70 Tithes versus Rent. " [JAN. 



such remuneration of his industry as will maintain the energies of body 

 and mind. When the Englishman is convinced that God made man 

 and woman to be a mutual curse, and not a blessing ; when he believes 

 that God made for Adam one meet to be his torment, instead of the 

 object of his love, the instrument of his best earthly happiness ; then, 

 but not till then, let him make up his mind to the moody, maddening 

 maxims of emasculating Malthus : when again he sees reason to be- 

 lieve that the soil of England is overcharged with population ; then 

 let him hearken to the heart-rending exhortations of the inhospitable 

 Horton. 



The condition then of the poor population of our country is dependant on 

 the quantity of employment provided by the soil, and the quantity of the 

 necessaries of civilized life, which labour in such employment will pro- 

 cure. 



7. This quantity of employment and remuneration being not, at pre- 

 sent, nor likely to be for ages to come, restricted by any natural causes 

 affecting our country's soil, it follows, that the present distressed state of 

 our labouring classes is attributable to the artificial condition of landed 

 property ; that is to say, to some contrivances of our own, by which 

 our petty selfishness, our short-sighted prudence, our presumptuous 

 officiousness, has thrust itself in the way of a wise and benevolent Pro- 

 vidence ; has intercepted the communications of its blessings to those 

 who most need them ; has turned aside the majestic and fertilizing 

 streams of its equable and effectual bounty into channels cut in a soil 

 abundantly supplied before; making that barrenness which was once a 

 garden ; converting that into the rankness of a fungus-forcing-hot~betl, 

 which before yielded, in the full perfection of its nutritive properties, 

 the grain by which the life of man is best preserved in its full animal 

 vigour, its moral and intellectual dignity. 



8. Whatever has been contrived by human means, by human means 

 may be altered. There is absolutely no limit to the extent to which 

 man may lawfully prosecute the work of altering any, and every thing, 

 which man has ever, or can ever devise. The same right by which man, 

 in time past, called any provision of the social system into existence, 

 remains, unimpaired, to man in time present to modify the details of 

 any such system, to expunge them from the system, to alter the system 

 to any extent, to abolish the system altogether, to create a new system 

 in its stead, either by positive provisions, or by leaving the common 

 good of the community to the common operation of its common intel- 

 ligence. 



The rights of any portion of the community, derived merely from the 

 contrivance of any portion of the community, at any period of the com- 

 munity, may be by similar portions of the community at any period 

 confirmed, extended, abridged, abolished. It is the language of fashion, 

 by which we designate the provisions of mere human contrivance 

 rights : reason would name them privileges. 



9. We have thus rid ourselves of the bugbear of absolute social 

 rights, excepting such as conscience and reason dictate to us to be the 

 provisions of the only legislator for every age and country, the fountain, 

 head of all legislation, the Legislator of the universe. 



We shall find the appellation, privilege, a much more adequate ex- 

 ponent of the ideas suggested to us by mere social provisions, than the 

 appellation right : we shall find, that the substitution of this correct 



