, Letter 46). In _The Fable of
the Bees_, Mandeville concedes that gifts to charity would
support employment as much as would equivalent expenditures on
luxuries, but argues that in practice the gifts would not be
made.

Of the few contemporary notices of the _Letter to Dion_, the most
important was by John, Lord Hervey. Hervey charged both Berkeley and
Mandeville with unfairness, but aimed most of his criticism at
Berkeley. He claimed that _Alciphron_ displayed the weaknesses of
argument in dialogue form, that it tended either to state the
opponent's case so strongly that it became difficult afterwards to
refute it or so weakly that it was not worth answering. He found fault
with Berkeley for denying that Mandeville had told a great many
disagreeable truths--presumably about human nature and its mode of
operation in society--and with Mandeville for having told them in
public. He held, I believe rightly, that Mandeville, in associating
vice with prosperity, deliberately blurred the distinction between vice
as an incidental consequence of prosperity and vice as its cause: vice,
said Hervey, "is the child of Prosperity, but not the Parent; and ...
the Vices which grow upon a flourishing People, are not the Means by
which they become so."[5]

[5] [Lord Hervey], _Some Remarks on the Minute Philosopher_,
London, 1732, pp. 22-23, 42-50.

T. E. Jessop, in his introduction to his edition of _Alciphron_,
characterizes Berkeley's account of the argument of _The Fable of the
Bees_ as "not unfair," and says: "I can see no reason for whitewashing
Mandeville. The content and manner of his writing invite retort rather
than argument. Berkeley gives both, in the most sparkling of his
dialogues. Mandeville wrote a feeble reply, A _Letter to Dion_."[6] F.
B. Kaye, on the other hand, says of the exchange between Berkeley and
Mandeville that "men like ... Berkeley, who may be termed the
religious-minded ... in their anguish, threw logic to the winds, and
criticized him [i.e., Mandeville] for the most inconsistent reasons."[7]

[6] _Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher_, T. E. Jessop, ed., in
_The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne_. Edited by A. A.
Luce and T. E. Jessop. London, etc., III. (1950), 9-10.

[7] In his edition of _The Fable of the Bees_, Oxford, 1924, II.
415-416. All subsequent references to _The Fable of the Bees_
will be to this edition.