PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. XV 



miserable poor, without resource but from crime or charity. A distinguished 

 manufacturer in one of the most industrious counties in England, states that 

 there are at least five hundred thousand operatives without employment, and 

 many on the borders of starvation : tradesmen and professional men will tell you 

 that every trade and profession is overstocked ; and one is daily saluted with 

 the melancholy, not to say presumptuous exclamation, that there are too many 

 people. This reminds one of the sad shipwreck of the French frigate, the 

 Alceste, when many of the wretched survivors, who were floating upon a raft 

 composed of fragments of the ship, deemed it necessary to their own safety to 

 drive by force a large portion of their suffering companions into the sea 

 a sad and horrible alternative. 



It would be more than absurd in me to attempt to prescribe a remedy for evils 

 upon which so many sagacious heads and philanthropic hearts have concentrated 

 without success their powerful energies. But I will point out what I deem the 

 true cause of this great evil, and leave to wiser minds to suggest a cure. One 

 thing is certain ; as matters go on, the evil must extend itself, and become every 

 day more aggravated and terrible, unless some remedy is devised. The reme 

 dies for the wretched, or, if not wretched, the unfortunate condition of the labor 

 ing classes, which have been proposed in Paris by men whose good intentions I 

 would not distrust, and which have been so fully and publicly discussed, are 

 absurd, impracticable, and mischievous. The interference of government in 

 limiting or fixing the hours of adult labor ; in attempting to establish a rate of 

 wages irrespective of the time employed ; in proposing to equalize the wages of 

 all trades, and determining the same rate for the skilled and the unskilled, the 

 active and the indolent ; the proposition to furnish the unemployed with work at 

 the national expense, and to destroy private competition by the establishment 

 of national workshops, are all of them attempts which are sure to defeat them 

 selves, and which are as impracticable for the end which they propose, as to 

 attempt to chain the wind, or to stop the flowing of the tide. None of them 

 touch the true cause of the evil. 



Must we affirm, then, that there are too many people in the world ? and that 

 thousands and millions are born into it for whom there is no place at the table 

 of a beneficent Providence? Why, in France there are more than nineteen 

 millions of untilled and unoccupied acres, and in England more than eight mil 

 lions, all capable of jdelding food and clothing to countless human being-s : and 

 here and in other lands there are millions of acres, for the want of labor which 

 might be applied, that produce not a moiety of what they might be made to 

 produce. In ancient Rome, seven acres were the ordinary size of farms on 

 which a family might, be sustained. In Flanders, on a soil which was once 



