267 CHAPTER VII. REMEDIES FOR OVER-POPULATION IN ENGLAND AND WALES. Restrictions on the Marriages of the Poor. - Soundness of the Consideration of Theory of Malthus. Its Incompleteness. various Schemes for the Cure of Poverty. — Vindication of the New Poor Law. Emigration. Improvement of Agriculture. · Free Trade. Ability of foreign Countries to supply Great Britain with Provisions. Imperative Obligation on foreign Merchants to accept British Goods in exchange. Groundlessness of the Opinion that Cheapness of Food would occasion a Fall of Wages. - Examination of Objections to Free Trade in Provisions. Loss of Revenue Dependence on foreign Countries. Reduction of Rents. Possible Extent of such Reduction. Circumstances by which it would be compensated. - Inadmissibility of the Objection that Free Trade might lower Rents. -Effect of Free Trade on the Demand for agricultural Labour - Subdivision of Farms. - Manner in which that Subdivision would affect Land Owners and agricultural Labourers. Superior Productiveness of small Farms. - High Rents obtainable for them Great Amount of human Labour required for their Cultivation. Cottage Allotments.-Their Advantages. -Examination of their supposed Tendency to create an excessive agricultural Population.- Peculiar Circumstances which have led to the minute Partition of Land in Ireland. Dissimilar Condition of England. -Actual Results of the Occupation of Land by the Peasantry in some Parts of England. Its Influence in preventing and curing Pauperism, and in checking improvident Marriages. Tendency of Cottage Allotments to promote the social and moral Improvement of the Occupants. To cure over-population, is to restore the proper proportion between the number of labourers and the fund for the remuneration of labour. Either the first must be diminished, or the second must be augmented. But it is not sufficient to cure,-we must also guard against a return of the disease. Population must if possible be prevented from increasing beyond the means of subsistence. This can only be done by restraining people from marrying until they can bear the expenses of a family. Whatever other remedies may be prescribed, therefore, restrictions upon the marriages of the poor are an indispensable part of the regimen to be observed. It requires some courage, in these days, to exhibit such principles, the very essence of Malthusianism, in all their naked simplicity. They are, indeed, as clear, and one would have thought as undeniable, as the sun at mid-day; but they have been so sternly denounced, and so mercilessly ridiculed, that few are now found bold enough to avow them. It is not merely benevolent declaimers or fanatical zealots who inveigh against the "detestable hard-heartedness of the system that would keep people single until they can afford to indulge in the "luxury of marriage" *, who call it "an impeachment of God's providence"† to suppose that population can outrun subsistence, and in this fiftyninth century esteem it a sin to disobey the ante *These expressions are Southey's, and occur in an article in the Quarterly Review, vol. viii. p. 326. See the late Mr. Sadler's "Law of Population," or rather an article in No. 102. of the Edinburgh Review, in which the most brilliant writer of the age has condescended to demolish Mr. Sadler's absurdities. diluvian injunction, "to be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth.” * Even hard-headed and hard-hearted political economists shrink from one whom they were once proud to hail as a colleague. Mr. M'Culloch, the Coryphæus of the band, stigmatises the theory of Malthus "as a striking instance of the abuse of general principles † ;" and Mr. Laing contends, that to give the name of moral restraint to prudential abstinence from marriage is to "confound prudence and morality," and to "overturn the land-marks of human virtue." I will not be drawn into a regular defence of Mr. Malthus against his opponents, though the temptation is great to show that the poor have no more right than the rich to indulge in luxuries which they cannot afford, and that it is decidedly immoral to bring children into the world to starve.§ I will confine myself to one or two observations. Malthus asserts * Mr. Alison has taken this for the text of his Discourse on the "Principles of Population." † Principles of Political Economy. Preface. Residence in Norway, p. 481. Notes of a Traveller, p. 338. § Mr. Laing is not to be put down by authority, or I would quote Milton and Dean Swift against him. The former makes Eve exclaim : — "Miserable it is To be to others cause of misery, Our own begotten, and of our loins to bring Into this cursed world a woful race."-Par. Lost, book x. And the latter informs us that "the Lilliputians think nothing can be more unjust than for people, in subservience to their own appetites, to bring children into the world, and leave the burden of supporting them on the public.”—Voyage to Lilliput, chap. vi. that people ought not to marry until they are able to maintain the children they are likely to have. This is the great maxim which he labours to establish, the end to which all his reasonings point, the sole practical deduction to be drawn from his doctrines. Do his opponents maintain the contrary? Do Messrs. M'Culloch, Alison, and Laing, does any one, in short, except doting mammas, impatient to behold their children's children, or young ladies still dreaming of love in a cottage, think that people ought to marry before they can afford to do so? If they do not think this, they are as much Malthusians as the founder of the sect, for Malthus himself has said no more. It is, indeed, his great defect that he has confined himself to this, that he has said so little, not that he has said so much. Over the space of two goodly volumes he has heaped up proofs of what no reasonable man disputes, the necessity, viz., in certain circumstances, for abstinence from marriage; but he has omitted to show how men can be induced to practise such abstinence. He apparently relied entirely on education. He seems to have thought that people might be persuaded to control their matrimonial inclinations by having the evil consequences of indulgence in them clearly explained. He overlooked or undervalued the tendency which the possession of property has to engender prudence, and seems, indeed, to have thought that that quality is rarely to be found among members of the labouring class, except under the pressure of misery. If he has not explicitly pronounced these sentiments, at least he has not clearly expressed the contrary; and it is this deficiency on his part which it is the object of the present essay to supply. An attempt has already been made to show that misery renders men reckless in marriage, as in every thing else; and that, in order to make them provident, it is first necessary to make them comfortable, and to make the continuance of their comfort contingent on their own behaviour. It has been asserted that indigence, the never-absent symptom of over-population, is likewise its principal upholder and promoter. If these opinions be correct, a permanent cure of over-population may be effected by any means that will raise the labouring classes from the poverty in which they are sunk, and provide them with adequate means of supporting themselves. How so desirable a change can be wrought in the condition of the British peasantry is now to be considered, and I enter upon this part of my subject with the more alacrity, because none can fail to be interested in the immediate object of pursuit, however doubtful they may be of the ulterior results expected from it. Before, however, offering any suggestions as to the proper course to be followed, it will be convenient to examine some measures which are popularly regarded as likely to conduce to the desired end, and it is particularly important to demonstrate the hopelessness of any considerable benefit from a relaxation of the present Poor Law. Few persons are now disposed to deny, that a poor law of some sort is essential to the well-being of every community. Cases of destitution, arising |