in exchange for this article so absolutely essential to
existence. The fund appropriated to the maintenance of labour
would be the aggregate quantity of food possessed by the owners
of land beyond their own consumption. When the demands upon this
fund were great and numerous, it would naturally be divided in
very small shares. Labour would be ill paid. Men would offer to
work for a bare subsistence, and the rearing of families would be
checked by sickness and misery. On the contrary, when this fund
was increasing fast, when it was great in proportion to the
number of claimants, it would be divided in much larger shares.
No man would exchange his labour without receiving an ample
quantity of food in return. Labourers would live in ease and
comfort, and would consequently be able to rear a numerous and
vigorous offspring.

On the state of this fund, the happiness, or the degree of
misery, prevailing among the lower classes of people in every
known state at present chiefly depends. And on this happiness, or
degree of misery, depends the increase, stationariness, or
decrease of population.

And thus it appears, that a society constituted according to
the most beautiful form that imagination can conceive, with
benevolence for its moving principle, instead of self-love, and
with every evil disposition in all its members corrected by
reason and not force, would, from the inevitable laws of nature,
and not from any original depravity of man, in a very short
period degenerate into a society constructed upon a plan not
essentially different from that which prevails in every known
state at present; I mean, a society divided into a class of