and riches have a necessary tendency to corrupt the human heart, he will
banish from his code all laws such as the unnatural monster of
primogeniture, such as encourage associations against labour in the form
of corporate bodies, and indeed all that monopolising system of
legislation, whose baleful influence is shown in the depopulation of the
country and in the necessity which reduces the sad relicks to owe their
very existence to the ostentatious bounty of their oppressors. If it is
true in common life, it is still more true in governments, that we
should be just before we are generous; but our legislators seem to have
forgotten or despised this homely maxim. They have unjustly left
unprotected that most important part of property, not less real because
it has no material existence, that which ought to enable the labourer to
provide food for himself and his family. I appeal to innumerable
statutes, whose constant and professed object it is to lower the price
of labour, to compel the workman to be _content_ with arbitrary wages,
evidently too small from the necessity of legal enforcement of the
acceptance of them. Even from the astonishing amount of the sums raised
for the support of one description of the poor may be concluded the
extent and greatness of that oppression, whose effects have rendered it
possible for the few to afford so much, and have shown us that such a
multitude of our brothers exist in even helpless indigence. Your
Lordship tells us that the science of civil government has received all
the perfection of which it is capable. For my part, I am more
enthusiastic. The sorrow I feel from the contemplation of this
melancholy picture is not unconsoled by a comfortable hope that the
class of wretches called mendicants will not much longer shock the
feelings of humanity; that the miseries entailed upon the marriage of
those who are not rich will no longer tempt the bulk of mankind to fly
to that promiscuous intercourse to which they are impelled by the
instincts of nature, and the dreadful satisfaction of escaping the