when he feels the consequence of his error. All parish assistance should be most rigidly denied him; and if the hand of private charity be stretched forth in his relief, the interests of humanity imperiously require that it should be administered very sparingly. He should be taught to know that the laws of nature, which are the laws of God, had doomed him and his family to starve for disobeying their repeated admonitions; that he had no claim of right on society for the smallest portion of food beyond that which his labour would fairly purchase. With regard to illegitimate children, after the proper notice had been given, they should on no account whatever be allowed to have any claim to parish assistance. If the parents desert their child they ought to be made answerable for the crime. The infant is, comparatively speaking, of no value to society, as others will immediately supply its place. Its principal value is on account of its being the object of one of the most delightful passions in human nature-parental affection. But if this value be disregarded by those who are alone in a capacity to feel it, the society cannot be called upon to put itself in their place, and has no farther business in its protection, than in the case of its murder, or intentional ill treatment, to follow the general rules in punishing such crimes; which rules, for the interests of morality, it is bound to pursue, whether the object, in this particular instance, be of value to the state or not."

Thus, then, this eminent philosopher, who, at the beginning of his book, argues that it is in vain to hope for an improved state of society, because men, in the highest imaginable state of wisdom and virtue, would continue to breed, regardless of all consequences, tells us, at the end of this very book, that the way to reduce our poor rates is to persuade the lower orders to continence while they are in their present state of deplorable ignorance; to discourage them, as much as possible, from marrying; to preach wedding sermons to them, if they will marry, upon the immorality of breeding, that being a luxury reserved only for those who can afford it; and if they will persist in so improper and immoral a practice, after so solemn and well timed a warning, to leave them to the punishment of severe want, and rigidly deny all parish assistance. No public relief is to be given to the starving infant; it is worth nothing to society, for its place will be presently supplied, and society, therefore, has no farther business than to hang the mother if she should shorten the sufferings of her babe rather than see it die of want. A plan for the abolition of the poor-rates as practicable as it is humane! The rich are to be called upon for no sacrifices; nothing more is required of them than that they should harden their hearts. They have found a place at the table of nature, and why should they be disturbed at their feast? It is Mr. Malthus's own metaphor; and that we may not be suspected of exaggerating the detestable hard-heartedness with

which his system is recommended, the illustration shall be presented in his own language.

"A man," he says, "who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents, on whom he has a just demand, and if the society does not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature's mighty feast there is no cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he do not work upon the compassion of some of her guests. If these guests get up and make room for him, other intruders immediately appear demanding the same favour. The report of a provision for all that come fills the hall with numerous claimants. The order and harmony of the feast is disturbed; the plenty that before reigned is changed into scarcity; and the happiness of the guests is destroyed by the spectacle of misery and dependence in every part of the hall, and by the clamorous importunity of those who are justly enraged at not finding the provision which they had been taught to expect. The guests learn too late their error, in counteracting those strict orders to all intruders issued by the great mistress of the feast, who, wishing that all her guests should have plenty, and knowing that she could not provide for unlimited numbers, humanely refused to admit fresh comers when her table was already full."

A writer ought to possess a more logical mind than Mr. Malthus has been gifted with, before he ventures to reason in metaphors and similitudes. But it were idle to dwell upon flaws of reasoning in a passage where, at the first perusal, every reader, whose heart and understanding are in their natural state, will see nothing but naked deformity. There is, however, no accounting for tastes physical or metaphysical, and there are certain intellects which seem to have an appetite, like the Hottentots, for garbage. The late Sir William Pulteney is said to have been so smitten with Mr. Malthus's theory, that he intended to bring a bill into parliament for abolishing the poor-rates upon the plan thus recommended and thus illustrated. While such a plan remains upon paper it is as harmless in the written letter as the receipt for Sir Humphry Davy's new fulminating powder; but if either the one or the other be made the subject of experiment, wo be to all within reach of the explosion! The numerous claimants at Mr. Malthus's feast of nature, who, as he tells us, have "no right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, no business to be there," would very soon begin to ask the luckier guests what better title they themselves could produce, and resort to the right of the strongest, "You have had your turn at the table long enough, gentlemen," they would say, "and if those who have no places are to strave, we will have a scramble for it at least." Let any man in his senses ask himself whether this would not be the

natural and inevitable consequence; whether, in the present state of society in this country, such a plan as that of Mr. Malthus could, by any possibility, be carried into effect without producing all the horrors of a bellum servile; whether the legislators who should pass such an act would not be pulled in pieces by an infuriated and desperate populace, and whether such legislators would not deserve their fate! Here, then, we dismiss Mr. Malthus -to enjoy the applause of those (if such there be) who feel no contempt for his theory, and no abhorrence of its proposed practical application.

When Berkeley, in the Querist, asked "Whether the number and welfare of the subjects be not the true strength of the crown? whether a country inhabited by people well fed, clothed and lodged, would not become every day more populous? and whether a numerous stock of people, in such circumstances, would not constitute a flourishing nation?"-and "whether to provide plentifully for the poor be not feeding the root, the substance whereof will shoot upwards into the branches, and cause the top to flourish?" he did not propose these questions as points which he conceived would ever be disputed. That wise and excellent man believed, as all wise men had done before him, that the strength of kingdoms consisted mainly in the number of their inhabitants, and that the true policy of governments is not to prevent their subjects from multiplying, but to provide uses and employment for them as fast they multiply. If in any country they increase faster than means, not merely for their existence but for their well being, are provided, it is rational to infer that in that country there is a defect of policy; it is pious to infer that the error is in human institutions, not in the unerring laws of nature;-in man, not in his Maker.

That this is the case in England is manifest in the number of the poor, and the amount of the poor-rates.* Certain it is that the poor have rapidly increased, and are increasing; and the chief causes of this increase render their physical and moral condition worse at present than it has been at any former time since the shock of the Reformation subsided.

In the political, as in the natural body, it seems as if those important transitions in the system, which are necessary to its development, could not be performed without some degree of suffering or of danger. Mendicity followed the abolition of vassalage in Europe. Feudal times afford tempting themes for the romancer and the poet. The high-minded and generous lord; the high

• The parish rates of 1803 were 5,318,000l. of which 4,267,000l. were expended on the poor. The rack-rental of England in that year was about forty millions; it is now nearly fifty-five, and the poor-rates will probably be found to have at least kept pace with this increase when the returns shall be made next year pursuant to an act passed in the last session.

born and gentle lady; the servants who were, as in some countries is still expressed in their name long after the reality has ceased, children of the house; the vassals seeming to be humble members of the same family rather than dependents; the baronial hall; the seasons of festival, and the every-day hospitality; these are materials from which imagination may build up an ideal state of happiness not less delightful than fabled Arcadia, and of a loftier character. From a state of perfect vassalage, whether feudal or commercial, mendicity and want are of course excluded; hence the advocates of the slave trade drew one of their favourite arguments; and thus it is to be explained how good men, like Mr. Tobin and Bryan Edwards, should have written in defence of that abominable traffic, feeling as much indignation against the abolitionists as the abolitionists against all who protracted the consummation so devoutly to be wished for, to which they were pressing on. These writers knew that, in their hands, power over their slaves was but the means of beneficence. But Hodge and Huggins, and the black code of our own, as well as of the French islands, furnish the same proof against their opinions as the feudal laws of every country afford of the cruelty and oppression of the feudal system.

By abolishing that system in the countries which he has subjected, and by necessitating its abolishment in others, Buonaparte, incarnate fiend as he is, insatiable of blood, and delighting in the infliction of misery, is made to produce good amid the evil which will consign him to execration in this world, and perdition in the next. This country would not now have been great and happy if the yoke of bondage had not long ago been broken here: but, in the transition which the lower classes made from the state of villeins to that of free labourers, a mass of immediate evil was produced of which the unexaggerated report might almost startle our belief. The Reformation aggravated the evil, not only by depriving the poor of that eleemosynary support which the monasteries afforded when there was no other constant source of relief, but because men who shared the plunder of the church in the vile way in which it was lavished, became hard landlords, and the rents of the abbey tenants were heavily raised, in consequence of the same act which destroyed the chief market for their produce. Never was there a good work so wickedly effected as the Reformation in England. It is at once our chief blessing and our foulest reproach.

These circumstances aggravated the evil; but the decrease of villenage was its cause. "Manufactures," says Sir Morton Eden, "by creating a necessity for free hands, and, consequently, enabling men to make use of the most valuable of all property, their own industry, subjected those who were any ways incapacitated from availing themselves of that fund, to the miserable alternative of starving independently;" and he states it as an inevitable conclusion,

from his inquiries, that manufactures and commerce are the true parents of our national poor. Had the price of labour, when it first became a marketable commodity, found its proper standard, so that the labourer in youth and health might have been enabled to make provision for sickness and age, this consequence would not have followed; but we must not blame our ancestors for not discovering with prospective wisdom, as the means of prevention, what we ourselves, after so long and heavy an experience of the evil, have not yet adopted as the cure. It was mitigated at first by the spirit of adventure, then more prevalent among the lower classes than now. Harrison speaks of emigrants to "France, Germany, Barbary, India, Muscovia, and very Calicut;" and shortly afterwards our colonies in North America were established. And though, when labour is underpaid, and the labouring classes are kept poor, poverty must always be upon the increase, the increase was less rapid than in later times, because of the flourishing state of the country, whose progress seems scarcely to have sustained any interruption by the civil wars of Charles I. because the virtues of the feudal system survived that system awhile, and because the manners of the peasantry were not yet corrupted.

Harrison states the number of vagabonds in his time, upon a rude estimate, at above 10,000. This is, perhaps, short of the number-there is a document in Strype, which affirms that there were at least three or four hundred able bodied vagabonds in every county, who lived by theft and rapine, and who sometimes met in troops to the number of sixty, and committed spoil on the inhabitants. It adds that if all the felons of this kind were reduced to good subjection, they would form a strong army; and that the magistrates were awed, by their association and threats, from enforcing the laws against them. But in Scotland, a century later, the evil was ten or twenty fold greater-for, during that century, Scotland had been stationary, if not retrograde, and the people were in a more savage state than even the worst of the wild Irish at the present day. Fletcher, of Saltoun, gives a dreadful picture:

"There are, at this day," he says, (1698,)" in Scotland, besides a great many poor families, very meanly provided for by the churchboxes, (with others, who by living upon bad food fall into various diseases,) two hundred thousand people begging from door to door. And though the number of these be perhaps double to what it was formerly, by reason of this present great distress, yet in all times there have been about one hundred thousand of those vagabonds, who have lived without any regard or subjection either to the laws of the land, or even those of God and nature; fathers incestuously accompanying with their own daughters, the son with the mother, and the brother with the sister. No magistrate could ever discover, or be informed, which way one in a hundred of these wretches died, nor that ever