100 Actual State of the British Empire. 



A young couple, who marry with the ardent hopes and san- 

 guine temperament of youth, disdain to contemplate the pos- 

 sibility of ever being reduced to depend on any other help 

 than their own. It is a matter wholly aloof from all their cal- 

 culations. 



But the worst feature of Mr. Malthus's innovation is, that 

 it reduces to one indiscriminate mass of immediate distress 

 the profligate and the industrious ; the young and the old ; 

 the sturdy beggar, and the blind and crippled mendicant. On 

 this sweeping plan, a family, whose whole life has been an 

 incessant course of steady industry, and who, on the approach 

 of old age, are deprived of the fruits of their earnings by unfore- 

 seen misfortunes, and rendered incapable of labour by growing 

 infirmities, are entitled to no more support from the country 

 they have served and enriched, than the desperate spendthrift 

 who never looked beyond the gratification of his appetites. 

 The destitute widow, the hapless orphan, lameness, blindness, 

 mental imbecility, casual insanity, and all the other innumer- 

 able infirmities of our common nature, which reduce the 

 strength of manhood to the feebleness of infancy, are to be 

 condemned to slow starvation, or to the forlorn hope of casual 

 benevolence. I am well aware that any attempt to appeal to 

 the charitable sympathies of our nature, in such a discussion, 

 would be idle and impertinent. This grave question is not to 

 be examined as a matter of feeling, but of calculation. I 

 wish to make no appeal but to the results of plain facts and 

 obvious experience. 



The efforts of private charity, it has been alleged, would 

 become so much more active and extensive by the abolition 

 of the poor-laws, that they would quickly be found an efficient 

 succedaneum for that pernicious system. There is, it has 

 often been said, a fund of benevolence in the British nation, 

 always adequate to every claim upon it which may successively 

 arise. That this fund is very great, and that it seldom fails to 

 rise with the occasion which demands it, I have had sufficient 

 opportunities of witnessing. Without such an aid, many of 

 the parishes of this kingdom, in the fatal winter of 1816, must 

 have been half depopulated. But this resource is, in its very 

 nature, precarious and incidental. As an auxiliary it may 



