principles, all knowledge, or virtue, or liberty, under a heap of misapplied facts? 11. Whether, instead of accounting for the different degrees of happiness, plenty, populousness, &c. in different countries, or in the same country at different periods, from good or bad government, from the vicissitudes of manners, civilization, and knowledge, according to the common prejudice, Mr. Malthus does not expressly and repeatedly declare that political institutions are but as the dust in the balance compared with the inevitable consequences of the principle of population; and whether he does not treat with the utmost contempt all those, who not being in the secret of the grinding law of necessity,' had before his time superficially concluded that moral, political, religious, and other positive causes were of considerable weight in determining the happiness or misery of mankind? It were to be wished that the author, instead of tampering with his subject, and alternately holding out concessions, and then recalling them, had made one bold and honest effort to get rid of the bewildering effects of his original system, by affording his readers some clue to determine, both in what manner and to what extent other causes, independent of the principle of population, actually combine with that principle (no longer pretended to be absolute and uncontroulable) to vary the face of nature and society, under the same general law, and had not left this most important desideratum in his work, to be apocryphally supplied by the ingenuity and zeal of his apologists? 12. Whether Mr. Malthus does not uniformly discourage every plan for extending the limits of population, and consequently the sphere of human enjoyment, either by cultivating new tracts of soil, or improving the old ones, by repeating on all occasions the same stale, senseless objection, that, after all, the principle of population will press as much as ever on the means of subsistence; or in other words, that though the means of subsistence and comfort will be increased, there will be a proportionable increase in the number of those who are to partake of it? Or whether Mr. Malthus's panic fear on this subject has not subsided into an equally unphilosophical indifference? 13. Whether the principle of moral restraint, formerly recognized in Mr. Malthus's latter writings, and in reality turning all his paradoxes into mere impertinence, does not remain a dead letter, which he never calls into action, except for the single purpose of torturing the poor under pretence of reforming their morals? 14. Whether the avowed basis of the author's system on the poorlaws, is not the following:-that by the laws of God and nature, the rich have a right to starve the poor whenever they (the poor) cannot maintain themselves; and whether the deliberate sophistry by which this right is attempted to be made out, is not as gross an insult on the understanding as on the feelings of the public? Or whether this reasoning does not consist in a trite truism and a wilful contradiction; the truism being, that whenever the earth cannot maintain all its inhabitants, that then, by the laws of God and nature, or the physical constitution of things, some of them must perish; and the contradiction being, that the right of the rich to withhold a morsel of bread from the poor, while they themselves roll in abundance, is a law of God and nature, founded on the same physical necessity or absolute deficiency in the means of subsistence? 15. Whether the commentators on the Essay have not fallen into the same unwarrantable mode of reasoning, by confounding the real funds for the maintenance of labour, i.e. the actual produce of the soil, with the scanty pittance allowed out of it for the maintenance of the labourer (after the demands of luxury and idleness are satisfied) by the positive, varying laws of every country, or by the caprice of individuals? 16. Whether these two things are not fundamentally distinct in themselves, and ought not to be kept so, in a question of such importance, as the right of the rich to starve the poor by system? 17. Whether Mr. Malthus has not been too much disposed to consider the rich as a sort of Gods upon earth, who were merely employed in distributing the goods of nature and fortune among the poor, who themselves neither ate nor drank, 'neither married nor were given in marriage,' and consequently were altogether unconcerned in the limited extent of the means of subsistence, and the unlimited increase of population? 18. Lastly, whether the whole of the reverend author's management of the principle of population and of the necessity of moral restraint, does not seem to have been copied from the prudent Friar's advice in Chaucer ? 'Beware therefore with lordes for to play, To a poor man men should his vices tell, But not to a lord, though he should go to hell.' VOL. III.: 2 B END OF POLITICAL ESSAYS BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE This work was published in two 8vo volumes in 1807 with the following titlepage The Eloquence of the British Senate; or, Select Specimens from the Speeches of the most Distinguished Parliamentary Speakers. From the beginning of the Reign of Charles I. to the Present Time. With Notes, Biographical, Critical, and Explanatory. Two Volumes. London: Printed for Thomas Ostell, No. 3, Ave Maria Lane, Ludgate St. 1807. In the following year the work appeared with another title-page, which contains the same title, and proceeds 'By William Hazlitt. In Two Volumes. London: Printed for J. Murray, Fleet-Street, and J. Harding, St. James's-Street, London; and A. Constable and Co., Edinburgh. 1808.' |