1832.] [ 09 ] 



TITHES verSUS RENT. 



1. A thinking man soon finds out, that the present difficulties of one 

 portion of the community, and privations of the other, are not owing to 

 circumstances inseparable from the age and country in which we live, 

 and the government to which we are subject. 



2. A thinking man, that is, if he be not a landed proprietor, soon 

 discards the tenet, that population has in this country exceeded its natu- 

 ral maximum ; that the time has arrived for pouring out upon unoccu- 

 pied portions of the globe the superfluous inhabitants of our own ; that 

 emigration is our only remedy, or that it can be made a general remedy 

 for the evils, of which we are all sensible. 



3. A thinking man sees at a glance, that the wretchedness of the poor, 

 accompanied as it must be by poor laws, and improvidence, and idle- 

 ness, and moral degradation, and moral insensibility, and vice, is the 

 greatest of those evils which afflict England. 



4. A thinking man need not be told, that the condition of the poor of 

 a country depends upon the quantity of employment within their reach, 

 and the quantity of the necessaries of civilized life, which this employ- 

 ment will procure. 



5. It is obvious that manufacturing property, though of first-rate 

 importance to a country, adapted, like ours is, to manufacture, is not 

 the property upon which the poor depend for sufficient provision of the 

 necessaries of civilized life. 



The manufacturing property of any particular nation is exposed to 

 many accidents in every stage of its condition, between the extremes of 

 the highest prosperity, and utter annihilation. It depends upon such 

 accidents as peace, war, national competition, encouragement, restric- 

 tion, prohibition, fashion, price of food : it depends upon such accidents 

 as these, whether the demand for any particular manufacture, at any 

 particular juncture, in any particular nation, is so urgent, as to make it 

 worth a capitalist's while to create or continue, extend or contract, the 

 supply, that is, to call the poor into employment, or retain it in employ- 

 ment, paying such wages as will keep the poor in a state of rational 

 contentment with poverty j in a state not obstructive of the moral and 

 intellectual progress of the poor along with, and in proportion to, the 

 like progress of the higher classes. 



Manufacturing property is then, in the present state of civilization, 

 at least, in a dependant condition itself; it is subject to all degrees of 

 distress, and finally, annihilation ; and cannot therefore be considered as 

 the final resource against the pressure of extreme poverty. 

 . 6. The only stable source of production within man's control is the 

 soil. To the soil then the Author of our being and its necessities directs 

 us, whenever the mere contrivances of man shall have failed to furnish 

 the means of subsistence adequate to the support of a moral, as well as 

 an animal nature : the soil of our own country, the voice of rational free- 

 dom directs us in preference to any other: by the soil of their own 

 country have Englishmen a right to be maintained in soul and spirit, as 

 well as body, as long as that soil is naturally competent to such main- 

 tenance. 



The Author of man's natural rights, and the spirit of his own politi- 

 cal rights, both warrant an Englishman in looking to the soil of his own 

 country for employment enough to occupy his powers of labour ; for 



