526 My Uncle's Diary at Calais. [MAY, 



And here concludes My Uncle's Diary, in which he has described, 

 with truth but petulance, the several disagreeables attendant on a resi- 

 dence in Calais. His observations, though morose or caustic, are mainly 

 just. But I must add, that he is most profoundly wrong when he 

 derives his inference of France in general from what he saw and suffered 

 in the town of his abode. The inhabitants are commonly a set of per- 

 sons who have risen, by their constant traffic with the English coast, 

 from the worst condition of distress and beggary, into a state of prema- 

 ture abundance. Their character exhibits all the traits of men grown 

 opulent by lawless arts and servile offices too much absorbed in the 

 pursuit of lucre to bestow a thought on any other object of existence. 

 They are, in short, a kind of fungous filth thrown out upon the stock of 

 industry and trade. My uncle, had he bent his course inland, would 

 have found the uncorrupted qualities of pure good hearts, a moral cha- 

 racter, a friendly sympathy, and social disposition in the people ; in fact, 

 a state of amiable society, from which he might have accurately drawn 

 an estimate of France and her inhabitants. He would have found no 

 angry collisions arising from the imposition of the rapacious on the 

 unwary ; no rude presumption of importance in the livery of public func- 

 tion ; no mean sneaks to greatness, and no unprincipled oppressors of 

 supposed inferiority and helplessness. But having placed his foot ashore, 

 where official impudence, and fraudulence, and incivility maintained 

 such vigorous, such systematic ascendancy", he had the candour to cor- 

 rect his plan of exile; and, returning to his native soil, conceived it 

 wiser to 



" rather bear those ills we have, 

 Than fly to others that we know not of." 



THE POPULATION QUESTION. MR. SADLER AND THE POLITICAL 



ECONOMISTS. 



RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN, in some scattered memoranda found 

 amongst his papers, says, that " there are on every subject but a few 

 leading and fixed ideas : their tracks may be traced by your own genius 

 as well as reading/' There is no subject to which this maxim will be 

 found to apply with more truth than that of the Law of Population ; 

 and most men who have a few sparks of the Great Intelligence from 

 whence they sprung are capable of working down into the mine of 

 thought when they have once started the arteries through which the 

 mineral courses. But it cannot be denied that there are knaves and 

 blockheads in the world ; rogues who delude and fools who are deluded; 

 The classes are numerous, and they thrive mutually on the simplicity of 

 others and their own. It would be hard to say whether the Edinburgh 

 Reviewer who, by the grace of Mr. Napier, and the encouragement of 

 a shuffling party behind the curtain, undertook to refute Mr. Sadler's 

 theory of Population, in the pages of Old Blue-and- Yellow, be really 

 the greater knave or blockhead ; for, with a mixed cunning and absur- 

 dity not often united in the same person, he confounds his own design 

 and misrepresents his antagonist so as to produce doubt, pity, and 

 contempt in the minds of the uninformed. It is very true that few out 

 of the multitude have ventured into the depths of this important ques- 



