principle according to which the necessary labours of agriculture
might be amicably shared among the whole class of labourers, by
general invectives against employing the poor he appears to
pursue an unattainable good through much present evil. For if
every man who employs the poor ought to be considered as their
enemy, and as adding to the weight of their oppressions, and if
the miser is for this reason to be preferred to the man who
spends his income, it follows that any number of men who now
spend their incomes might, to the advantage of society, be
converted into misers. Suppose then that a hundred thousand
persons who now employ ten men each were to lock up their wealth
from general use, it is evident, that a million of working men of
different kinds would be completely thrown out of all employment.
The extensive misery that such an event would produce in the
present state of society Mr Godwin himself could hardly refuse to
acknowledge, and I question whether he might not find some
difficulty in proving that a conduct of this kind tended more
than the conduct of those who spend their incomes to 'place human
beings in the condition in which they ought to be placed.' But Mr
Godwin says that the miser really locks up nothing, that the
point has not been rightly understood, and that the true
development and definition of the nature of wealth have not been
applied to illustrate it. Having defined therefore wealth, very
justly, to be the commodities raised and fostered by human
labour, he observes that the miser locks up neither corn, nor
oxen, nor clothes, nor houses. Undoubtedly he does not really
lock up these articles, but he locks up the power of producing
them, which is virtually the same. These things are certainly
used and consumed by his contemporaries, as truly, and to as
great an extent, as if he were a beggar; but not to as great an