now, take a thesis
from last century, a paradox still arguable, Mandeville's famous--some
would say infamous--paradox that Private Vices are Public Benefits.
Undertake to maintain this, and you will have no difficulty in getting
a respondent prepared to maintain the negative. The plain men, such as
Socrates cross-questioned, would have declared at once that a vice is
a vice, and can never do any good to anybody. Your Respondent denies
your proposition simply: he upholds that private vices never are
public benefits, and defies you to extract from him any admission
inconsistent with this. Your task then is to lure him somehow into
admitting that in some cases what is vicious in the individual may
be of service to the State. This is enough: you are not concerned to
establish that this holds of all private vices. A single instance
to the contrary is enough to break down his universal negative. You
cannot, of course, expect him to make the necessary admission in
direct terms: you must go round about. You know, perhaps, that he
has confidence in Bishop Butler as a moralist. You try him with the
saying: "To aim at public and private good are so far from being
inconsistent that they mutually promote each other". Does he admit
this?

Perhaps he wants some little explanation or exemplification to enable
him to grasp your meaning. This was within the rules of the game. You
put cases to him, asking for his "Yes" or "No" to each. Suppose a man
goes into Parliament, not out of any zeal for the public good, but in
pure vainglory, or to serve his private ends, is it possible for him
to render the State good service? Or suppose a milk-seller takes
great pains to keep his milk pure, not because he cares for the public
health, but because it pays, is this a benefit to the public?

Let these questions be answered in the affirmative, putting you in
possession of the admission that some actions undertaken for private
ends are of public advantage, what must you extract besides to make
good your position as against the Respondent? To see clearly at this
stage what now is required,