CONDITION OF THE POOR AND LABORING CLASSES. 577 



the government, &quot; for the public good,&quot; intending especially, 

 under this comprehensive designation, to embrace all means or 

 measures which may relieve, benefit, or improve the character 

 and condition of the poorer and laboring classes. 



The condition of these classes in Europe, in general, strongly 

 claims the interest of benevolent minds. Their wages are small ; 

 their toil in general hard ; their food scanty and mean ; and 

 their comforts extremely few. It is one of the monstrous anom 

 alies in the disposition of wealth, that those by whose toil it is 

 created receive the smallest portion of it ; and, in the midst of a 

 plenty growing out of their sweat and labor, they are often crip 

 pled by want, and perish with starvation. 



Philanthropic minds are now actively at work to discover a 

 cure, or at least a mitigation, of this injustice ; but it is much 

 more easy to complain of an evil, than to point out a remedy. 

 The Swiss are proposing to give up all the public lands, and 

 individuals with large possessions are offering to relinquish por 

 tions of their estates, that land may be given or furnished, on 

 certain reasonable conditions, to the laboring poor, who are found 

 to be rapidly increasing among them ; and who, in the moun 

 tainous districts, in some parts of the country, are as miserable 

 as the poor Irish. I saw, occasionally, on the Continent, cases 

 of extreme destitution ; and, in those places which had been 

 visited the previous year with the potato disease, I saw much 

 and extreme poverty ; yet, I confess, I saw nothing on the Con 

 tinent to equal the degradation, the squalidness, and wretched 

 ness of the Irish, even before that sweeping calamity, which has 

 consigned so many thousands of them to the grave. 



The French have recently proposed violent remedies for these 

 acknowledged evils. The visionary and mad among them have 

 demanded the perfect equalization of property, which, if carried 

 out to its full extent, would result only in universal injustice and 

 pillage. The scheme is as vain and impracticable, as to reduce 

 the Alps of Switzerland to a level with the low countries of 

 Holland and Belgium. The inequalities in the condition of men 

 do not constitute the great evils which are complained of. A 

 poor man is not in a worse condition because his neighbor is 

 rich, unless the rich man abuses his power to injure him ; nor 

 are the poor necessarily the poorer, except by comparison, for the 

 riches of the community in which they live. As far as wealth 

 VOL. ii. 49 



