“Such,” Smith concludes, “is the system of Dr. Mandeville, which once made so much noise in the world.” However destructive it might appear, he thought “it could never have imposed upon so great a number of persons, nor have occasioned so general an alarm among those who are friends of better principles, had it not in some respects bordered upon the truth.”
Mandeville’s work originally consisted merely of a poem of 400 lines called “The Grumbling Hive: or Knaves Turn’d Honest,” which according to his own account was first published as a sixpenny pamphlet about 1705. In 1714 he reprinted it, appending a very much larger quantity of prose, under the title of The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices, Public Benefits; with an Essay on Charity and Charity Schools and a Search Into the Nature of Society . In 1729 he added further a second part, nearly as large as the first, consisting of a dialogue on the subject. The “grumbling hive,” which is in reality a human society, is described in the poem as prospering greatly so long as it was full of vice:—
“The worst of all the multitude Did