578 Population of Great Britain ami Ireland ['DEO. 



" 3377. If cheap tracts were written and given to the poor, and in some 

 instances taught in the schools, explaining the doctrines you have just laid down 

 with respect to the condition of the poor, do you imagine they would be able to 

 understand them, and that they would apply what they learned to their own case? 

 I think they are not very difficult to be understood: but they are perhaps rather 

 difficult to apply" 



Before we talk of " tracts" in Ireland and our readers will have the 

 goodness to recollect that it is to Ireland peculiarly, according to the 

 Report of the Committee, that onr attention, in this work of abating popu- 

 lation, should be directed before we talk of " tracts" in Ireland, we 

 must at least have a population sufficiently instructed to read them. But 

 it is cant, or error, to talk at all of "the principle which more or less 

 operates tmong the higher classes, through all grades," of not marrying 

 without the means of providing for a family. In a case like this, the 

 greater part of the labouring classes, if they see any thing, must see that, if 

 they were to attend to that principle, three out of four of them would 

 never marry at all. We never can hold out to the lower orders that 

 inducement to caution which operates on the class of society above them ; 

 nor have they the same facilities for enduring the restraints which the 

 advisers of abstinence suppose. The vices of ploughmen are not dignified 

 with public approval, or clothed in silk or satb. The Tread-mill is their 

 " public instructor," which steps in to check such lapses from propriety as 

 the lectures of the pulpit may by any chance have failed to place in a light 

 of fitting abhorrence. To a beginning tradesman, the question of early mar- 

 riage may be a question of fortune in life, or of failure : to a farm labourer, 

 or a weaver, it is a question whether the parish shall or shall not pay him 

 a pittance, in addition to the wages which he receives from his master. 

 The competency of emigration to act as a remedy at all for such an evil 

 as surplus population, or surplus supply of labour, is almost less than 

 problematical. Without some checks to the filling up, and powerful ones, 

 all experience shews that it is like " tapping" in the dropsy a remedy 

 valueless, unless where it can constantly be repeated. The hundreds of 

 thousands of soldiers whom we took from Ireland, Mr. Leslie Foster 

 observes (this was emigration) did not sensibly check the tide of popu- 

 lation. The conscription in France, Mr. Maltbus says, did not sensibly 

 diminish the population. The scheme for preventing marriages, spoken of 

 by Mr. Hunter, in the Island of Coll,* may do (as many experiments 

 succeed on a small scale), confined to one property ; but let every land- 

 owner attempt to protect himself in the same way, and we should have a 

 revolution in the country in a fortnight. The only check, within the 

 application of man to population, we are afraid, is that suggested by Mr. 

 Malihus himself; the letting those people, who have no means of employ- 

 ment, starve to death ; but we object to that gentleman's scheme of 

 adding a little fresh impetus to the machinery for that purpose, which is 

 already, though with a more restrained energy, in motion. 



At length, however, we reach the last, and the most material point in 

 the Report of the Committee the Plan of Emigration. And, as we have 

 already had occasion to challenge the soundness of some of the views 

 developed in this document, so we are compelled to confess its conclusion 



* The whole island is the estate of one proprietor, who expels all persons that marry 

 without his consent. 



