Actual State of the British Empire. 157 



mercial districts. There is great reason to believe that (he 

 rural population has been nearly stationary; for though the 

 cultivation of wastes, and the inclosure of commons, have 

 necessarily caused an increase of agricultural employment, yet 

 the reduction of small farms, and the improvement of ma- 

 chinery and implements, have diminished the demand for 

 manual labour. Our increased population, therefore, has 

 arisen in those classes of the community in which the seeds of 

 poverty and misery most naturally take root. In almost all 

 the districts of the country, purely agricultural, the poor-rates 

 are comparatively low. The true inquiry, therefore, would be, 

 not whether pauperism has increased, with reference to the 

 entire mass of our population, but whether it is increased with 

 reference to that part of it which furnishes the regular supply 

 of indigence. On that comparison, which is strictly fair, we 

 may safely assert that it has not increased ; but, on the con- 

 trary, very considerably diminished. 



Yet it is on this false assumption of the rapid and constant 

 advance of the poor-rates, that Mr. Malthus, and a majority 

 of the members of both Houses of Parliament, have founded 

 their alarming list of grievances, and their still more alarming 

 remedies. The irfundamental propositions are — that our system 

 of parochial relief tends, inevitably, to create and extend the 

 evils it professes to remove ; that it destroys all self-respect, 

 and extinguishes the spirit of independence amongst the poor ; 

 and that pauperism, when thus sustained, possesses an in- 

 herent power of self-propagation so immense, that it must soon 

 swallow up the great bulk of our wealth, power, and popula- 

 tion. Mr. Malthus, who usually applies all the phenomena 

 of society to his great problem, maintains, as I have mentioned 

 before, that all the evils of a redundant population derive their 

 worst aggravation from this source. 



The simple statement just exhibited will show, on the con- 

 trary, that all these calculations and anticipations are purely 

 illusory. The relative portion of our collective w-ealth, devoted 

 to the relief of the poor, is not increased, but diminished. 

 The self-dependence of the poor, and their salutary terror of 

 overseers and workhouses, is noty if we are to believe the evi- 

 dence of facts, extinguished, or even impaired. There is no 



