1 consumed by the labourer in the production of that very fund on the extent of which, compared with the number to be maintained, the amount of wages depends? And is there any real difference between this conduct and the burning of a rickyard? Threshing machines are the present objects of hostility, ploughs will be the next; spades will then be found to diminish employment; and when it has been made penal to give advantage to labour by any tool or instrument whatever, the last step must be to prohibit the use of the right-hand. A Have sufficient pains been taken even to expose the absurdity of what appears so obvious to the populace that the landlords ought to reduce their rents and the clergy their tithes, and then the farmer would give better wages? If the farmer had his land for nothing, still it would not be his interest to give any man more wages for a day's work than his day's work was worth. He could better afford it, no doubt, to be paid as a tax, but why should the farmer pay that tax more than the physician or the shopkeeper? If the farmer is to employ, at this advanced rate of wages, only whom he chooses, the distress will be increased, since he will employ only that smaller number whose labour is worth their increased pay. If he is to employ a certain proportion of the labourers, however numerous, in his parish, he is, in fact, to J pay rent and tithes as before, with this difference only, that they are to be paid to paupers, instead of to the landlord and the parson; and that the payment is not a fixed but an indefinite sum, and a sum which must every year increase in an acce lerated ratio, as the increase of population rushes to fill up this new vacuum, till rent, tithes, profit, and capital, are all eaten up, and pauperism pro→ duces what may be called its natural effects-for they are the effects which, if unchecked, it must ultimately produce-famine, pestilence, and civil war. That this country can preserve its prosperity, or even its social existence, if the state of feeling which I have described becomes universal among the lower classes, I think no one will be bold enough to maintain. That it is extensively preva lent, and that, under the present administration of the poor-laws, it will, at no remote period, become universal in the southern districts, appears to me to be equally clear. But who, in the pre- : sent state of those districts, will venture to carry into execution a real and effectual alteration of the poor-laws? Remove, by emigration, the pau+ perism that now oppresses those districts, and such an alteration, though it may remain difficult, will cease to be impracticable. Again, the corn-laws, by their tendency to 1 raise the price of subsistence, by the ruin which they have inflicted on the internal corn-trade, and the stimulus which they have given to the increase of the agricultural population, have without doubt been amongst the causes of the present distress; and if, while the population of England and Wales continues to increase at the rate of 500 persons a day, the introduction of foreign corn is subject, under ordinary prices, to a prohibitive duty, those laws will become every day more mischievous, and less remediable. But the repeal of those laws, however gradual (and only a gradual repeal can be thought of), would, under the present pressure of pauperism, tend to aggravate the agricultural distress. Lighten that pressure, and we may gradually revert to the only safe system-the system of freedom. This observation, indeed, is only one example of a general rule. Nature has decreed that the road to good shall be through evil-that no improvement shall take place in which the general advantage shall not be accompanied by partial suffering. The obvious remedy is to remove those whose labour has ceased to be profitable, to a country that will afford room for their exertions. Few inventions, during the present century, have con+ ferred greater benefits on the labouring classes than that of the power-loom. By diminishing the expense of clothing, it has been a source, not merely of comfort, but of health and longevity. But its proximate effect was to spread ruin among the hand-weavers; to reduce almost all of them to a mere subsistence, and many to the most abject want. Ever since its introduction, thousands have been pining away under misery, not alleviated even by hope; with no rational expectation, but that the ensuing year would be more calamitous than the passing one; and this without fault, without even improvidence. If it had been thought that the removal of a fellow-creature from misery to happiness is worth 127., they might now have formed a flourishing settlement in Bri, tish America. The hostility of many, coupled with the indifference of almost all others, to any systematic plan of emigration, is a ground for regret and alarm, considered not only as a cause, but as a symptom. It is a lamentable proof of ignorance as to the real state of the country, or of carelessness as to its welfare, or of a determination to make no sacrifice for its relief. We are told that emigration would be expensive, and again we are told that the vacuum would be filled up. It is true, that to remove a million of persons might, perhaps, cost 12,000,000l. sterling; that is say, might cost as much as the direct expenditure of f THREE od do it indianmu vpisu MONTHS' WAR; and that an expenditure of 12,000,000l. sterling is an evil. But in the first place, it has been demonstrated that the expense of keeping paupers at home is far greater than that of their removal. It may be necessary to repeat, though it has often been remarked before, that the relief is afforded not only to those individuals who emigrate, but to the much greater number who remain. If there are 450 labourers in a district which requires the full employment and affords the full subsistence of only 400, all, or nearly all, will be in distress, and by the emigration of fifty all will be relieved. And, in the second place, even if the balance of expense were on the side of removing a portion of our surplus population, is no expense beyond that of their mere keep to be feared from their presence? If the present insurrection spread (and it will spread if the peasantry are told, as practically they have been told, that for riot and rebellion three days' imprisonment is the punishment, and a rise of wages the REWARD); if the ravage of the country reacts, as it will react, on the towns; if, when * See Mr. Wilmot Horton's Causes and Remedies of Pauper ism,' fourth series. Hic etiam fatis aperit Cassandra futuris b |