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THE COTTAGE ALLOTMENT SYSTEM ILLUSTRATED. 



THE general distress which has arisen from the unequal distribu- 

 tion of property, and the great pressure of the national debt, has 

 long forced itself on public observation, and remedies of every de- 

 scription have been prescribed, either to remove the evils altogether, 

 or to counteract their injurious effects. Such violent projects as an 

 Agrarian law, or a spunging off the national debt, will meet with 

 few supporters ; but there are other less sweeping measures well cal- 

 culated to relieve existing necessities, and, therefore, deserving con- 

 sideration. 



Of all these, the Cottage System is, perhaps, the most unexception- 

 able, offering the greatest advantages at the least risk ; it has been 

 tried in various parts of the country, and daily spreads more and 

 more widely, " bearing before it in its course the relics" of those pre- 

 judices which once opposed its introduction. Simple as it seems to 

 give a man, whose sinews are his only inheritance, so much land as 

 will occupy his unemployed hours, many objections have been made 

 to the principle, partly by a particular class of philosophers, ever 

 haunted by the phantoms of over-population ; and partly by men 

 who dread the establishment here of a cottier- tenantry like that 

 which has long crowded the estates of Irish landlords. 



Of population so much has been written in modern times, that we 

 shall not enter on it now further than to express our conviction that 

 it cannot be restrained j neither moral check nor physical suffering 

 will repress it, because the former is opposed to the strongest pas- 

 sions and feelings of human nature, and the latter experience has 

 shewn is unequal to the task, unless carried to a barbarous extreme. 

 Look at China, a country filled with a mass of people that would 

 stock a dozen European kingdoms ; there the harpy famine constantly 

 hovers over their heads, and is only kept at bay by unceasing toil ; 

 they spend their lives in a constant struggle to live ; they breed fish- 

 spawn they turn lakeweeds into gardens they rake up the vilest 

 offal for food they ransack earth and water, seeking what they may 

 devour, and, after all, barely succeed in satisfying the cravings of 

 hunger; yet population, like the poet's river, still rolls on its cease- 

 less tide, and we wait in vain for the failing of the waters. Common 

 privations, then, will not check the growth of nations ; it may be 

 that there is a degree in the scale of misery below which the natural 

 instincts are frozen, but no one yet ascertained this zero of wretched- 

 ness, nor has any one yet been found cold-blooded enough to propose 

 it as a remedy. The principle of increase can never be restrained in 

 countries where men have the shadow of freedom ; toil, suffering, 

 and despair can barely accomplish it in a land of slaves. 



The problem, therefore, to be solved is, how to provide subsistence, 

 not how to prevent consumers ; and to this the plan we are consider- 

 ing affords a direct, though partial solution. The Cottage System, 

 properly so called, consists in the allotment of land in small portions 



