Explore "Mandeville's Fable of the Bees" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
If I could ever believe that Mandeville really meant any thing more by his Fable of the Bees than a _bonne bouche_ of solemn raillery, I should like to ask those man-shaped apes who have taken up his suggestions in earnest, and seriously maintained them as bases for a rational account of man and the world -- how they explain the very existence of those dexterous cheats, those superior charlatans, the legislators and philosophers, who have known how to play so well upon the peacock-like vanity and follies of their fellow mortals.
By the by, I wonder some of you lawyers (_sub rosa_, of course) have not quoted the pithy lines in Mandeville upon this registration question: --