Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/555

Rh seem to agree that they are more so. Godwin, by relying on reason for suppressing selfishness; Malthus, by resorting to law for suppressing love.

it is more likely that man's errours should overlook nature's powers, than that his wisdom should outstrip her foresight. All her resources are not explored, and it assails a sound maxim, to expect the invention before the necessity. The recent use of cotton, improves upon wool in economy, far beyond the improvement of wool upon skins. And until we see the improvements of agriculture exhausted by population, a system of inexorable oppression to prevent men from starving, will by its elegance, only more forcibly display the insecurity of resting upon authority.

This authority bursts upon the poor of England with a new oppression. To the system for distributing wealth and poverty by law, an exclusion of those to whom the latter is assigned, from the pleasures of relationship, friendship and love, lest they should be starved by this artificial poverty, is an admonition, both of the end to which that system leads, and of the coldness with which even philosophy can look upon such an end. The more eminent a political authority becomes, the more awfully it operates as an ad- monition. Malthus teaches us, that the English system of distributing wealth and property, in modes which the United States have began to imitate, instead of leaving that distribution to industry, will devote one part of a community to death by famine, or to the necessity of living above half their lives, without affections and without mind.

The creation of a pour class by law, and a refusal of alms from law, to prevent a redundant population, would very forcibly illustrate the difference in point of benevolence, between indirect slavery to a separate interest, and direct slavery to an absolute master.

The terror of a plethora of population, and the hope of obtaining wealth by a plethora of paper stock, concur in