582 Population of Great Britain and Ireland [Duo. 



In fact, it is scarcely possible to doubt that the Committee themselves 

 have intended this project as a sort of tub to the whale : a medicine which 

 the patient shall be amused with mixing up and swallowing, while nature 

 herself (as she produced the complaint) applies the real remedy. The 

 day for emigration, upon a profitable and effective scale, is gone by : if 

 we might burst (with no interference from our neighbours) upon Spain 

 Or Portugal, massacre the inhabitants of those countries, establish our- 

 selves upon their lands, and in their homes, this would be emigration to 

 some purpose ! but the spirit of the age will not allow this ; and we cannot 

 send millions of men to the distance of Canada or New South Wales. 

 The emigration proposed by the Committee will cost a million aud a half 

 of money, and benefit (to this we fully agree) 95,000 men who are to 

 emigrate. But.it will do nothing to relieve this country from the surplus 

 labour, a surplus population, which is declared to be oppressing it unless 

 the Committee have lights and views upon that subject, which can hardly 

 be deduced from the evidence given before them, and which certainly are 

 not glanced at in their Report. 



Our own object, as we stated in the commencement, is to point out this 

 failure in the enterprize of the Committee, rather than to attempt any theory 

 which should supply the gap which it has left. The complaint of surplus 

 labour, or surplus population, is not a new one : in this age of active 

 inquiry, such an evil excites more attention and discussion than it did 

 formerly : but it is not because we see the mortal tendency of the disease, 

 that we are always able to apply the remedy. Half the improvements 

 which science and the exertion of individuals, everyday are opening upon 

 us, have a direct tendency to produce the mischief which we are now eu- 

 deavouring to remove to raise the rates of increase upon our population. 

 Every increase of morality in our habits ; every fresh discovery in the 

 treatment of our maladies; every improvement in the purity and whole- 

 someness of our cities ; are all so many engines labouring directly to 

 augment our population. In opposition to the working of all these causes 

 and of an hundred others besides the grand one> which neither force nor 

 argument will ever overcome each theorist to set all right has his 

 single specific! One man cures all by freely importing corn: forgetting 

 that (independent of present mischiefs) if we did freely import corn 

 to-morrow, no importation could keep pace with an unchecked population, 

 and that thirty years would place us again in circumstances of difficulty. 

 Another speculator would cultivate more corn at home : never noticing 

 the man who cries that he is starving, because we cultivate too much 

 corn too much inferior land already. A third tithes, the mere 

 increase upon our existing numbers, by " emigration to Canada," and calls 

 that " practical relief and diminution." And a fourth, enraged to see the 

 labouring classes working almost to death for bare subsistence, proposes 

 to revert to our old usage (no longer practicable) and allow the magistrate 

 to fix a minimum of wages. It is curious to observe, in the evidence of 

 Mr. Wills and Mr. Wright, members of a " Society for bettering the con- 

 dition of the labouring classes," how completely abstract propositions 

 blind men to possibilities, as well as to results. Nothing can be more 

 plausible, or more honourable to their dispositions, than the arguments of 

 these gentlemen ; and yet it seems almost wonderful how they can be so 

 perfectly im penetrable as to the progress of their own mistake. The 

 labourer" this is their position " cannot stand in a worse situation than 



