PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. XXI 



ends of government and society have been answered ; whether it has really 

 reached the limits of its power for good ; and whether it has not yet to study the 

 arts of peace and the public welfare. The expenses of fortifying Paris and of 

 providing its armaments, would have converted a whole department into a garden, 

 teeming with the substantive comforts and luxuries of life. The enormous ex 

 penses of the wars, under the empire, of which now little remains but triumphal 

 arches stained all over with human blood, and splendid monuments to the glory 

 of one of the great butchers of the human species, would have converted the 

 whole of France into a fruitful field ; planted every where schools, churches, 

 colleges, and smiling villages ; filled her every where with the industrial arts, 

 and with monuments of taste; banished, under the blessing of Heaven, all want, 

 where there was industry to collect, and frugality to use the products of nature s 

 bounty ; and put it in the power of every one of her thirty-six millions of people 

 to sit down in peace and comfort under his own vine and fig-tree. The moneys 

 expended in the naval armaments of Great Britain, in the preparations of muni 

 tions of war, in the support of her navies and armies in any year of her history, 

 what would not they have done in subduing and making her waste lands pro 

 ductive ! The sums expended for her defence of Ireland, for the repression of 

 disorders, in a great measure consequent upon her wants and miseries, and the 

 vast sums bestowed upon that wretched country in charity, the necessity of 

 which springs directly and wholly from its neglected and wretched agriculture, 

 what would not they have accomplished in draining her bogs, in enriching her 

 meadows, in changing her mud hovels into comfortable cottages ; in warding off 

 the grim horrors of famine, and in raising millions of human beings, sunk, as I 

 myself have witnessed, in a lower degradation than that in which it seemed 

 possible that human life could be sustained, to the common level of humanity, 

 and even to a high measure of comfort and civilization ! 



What, then, shall government do to remedy the dreadful evils under winch 

 civilized society is now groaning aloud ; and one part of God s family is impi 

 ously complaining that He permits another portion, though Avith equal rights as 

 themselves, to come into the world ; and our cities, from an excessive compe 

 tition or production in the pursuits of mechanical industry, or in the learned 

 professions, are every where teeming with masses of misery and crime ? I do 

 not say that an extended and improved agriculture would prove the only remedy ; 

 nor that it would prove a certain remedy ; but I believe it would prove effectual 

 to a certain and large degree ; and I demand to know what single remedy will 

 prove more efficient. To whatever degree, be it more or less, to which it is 

 extended, it increases national wealth ; it multiplies the means of subsistence ; 



